Where is the future of Community and Advocacy headed for Customer Marketers/Advocate Marketers/Customer Success professionals?

I’ll tell you, and yes, much of this is already happening, but it will soon compound and accelerate as more and more organizations understand how to approach it for their success.

First off, when the pandemic hit is when I personally feel many B2B organizations, who either weren't utilizing customer community and advocacy practices, or were doing so in a half-hearted piloted way, learned what the rest of us in our discipline already knew: taking care of/engaging/guiding current customers can lead to steady profits at a lower cost of acquisition.

Companies' backs were against the COVID wall. They needed to do something different to allow the business to survive and even thrive on a new playing field. Organizations pivoted to invest more in retaining the current customers they had knowing the cost/time effort was too great (and frankly unknown at the time) for attracting enough net new customers. One seemingly "easy" and cost-effective way to double-down on current customers was to stand up a community, engage customers, and nurture them to advocacy where retention and profits grow. Easy solution. Right? Not really when approached out of desperation.

While many organizations emerged with innovative communities and great advocacy practices an equal, if not higher, amount thought just standing up a community would solve their short-sighted issues. Those who didn't pay attention and invest the necessary time, effort, and money into a well-established community experience for their customers are watching their competing peer organizations soar past them with continued success as they wonder why their community isn't working.

Part of the reason those communities are failing is because one can't just stand a community up and check the box that now the organization has one that nurtures customer advocacy. That just won't cut it, and if you're the one who suggested it in your organization, it's likely why you'll be let go. Furthermore, that organization will begin to believe that community and advocacy is a fad, like social media (sense my sarcasm), and doesn't work. Then the organization will fall further behind the current learning curve while their profits continue to decline in comparison to their competitors who figured out the magic of community and advocacy.

This was a similar phenomenon when company websites came on the scene, when social media for business came to the fore, and now with community and advocacy.

Enough with the recent history lesson, what's going on now and moving forward?

Community and Advocacy is now in full view of the C-suite. It was there before, but only about a quarter of the C-suite were paying any attention to it. If for some reason your C-suite is not on board, you may want to consider other employment options.

Today, in order for B2B companies to compete and/or have an advantage they have to embrace community and advocacy practices. Mainly, if they don't, they'll be left behind or just not even considered when potential customers are making a purchasing decision. Hint: buyers are looking for strong customer communities as an added value reason to make a purchase.

Companies that "get" Community and Advocacy are investing in providing added value to their customers beyond the core product purchased by having the power of a community to to help those customers with increased self-service, peer-to-peer crowd-sourced answers to their questions, and all in an online search engine style community site.

A customer community experience that makes your complex product easy to adopt, easy to own, and accelerates time-to-value WILL be engaged with, but it goes further...if you tap into the social/emotional aspect of your customers you can not only engage customers personally and professionally, but by doing so you'll promote empowerment, thought-leadership, recognition for individual and company successes, career advancement, a sense of purpose and belonging...a full-on positive brand culture if you will (all the building blocks of advocacy). Oh, and yes, you will experience retention from your customers and even expansion purchases for far less than the cost of acquiring net new customers.

Let's address net new customers for a second...with the kind of advocacy that results from your delivering value via your product and your awesome community, you'll have more successful customers willing to share their stories, more customers referring business to you because they love how your company helps them do their job better...your customers become your best sales and marketing team...because they're selling their outcomes to your prospects. Prospects who are after similar outcomes.

Why does all of this work? Because you have tapped into trust-building at scale. You're providing so much added value to customers by making easy the adoption of your product and their ability to be successful with it. Plus, because your community is online and the content is crowd-sourced by customers in addition to your organization's experts, the community information and value exponentially continues to grow. It becomes a better and better search engine that both your customers and your organization benefit from.
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Creating a world class customer community experience will continue to be a differentiator for B2B organizations (especially XaaS companies) in the near future. It's not easy to do, which is why many organizations are currently in an arms race to thoughtfully stand up their communities. They recognize the sales, marketing, product dev., support, and customer success benefits of employing Community and Advocacy...do you?

A quarterly list of 3 books to read to help improve your B2B customer marketing knowledge and skills.

Here are last quarter's recommended books, in case you missed them.
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Here's how it works:

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book (so be sure to go back and read the books from previous lists if you haven't gone in order).
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

​Happy reading!  Tune in next time for another set of book recommendations!

