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Helping brands earn fans

Customer Marketing | Employee Engagement

Quarterly customer marketing recommended reading [part 3]

1/13/2021

 
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Posted by: Nick Venturella
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.

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Carol S. Dweck's, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success is useful especially if you've never fully examined fixed vs. growth mindsets. As you read this book, in some ways its concepts may seem like common sense, but keep in mind these concepts are often overlooked, and unless the negative, fixed mindset habit is reset with a more positive growth mindset, customer marketing will be an uphill battle to wrap your head around.  Author, Dweck, is a world-renowned Stanford University psychologist who explores how and why what we think has a dramatic influence on the outcomes of what we do.

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Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy, the pioneers of the modern Customer Success department in software organizations wrote, Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue. This is an important book because customer marketers need to understand how customer success departments operate and help drive another aspect of the relationship an organization has with it customers. This will help you understand how to better engage customers, partner with them, and leverage their advocacy for your organization's and the customer's mutual benefit.

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​The Messenger is the Message: How to Mobilize Customers and Unleash the Power of Advocate Marketing by Mark Organ, founder of the advocate marketing software platform, Influitive, and Deena Zenyk a former Influitive employee and one of the original advocate marketing practitioner pioneers. Zenyk now runs her own firm Captivate Collective. This book essentially gives you the basics around how, at scale, you can cultivate your customers into a community of advocates who will help to expand your brand's marketing reach and influence towards more credibly voice-of-the-customer (VoC) marketing, more sales, less churn, less support burden, more VoC influence on product roadmaps, and more.

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

Will smaller B2B companies embrace customer marketing post-COVID?

1/5/2021

 
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Posted by: Nick Venturella
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.

What is Customer Marketing?

12/4/2020

 
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Posted by: Nick Venturella
Recently I was on LinkedIn and a newly minted connection asked about my professional pursuits. I described that I'm a customer marketer among other things, and she asked what I meant by "customer marketer."

This isn't the first time I've been asked this question, and it makes sense that it's coming up more now (as the COVID-19 pandemic is still going) and companies are looking to double down on their current customer base to retain them and their associated revenue.

Customer Marketing is a specific discipline within marketing. It really grew out of B2B software organizations. Think of subscription software (SaaS offerings) where customers subscribe to use a software application, but because it's subscription based, and the fact that there are competing software products providing similar services/outcomes, customers can leave at any time fairly easily, and with less financial repercussions than in the past.

In the past, it was harder for customers of a software product to move on after making a hefty upfront investment in the software solution, and they owned it, and needed to maintain it - a very expensive arrangement for the customer.

Now the software organization owns the burden of the software solution's backend infrastructure and maintenance, which is why it's less expensive to "own" for a customer, or rather rent for a monthly subscription fee.

Today, the customer isn't so heavily invested, at least not financially, in the software product like they were in the past when they had to buy and own it outright. This is helpful news for customers, but it means that the burden to retain customers using the software falls to the solution provider because the choice to switch software solution providers is no longer purely financial.

In other words, the customer can more cheaply leave one software subscription for another and potentially still have spent less money than what it would have cost to buy and implement the software like in past models. The customer is no longer bound to keep using an outdated solution simply because it's not cost-effective to switch and buy another.

This caused a problem for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Enter: churn.

Churn is when a customer leaves and their subscription revenue is lost by the software provider because of their departure. A SaaS based solution provider thrives on predictable recurring revenue, which means it needs to know how many subscribers they have, what they're currently paying per month, and, if the organization is successful in keeping those customers next month, the software company's month-over-month revenue should be X.

That little bit, "if the organization is successful in keeping those customers next month," is where both the Customer Success and Customer Marketing disciplines in software organizations came from.

Software companies are full of innovative, smart people, so they decided to solve for this issue. Enter: Customer Success.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) became this post-sale hybrid of customer service reps, product coaches, marketers, and inside sales reps for a small group of customers in a CSM's book of business. The idea is that the CSM would build a trusting relationship with the software customer and help that customer become successful adopting and using the software as intended for their organization.

That bit, "help that customer become successful," is where Customer Marketing launched forth.

Customer Marketing as a whole benefits an entire software organization from Customer Success, Support, and Product departments, to Marketing and Sales.

To keep customers from churning Customer Success is trying to help their customers accelerate their adoption of and success with their software solution - reduce time to value. The faster customers realize value and validate their reason for purchasing this software the more trust is built between the customer and the software solution provider, and the likelier it is that the customer won't churn.

