Okay, so I’ve paid attention to some of the marketing and communications trends that have happened over the last several decades as we attempt, in business, to balance marketing strategies and tactics with technology and online tools that will resonate and be accepted/consumed by the people within our target audience.

I’m referring to trends like, when websites first were introduced to the business world, when social media was first introduced to the business world, and now as online community and advocacy efforts are being introduced to the business world as a result of how groups of potential buyers interact with, shop for, and make purchasing decisions about B-to-B products and services.

To build anything new that is effective in relation to these “new” sales/marketing/communications trends hiring someone with previous experience building such a thing is ideal.

Someone with such experience can likely build, in this case, a community and advocacy program more quickly and effectively than someone with less experience.

However, such experience comes at a higher price than someone with less experience. And, quite frankly, building out an effective community and advocacy strategy is a complex task because of the holistic nature of how it touches so many aspects of the business organization that it’s designed to help, not to mention the necessary consideration for your customers’ point of view and experiential habits as they interact with your organization both online and off.

So, my advice to business recruiters who are trying to hire community and advocacy professionals to build out their organizations’ strategy, please keep in mind that doing so is a complex task and those with the experience in this realm will probably be your organization’s best bet towards accelerating your time-to-value with the desired outcome that you’re hoping to get from building out a community and advocacy strategy.

The return on that investment will likely be far greater than the higher salary you have to pay an experienced professional to build out this kind of strategy.

Please do not be surprised when you hire a junior level, less experienced professional, to create and build out your community and advocacy strategy and it takes a lot longer than you expected and isn’t as effective initially as you want it to be.

That is not the fault of the junior professional but rather your organization for not setting them, and you, up for success.

This is not to knock anyone who is junior in this industry who is trying to build their experience to get to that higher level in their career, but rather for the organizations who are recruiting for those kinds of positions to understand, and be very aware, that if your budget is such that you cannot afford someone with more experience to build out what you need more quickly and effectively it is absolutely okay to give an opportunity to someone more junior, and I encourage this — all emerging superstars in this discipline need a break to prove themselves — just understand that their learning curve is going to be greater and you need to be okay with fostering their pursuit to excellence for their own career and your business’ success.

You took the risk on someone with less experience. Set them up for success and together you’ll build something remarkable. If that’s not what you’re after, simply pony up the money and supporting resources needed to attract more experienced talent – they’re worth it.

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.
   ​

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.

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?
​
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.

Whether you are a musician cultivating true fans or a SaaS based tech enterprise cultivating customer advocates, to scale your word-of-mouth marketing and sales efforts the key is to first provide value to your customers to engage them and, over time, cultivate them into advocates.

You can’t have advocates without engagement, and you can’t have engagement without providing some level of consistent value to your customers.

Now, this was part of the inbound marketing concept, and still is, but instead of just providing a free valuable download for some level of customer data, the back and forth communication is now in real-time and it’s an ongoing conversation – not just 1:1 (you and your customer). It’s now also peer-to-peer between your customers and those in your customers’ networks – they’re talking with each other to share experiences and best practices about you, your product or service, online for all to see and review.

That may seem a bit overwhelming to manage, but that is the point: it is not something you can completely control. You have to build a strategy to participate in partnership with your customers to join the conversation. Doing so provides you the best opportunity to help guide the narrative in a truly mutually beneficial way that is win-win for your customer and you (notice the order of those words “your customer” is first, then “you”).

In that process if you make a point to always first bring value to your customers when you communicate with them, customers will more often than not rise to the occasion to advocate on your behalf. That’s the simplicity of the win-win relationship that starts with engagement – not only your customers’ engagement, but yours as well. You have to authentically want your customers to succeed with or without your product/service...and certainly far beyond your product.

Why is this sort of engagement important?

Your engaging with your customers in a provide-value-and-connect-authentically-because-you care-about-your-customers’-success sort of way not only endears you to your customers, but when word gets out about how you operate in this way you will begin to attract others to you. That means more brand exposure, new business, and more advocates.

So how can you begin to foster that kind of engagement?

There are plenty of voice-of-customer software platforms that help you more easily cultivate your customers into advocates at scale, and fairly quickly, however, if you’re small or operating on little to no budget there are simple tools available to help. In fact, I would argue that it’s more about your strategy, approach, and starting where you are currently at than the specific tools you use.

However, if you can clearly define how you’ll measure your customer advocacy success and even attribute ROI dollars to it, you’ll be able to more easily justify the cost of specific platforms and tools that will help you scale your efforts to drive even more value for your customers and your organization. Things like, calculating the cost-savings of deflecting support tickets with peer-to-peer networking and best practices sharing, or the amount of new, closed/won business that was brought over the finish line by a customer reference.

When there is a will there is a way…

If nothing else, start with communicating to your customers via an email list. Ask your customers in an email how you can help provide more value to them beyond your products and services. Specifically, let them know you would like to create a partnership with them for your mutual benefit.
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Ask your customers:

• In what ways could your organization better educate them (the customers) on its products/services and industry?
• How can our organization help you (the customers) build your network of other professionals in the industry?
• How can our organization collaborate with you to better capture your feedback to help us improve our products and services, so you feel some level of ownership over the direction of our organization/products/services?
• How can our organization help to better recognize you for your successes in our industry, and help you become a thought leader in our space?

​Then invite those customers who respond to invite their coworkers and colleagues to participate in a partnership whereby you communicate regularly with your customers (again tools matter less than strategy here) via email, social media, online groups, whatever you have to use, and consistently present your customers with opportunities to do all the things you asked them about in those questions above, and if you use the suggestions they provided you, you’ll get more participation.

It may be slow going at first, but anything new typically doesn’t start out as a huge success, but if you keep at it and are able to track and identify the impact such efforts are having for your organization, you’ll be in a far better position to justify better tools that make this effort more efficient to scale with great ROI. However, that can't happen without a good strategy first.