A quarterly list of 3 books to read to help improve your B2B customer marketing knowledge and skills.

Here are last quarter's recommended books, in case you missed them.

Here's how it works:

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

​Happy reading!  Tune in next time for another set of book recommendations!

These days customer marketing -- including customer engagement and advocacy -- often collaborate with customer success department efforts. In fact, customer marketing may sit within the customer success department. This is not uncommon, especially in business-to-business (B2B) software organizations.

​Having these disciplines' separated as different, though related, functions is often how mid-market and/or enterprise level B2B software organizations operate.  This makes some sense, as these sized organizations likely have more resources (financial and human) to operate and scale these functions within their organization, and at various customer interaction levels (i.e. tech touch, low touch, and high touch).

But I think many smaller B2B companies are seeing the effects of the pandemic on their own business economy and understand that building a repeatable process to accelerate customers' success using their products/services while engaging and cultivating those customers into trusted partners and brand advocates,  can help weather similar storms in the future.

In other words, I think even smaller businesses are realizing they need some level of customer marketing and customer success to compete in the latest, and forthcoming post-COVID, version of the customer economy.

But how does a small B2B organization employ customer marketing and/or customer success functions with little headcount and even less budget?

Well, I think smaller B2B organizations will start to develop a hybrid version of tech touch customer marketing and customer success that will help engage and cultivate customers into brand advocates, but also drive customer community collaboration (i.e. peer-to-peer help from customer to customer towards success with the product).

We already see this in larger mid-market and enterprise organizations, but it's usually a combination of tech touch, low touch, and high touch customer interactions across the customer marketing and customer success functions. The effect of their impact ripples through the support department, product development, and of course sales and marketing.

Building successful relationships with your customers who want to advocate on behalf of your brand becomes a force multiplier in an organization's marketplace credibility, growth, and revenue. However, such efforts are not a quick win. Just like any relationship it takes time to build appropriate trust to then leverage that trust for mutual benefit, gain, and success.

Like inbound marketing in the recent past allowing smaller organizations to compete with larger, better resourced companies via content and SEO, customer marketing and customer success practices can help smaller organizations survive otherwise devastating economic blows from unforeseen forces.

This is because, if you have a community of customers who love your brand, that advocacy helps insulate you from customer churn while helping accelerate customers' success with your products/services and expanding/extending their lifetime value to your organization. This also supplies your brand with more marketplace credibility, which makes sales and marketing growth goals easier to achieve.

The trickiest part for small B2B companies leveraging some form of customer marketing and customer success is getting creative with limited resources to define and successfully execute an effective strategy. When headcount, finances, and tools (tech stack) are limited it takes the right kind of marketer to put even a simple solution, using ubiquitous, often disparate, tools together.

However, it is possible, and I believe you'll end up seeing more technology tools become available in the next several years designed specifically for the SMB space to scale and automate more of their customer marketing and customer success functions.

A quarterly list of 3 books to read to help improve your B2B customer marketing knowledge and skills.

Here are last quarter's recommended books, in case you missed them.

Here's how it works:

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

Happy reading!  Tune in next time for another set of book recommendations!

B2B brands want to build deeper relationships with their customers. The kind of relationships that go beyond transactions...a trusted partnership. A mutual respect and caring for the benefit of one another.

This is a nice sentiment, and it is achievable, but the proof is in the putting, or rather actions speak louder than words.

Unfortunately, many brands say they want to be customer-centric, but what they really want are the rewards of customer-centricity while only paying lip service to what it takes to actually grow a mutually beneficial partnership with customers. 

It's easier now, more than ever, for customers to call bull shiitake on such rues and take their share of wallet elsewhere.

So how do you build an infrastructure to start scaling this customer relationship building process?

First, it all starts with people. You have to ensure your own house is in order before you worry about building deep reciprocal relationships with your customers.  If you take care of your own employees, those employees will take care of your customers, and profits will take care of themselves.

That being said, once you find yourself in a position ready to wrap some tools and processes around your efforts to cultivate better customer relationships and ultimately customer advocacy at scale, you'll want to understand exactly what those tools and processes will help you (or rather, your customers) achieve. 