Customer Marketing takes this a step further by building processes and practices to provide air-cover (constant engagement and touchpoints for the customer to aid their individual growth and acceleration with the products and with their peers and counterparts who are also using the product).

This creates consistent valuable engagement between customers and software providers aiding the acceleration of trust between the two parties. This is also where communities form around a software brand/product and its customers - the software and the outcomes it provides is a shared purpose/pursuit for customers (and the software provider for that matter). Customer Marketing works to cultivate that trust with customers over time by providing added value related to and around the software through ongoing engaging activities and interactive communications.

Those ongoing engaging activities and interactive communications provide customers with:
  • education on various use cases for the product that may or may not be obvious
  • opportunities to network with customer peers from other organizations also using the software (organic community growth happens here as customers share questions and answers and sharpen their individual skills - this accelerates success with the product and individuals' confidence, which builds trust within the customer community collectively and with the software provider/brand).
  • opportunities to share product feedback. This is important because a software product is for it's customers therefore the customers should have input into, and ownership over, the future of the product so it meets their evolving demands, and doing so will help software companies minimize churn.
  • recognition of customers' successes. As a software organization, being able to recognize the victories of your customers on an individual level gets to the heart of humanity - you're engaging people, humans. Individual recognition builds trust and endearment and helps customers know that you see them, see their hard work, and their resulting success. This kind of individual recognition is a sacred and intimate place to be with customers. Never squander it.

All those elements of ongoing engagement and interactive communications over time lead to successful customers who trust in their software provider because they're engaged as humans, individuals bound by a shared software solution, and that trust eventually turns into advocacy - customers' advocacy for a software solution and brand.

A customer's advocacy at that level is invaluable because now the Customer Marketer can present opportunities for that customer advocate to further their own thought leadership on a topic they're now already passionate about so they want to share their success story with others to evangelize the software and the brand.

At this point, the software company has not only helped to solve its churn issue, it's now fostered an avenue to capture voice-of-the-customer progress and success stories via its advocates. Customer Marketing can leverage those advocates to co-create customer story video assets, case studies, user groups, product councils, mentoring programs, provide reference customers to prospects considering purchasing the software, etc...

All things that not only put customers center stage to recognize their hard work and successes with the software product, but also to have a positive network effect across the software organization's whole operation with a focus on the customer. Such a focus will help to increase customer retention, growth, and revenue.

Here are some examples of that network effect across a software company's operations:
  • Support - because customers are asking and answering questions among themselves about the software, they're reducing the burden on the Support team to answer those questions
  • Product - with strong customer relationships a software company has an avenue to get regular product feedback from their most important constituent, their product user. This helps to know what should be on the development roadmap to continue to maintain current customers and attract new ones.
  • Customer Success - Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are trying to build deeper relationships with those customers in their book of business. As a result they can't deeply connect with as many members of one customer organization as they would like. A Customer Marketing program can help scale regular, valuable touchpoints for CSMs to fill those gaps and engage more individuals within each of the customers on their roster. This also comes in handy to help maintain higher levels of engagement between the customers' employees and the software provider. That trust and engagement may be the difference in a renewal and/or a cross-sell/up-sell. Plus, as customers commune together to answer one another's questions and share their experiences they learn about new/different software features that they may not yet be utilizing.
  • Marketing - maintain the ongoing, engagement and communications to cultivate customer advocates while also leveraging passionate advocates' interest and willingness to share their story and experience in marketing assets and with prospects. Their voice-of-the-customer credibility in the marketplace provides the best word-of-mouth marketing on the planet for Sales to leverage.
  • Sales - when Sales has an ongoing, ever-growing pool of passionate advocates who are willing to be references for prospects, it can help bring more new deals over the finish line, faster.

Customer Marketing is a simple concept, but it is complex to implement and execute well so that a real and transparent, trusted partnership between a brand and its customers can form.

The idea of Customer Marketing is to build trust in a customer-centric way. It's a deliberate focus on partnering with one's customers to co-create value with, and for, one another. This builds longer term relationships with customers, which accelerates customers' adoption and success with the product, which increases renewal rates (reducing churn), provides peer-to-peer customer networking and support, leads to easier up-sells/cross-sells and overall an extended/increased life-time value of customers...

Ultimately, it's cultivating the desire for a customer and their software partner to want to support each other's success.

However, a software organization cannot reach the kind of Customer Marketing state described above without getting their own house in order. To do that they need to partner with their employees to create a positive, trusting, and humane environment that cannot help but engage its employees to want to band together and create a brand-differentiating company culture.

