My name is Gal, I'm the co-founder of Crowdvocate, and today we're going to talk about streamlining customer marketing by associating it with the journey and product insights, and how all that can impact advocacy and upsell.
I'll start by giving a little intro to Crowdvocate, then I’ll run through the pillars of B2B customer marketing and share some tips on how to get started. Then we’ll look at how to use data to streamline engagement across the customer journey and how to engage with your customer advocate base at scale. Lastly, we’ll explore how customer marketing drives revenue and how to leverage references and advocacy for upsell opportunities.
Let's dive in.
The pillars of customer marketing
Crowdvocate is the only purpose-built platform for customer marketing that can also be leveraged by product marketers. It's a holistic approach to managing advocacy programs. lifecycle engagement, upsell, expansion, reference automation, loyalty rewards, and much more.
It's a holistic approach because we believe that customer marketing is holistic. For us, customer marketing is everything post-sale. On top of what customer success does, customer marketing can also scale adoption and content for your customers. We run events, user groups, and CABs. Customer marketing can also look after communities and user forums.
Engaging all of those activities and leveraging the data from them is part of what customer marketing can do, both for the company and the community.
Of course, there are different types of advocacy. There are reviews, customer stories, and customer feedback and input. There are reference calls, and there’s reference content. And then there's lifecycle marketing to drive upsell, cross-sell, and expansion. There’s also the overall communication of activities, events, and whatnot.
The thing is that for your customer, all those activities are part of the same thing. They all form the sum of their engagement with you. They don't see the separate programs. They’re a user of product X, and within their journey, they onboard, they join a user group and maybe a customer advisory board. They might be active in your community and maybe take a reference call or say yes to an upsell.
That's their journey. That's how they see it, and that's how you should see it too. You need to tie all the pieces together.
Four tips to get started with customer marketing
Before you do that, here are four tips to get you started. We've seen them work with all our customers. The key thing is not to start with a platform with a plan.
Tip #1: Define your strategy and KPIs
What’s your year one goal? What numbers do you need to reach at the end of the year? Maybe that's the number of advocates. Maybe it's the number of upsell revenue or campaigns that you run. Maybe it's the number of people that participated in reference calls or the number of deals that leverage reference calls. There are so many things you can track, but your targets have to be numeric.
You also have to agree on your goals with management in mind, and the best way to start is by understanding the company's KPIs and aligning with those. If the company wants to focus on upselling this new feature, the customer marketing program should support that.
Tip #2: Collaboration is key
You want to collaborate with everybody. Customer marketing is the quarterback of the organization. You're talking to internal marketing teams because you need their help, and they need your help with demand generation because that requires customer-generated content.
You’re talking to sales because they need references, which are obtained and approved by customer success. Product teams can help you move more messaging and get feedback. And of course, you have to get executive sponsorship to run these programs.