What actual incentives do your customers enjoy (physical rewards, swag, etc.), but for the long haul, what intrinsic value are your customers seeking by building a partnership with you, your organization and brand? Also, how/where do your customers participate in this relationship-building realm.

So essentially, having some sort of scaleable online platform is a likely ideal tool to reach many customers and/or have them interact with one another (peer-to-peer, which is vitally important - you're not the only one, or in some cases, even the best, at answering questions about your company's products/services/use cases).

At the least, do you have an online platform that allows your customers...

• to learn from, and connect with, their peers (fellow customers)?
• to find/consume educational content about your industry/products/services?
• access to easily provide feedback for improving your products/services to meet the needs/demands of your customers?
• incentive to participate, share, and belong to this group?
• meaningful ways to be recognized for their contributions and successes?

To answer yes to all the questions above may be as simple as connecting with your customers via an email newsletter, or a LinkedIn customer group. You might be able to advance the group and its collective benefits with more specific tools like, a community platform or a gamified advocacy platform.

Regardless, if you can answer the above questions and make the customer experience to participate in it straight-forward and simple, you and your customers will start to reap the benefits of building a meaningful partnership together, at scale.

And to drive the point of such a platform (whatever you choose to use, and where ever you decide to start, or graduate to), the delight and initial value of participating is the doorway to your customers doing much more, sticking around longer, and eventually becoming your brand's advocates.

The following is photo of a section of George Howard's book, Everything in its Right Place, which is about blockchain technology in the music industry. Howard references how the Internet of Things (IoT) will lead its adoption by way of Amazon's Echo (voice activated) device as a music player. 

I point it out because it illustrates how a customer platform needs to be "dead-simple" in solving a very basic yet needed/wanted challenge for your customer (to learn about your industry/product/services and/or connect to peers in the same boat) to be able to draw them in, and then likely, if initially delighted enough, they will stick around and explore other things leading to more intrinsic value, trust, and a deeper partnership over time. 

While the concept of customer marketing is not new the dedicated discipline of it in a B2B setting is still relatively new.

As a result, if you're trying to learn and apply all the lessons you can grasp related to customer marketing you may be falling shorter than you'd like if you lack access to the few good mentors that exists in this discipline.

There is another way to gain mentorship from talented customer marketers, though...

Books can serve as a great alternative to connecting with mentors when you don't have direct access to such experienced professionals.

With that said, I'm introducing to you a quarterly customer marketing recommended reading list.

• Three books listed at a time (read one a month)
• The books are shared in a particular order to help you build upon the concepts of the previous book
• Read the books, take notes, highlight useful passages, apply what you've learned in your customer marketing work and analyze what is working and not for your organization - tweak and repeat.

Tune in next time for another three recommended books!

What’s the quickest way for you to have affinity to a brand you use?
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​By having a positive experience with that brand, it’s products or services.

What’s involved with having a good experience?

Getting your problem solved? Sure.

Getting value for the price you paid? Sure.

More importantly, it’s having an experience that evokes a positive emotion, one that evokes trust -- meaning your experience met or exceeded your expectations so you trust the brand that provided the experience, and you felt more closely connected to that brand as a result of your positive experience.

As a customer, this kind of brand affinity is further extended when you can share your experience with others, especially others who have also engaged with that same brand, and who have had a similar experience. When that happens, you’re immediately connected to another individual by association with the brand. This is how the network effect in a community surrounding a brand can start, and advocates are born.

Smart companies set up opportunities to help their customers not only accelerate their successes with their products/services but to capitalize on meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations with the added value of inviting them to meet, network, and educate their peers (other customers) who have shared a similar experience with the brand.

This is how social media groups around a topic, or product thrive. It's how musicians build dedicated fan bases, and it's how your company can also build a loyal following.

This advocacy effect can be leveraged to the mutual benefit of both the customer and the company. However that only takes place if you why and how advocacy happens. Then reverse engineer that journey that advocating customers take to make sure your organization is appealing to the kinds of experiences your customers are consciously, or subconsciously, looking for that will lead to their affinity of your brand and them becoming advocates in time.

So what are some of those customer journey milestones that lead a current customer to become an advocate?