When that's in place, executing Customer Marketing is way easier because employees truly want the company to be successful and partner meaningfully with customers. But that's a post for another time.

Quarterly customer marketing recommended reading [part 2]

10/2/2020

 
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Posted by:  Nick Venturella
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.

Marketing Rebellion, Mark Schaefer
Mark Schaefer's Marketing Rebellion - The most human company wins, provides the landscape of today's 3rd marketing rebellion (end of control).

Schaefer outlines how today's marketplace differs from the previous 2 marketing rebellions that have already taken place (end of lies and end of secrets), and what that means for how your organization not only reaches its audience but succeeds and thrives into the future.

This book is really good for understanding the historical evolution of various marketing tactics and strategies, and highlighting why they worked in the past, why they won't work now, and what to do about it to have success in today's marketplace. 

David Meerman Scott, Fanocracy
David Meerman Scott and Reiko Scott's Fanocracy - Turning fans into customers, gives a great high-level overview about what's common among fans of software, insurance, music, theater, and more.

It showcases that regardless of the industry you're in, you can partner and co-create with your customers to guide the future direction of your business. Plus, it can be done in a way that attracts your biggest fans to want to help your business succeed.

This is the concept the Scotts have coined as a Fanocracy.

Radical Candor, Kim Scott
Kim Scott's Radical Candor - Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity. No relation to David Meerman, and his daughter Reiko, Scott, that I know of...I digress...

Radical Candor is a framework for having critical conversations with managers, coworkers, and direct reports.

Scott has great experience and credentials to draw from having worked for Apple and Google, and having been an adviser to Dropbox, Kurbo, Qualtrics, Twitter, and more. 

This book is useful beyond its ability to help you understand how to be professional, and human, internally at your own organization. Many of the book's principles can also be applied to other relationships in your life, including family, friends, and even your customers.

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

How to build a scaleable doorway to customer advocacy

9/10/2020

 
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Posted by: Nick Venturella
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. 
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Quarterly customer marketing recommended reading [part 1]

7/24/2020

 
GrowLoop.com quarterly customer marketing mentorship
Post by Nick Venturella

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.

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Dale Carnegie's classic, How to win friends and influence people, is a good place to start.

Today, winning in business, and especially customer marketing, is about being human-first in your approach.

​This book simply breaks down basics of building relationships with other people in a practical way that you can begin to apply.

It's important to understand these concepts as a foundational starting point to genuinely and authentically build relationships with others in a way that builds respect and trust...authenticity, genuine interest, sincere empathy, respect, and trust are requirements of building long-lasting relationships, personally or professionally.

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Bill Lee's The hidden wealth of customers, is more specifically about customer marketing.

It outlines the basis for what is really the modern approach to customer marketing, especially in B2B. 

The premise is simple, yet profound for so many companies - take care of your customers and they'll take care of you/your business.

Here's a bit of what's involved:
  • nurture your existing customers,
  • build mutually beneficial, long-lasting relationships with them, and
  • those customers' lifetime value to your organization (renewals, up-sells/cross-sells) will increase, and
  • they'll become a brand/product advocate for you to lend credibility to your message and help influence future sales.

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Donald Miller's Building a story brand, is something I recommend all marketers, regardless of specialized discipline, to read.

This book is about understanding the elements of a writing and depicting a clear message that resonates with your target audience in the way you want, which if done right and targeted to the right audience, will increase your ability to have that audience take the action you desire.

I can't stress the power of copy and messaging enough. So much of our daily lives (especially being connect online all the time) starts narratives and story arcs that drive particular outcomes.

Those marketers who are good at telling a story that moves the reader/viewer/listener across a specific story arc will be able to better connect with their audience in a human way that endears that audience to you/your brand and the results you want for your organization.

​Story can accomplish this by bringing the right message and value to the right audience, at the right time, in the right way that makes the relationship (between customer and company) mutually beneficial. 

Tune in next time for another three recommended books!

​Why you need to know how brand advocates develop

5/21/2020

 
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Posted by Nick Venturella
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.

The Pandemic Effect: Why Customer Marketing is Now More Important Than Ever

4/24/2020

 
Posted by Nick Venturella
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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.

Why mental well-being is needed now

3/26/2020

 
posted by Nick Venturella
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As of this writing, there is a pandemic occurring in the world. The coronavirus (or COVID-19) is wreaking havoc on families, heathcare workers, local communities and economies everywhere.

It's important to stay as healthy as you can, and that includes one's mental well-being. 