(Side note:  Read David Meerman Scott and Reiko Scott's book, Fanocracy for some additional in-depth thoughts and case studies around these ideas)

1. Exceed expectations beyond the transaction as you onboard new customers
   Make a big deal when a customer chooses to partner with you. The idea is to make them feel, to the extent you can, that they are the most important customer you have (by the way, each individual customer IS the most important customer you have). That being said, think through your new customer onboarding process and how it can make people feel welcomed, valued, and positioned for success with your product or service.
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2. Accelerate early successes with your product/service/brand
   Customers will likely have a better experience if they can win early and often as they climb the learning curve of your product or service. You might think about having current customer videos that speak directly to new customers about their initial experiences with your product or service. This provides your brand credibility as it's customers share their experiences rather than your brand suggesting why your product or service is great. New customers will start to see their future successful selves in the current customers sharing their stories. 
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3. Provide access to community
   Part of accelerating the success of your customers is giving them access to your company's experts, and more importantly, other customers who are in the midst of a similar journey with your products or services. The big benefit to you and your customers is that each of your customers are at different milestones on their journey with your products or services and can provide practical application and insight into how to best use your products or services in all sorts of use-cases that your customers are encountering. The ability to ask and answer questions among a group of customers having a somewhat similar shared experience allows for crowd-sourcing of information within the group. Customers often get very relevant answers more quickly than simply asking Support in such a community, and your organization lessens it's Support burden while gaining better insight into customers' concerns and needs to make future improvements.  
   
   
4. Recognize your customers' successes
   Continue to help your customer feel special by providing them opportunities to be recognized for their successes as individual practitioners in their industry and as experts with your products or services. Provide positive comments on their posts in your community or on social media. Create awards for your highly engaged customers who are pushing the boundaries of how to best use your products or services to their organization's benefit. Find small and large ways to validate and recognize your customers at every point in their customer journey with you.
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5. Listen to your customers' feedback and execute their suggestions
   Making your customers feel welcomed, appreciated, and valued only goes so far if you aren't giving them access to you and influence over the future of your products or services. Be sure you're providing plenty of opportunities for your customers to share their experiences, thoughts and suggestions about your products or services. Then actually listen to them and decide which suggestions make the most sense to improve your products or services to better meet the demands of your customers. Be sure to share with your customers that those new features are theirs -- they came directly from their feedback. This helps your customers have some level of ownership over the future direction of your products or services. Your customers, just like you or me, will likely feel more connected to your brand because you took their feedback and actually made the improvements they suggested.
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Why is all of the above important?

When you create a string of positive experiences that have an emotional appeal to your customers, you continue to build trust with them over time, and you continue to partner with them -- partnering with your customers goes well beyond a monetary transaction.

That partnership leads to your customers' affinity for you, your products or services, and your brand overall. That's how customer advocates are cultivated over time. The result is successful, happy customers that will defend your brand and help you sell to new customers, as well as extend the mutual lifetime value of their own relationship with you.

And it's just good business.

Yes, there is this world-wide pandemic called COVID-19, or the coronavirus, as of this writing.

It’s not good.

It’s affecting everyone.

People are doing what they can to stay and work from home for public health and safety reasons. 
However, businesses, that are employers and their individual employees, still need to keep working to the best of their ability because all parties need to continue earning income for basic living and operations expenses.

From an organizational business standpoint, Customer Marketing, Customer Success, Customer Experience and Advocacy are all about partnering with your customers to build a human relationship that thrives together vs. simply being transactional.

Now, more than ever, a human first approach is needed.

By no means am I trying to minimize what’s currently going on, the hardships many are facing as a result of COVID-19, and/or the impact this will all have mentally and financially once this thing is over…

…However, that being said…

Those organizations that can keep their heads, stay transparent with their customer-partners, and work together with those customers to build bridge solutions that extend each other’s solvency will emerge stronger on the back end of this, and be in a better position for a more expedient recovery.
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Here’s what’s key in Customer Marketing Crisis Communications

• Stay in communication with customers early and often, and be authentic and transparent
• Share facts and information that are of value to customers to help them (not time for a hard sell)
• Reinforce your partnership with your customers – everyone needs as many positive allies as they can get right now to get through this. Make it as easy as you can for your customers to want to stay in business and connected with you.

​Those people and organizations who are there in clutch situations are remembered with deeper regard and loyalty when the dust settles.