Simply developing a daily journaling practice can ease anxious feelings and even promote immune health. This according to a Fast Company article that quotes leading Expressive Writing expert and psychologist Dr. James Pennebaker. [Source:  Why Journaling Is Good For Your Health (And 8 Tips To Get Better) by Michael Grothaus, Fast Company Magazine]

In the article (source link above) Pennebaker shares that not only does journaling that explores the very things you may be anxious about can help lower stress, anxiety and depression, but her shares that people go to the doctor less in the months after starting a regular expressive writing habit.

Writing down the things you're grateful for is also helpful to maintain one's positive mindset.

So in these current, "work-from-home" days of the COVID-19 pandemic it can easily becoming isolating, which can add to already high anxiety. Be sure to help your mental well-being by writing regularly about what bothers you. Get it out of your brain and release it. You'll feel better.

But also be sure to regularly write down specific things you're grateful for as that will help keep your brain leaning towards a positive mindset.

Setting a goal and writing in a journal everyday about what actions you're taking to reach that goal is a great way to trick yourself into a daily journaling habit.

Often what happens as you begin to write about the daily actions you're taking to reach your goal, you'll also write about the things that bother you, or make you anxious, and I would encourage you to remember to write about the victories and things you're thankful for. If you can do that for even a couple of weeks consecutively, I'm willing to bet you'll feel more mental clarity.

To help, here is a free PDF goal-setting / journaling ebook to get you motivated.
how_to_reach_beyond_your_goals_gl_ebook.pdf
File Size: 180 kb
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Where B2B Marketing is heading in 2020

1/6/2020

 
posted by: Nick Venturella
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While social media and digital marketing disciplines will still be needed in 2020, there is a fatigue that is occurring among the audiences of those marketing tactics.

More specifically, so much messaging is scheduled or AI or something automated that it can often keep the human connections of the people involved in B2B organizations (marketers/sellers and buyers) at arm’s length from one another.

Given this state of automated, often-non-human message bombardment, how do B2B marketers cut through the clutter to be heard and generate positive results?
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In a word:  balance.

In my opinion there’s really one umbrella concept that you need to focus on to determine the right balance of all the other key areas underneath that concept...

Symbiotic Partnerships

What I mean by this is, your organization needs to build partnerships internally and externally that are mutually beneficial to create a self-sustaining and scalable ecosystem of market potential.

In regular speak: start with your own network of employees, partners, and customers to create genuine win-win situations that brings value to what each party cares about. This is not a new concept, but it’s needed now more than ever.

That means, starting to invest where you are vs. only being heavy handed towards demand generation. If you currently invest 80% of marketing budget in demand gen. and 20% elsewhere to build relationships and partnerships across your organization’s current network (employees, partners, customers), consider changing that to 70% / 30%, or even 60% / 40%.

Your organization’s current network is where you can begin to gain depth and eventually more scalable reach due to the network effect of cultivating advocates over time. To cultivate advocates over time is simple: build mutually beneficial relationships with those humans in your organization’s network over time – always be trying to give great unexpected value, and it will come back to you in spades. This practice will help drive forward and upward the success of all involved. 

How this drives everyone’s success forward and upward is by caring about the success of the people involved in each area as much, if not more, than the wealth of your own organization. (If you take care of the people involved, wealth will come. Here’s a Harvard Business Review article that highlights this effect.)

The basic idea is that your organization’s brand stands for something, and your products/services help your target audience achieve something, so then the question is, how can you bring additional value to others beyond “I have a problem and you have a solution,” with a real human relationship? 
The idea is to elevate the connections your organization’s network has far beyond the capabilities of the product or service you sell to build meaningful and fruitful relationships.

Also, and this is crucial, you have to actually and authentically care about these partnerships (and if you care about the success of your business you will care about these partnerships on a human-to-human level – people run businesses, and people buy from people, period).

Because more and more people in this digitally chaotic world are craving trusted human interactions – and they can still be online interactions, just more human-to-human vs. bots – the power in driving market growth is in building relationships that build community where that community trusts one another to give their attention to one another learning and improving because of one another around a common purpose, brand or product, but it’s less about the entity that’s bringing them together and more so about the collective outcome of expanding one’s trusted network and ecosystem of human connections.

This is where concepts of Employee Engagement, Partner Marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Customer Marketing and Advocacy come into play. They all exist to leverage and scale an organization’s current network, which can’t even begin to provide dividends for anyone involved until trust is built and real human relationships are cultivated.
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