The Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Customer Marketer 

Part 2 in a (scrumptious) series

Introduce these 7 mindset adjustments to your daily activities to become an effective customer marketer and prove your programs are worth their weight in gold (literally!)

Part 2: Build Long Term Relationships

In the previous post in this series we focused on laying the foundations for a customer-led growth culture, and the need for customer marketing to adopt and evangelize a new, cross-functional approach. This week, I’d like to highlight one of the pillars of a Customer-led strategy that is often referred to as creating “customers for life”. 

In the B2B industry this type of marketing strategy is even more r/evolutionary because the relationship between marketing and the customer was traditionally something that started to dwindle as the hand-off to Sales, Support and Success was made. 

But it’s the age of the customer, and we now know that marketing to customers is far more than a “nice to have” initiative. Customer marketing is delivering an upsurge in uncharted marketing metrics like retention, revenue and lifetime value.  

So, our habit for today is to shift your mindset and behavior to serving a long-term game. Don’t settle for a short funnel! Place as much (or even more)importance on the post-sale relationship as you would on generating demand, and the customer-led magic will begin to flow in.  

1. Build long-term relationships. 

B2B marketers have always lived by a (theoretical) funnel that begins with awareness and after many twists and turns along the journey, ends with the hand-off of a lead. And this has been roughly the span of the relationship. Under a customer-led strategy, the relationship begins with awareness but continues to deepen long after the aware have become customers. 

Forrester’s 2022 Predictions Report says it well: 

“The average B2B organization gets 77% of its revenue from existing customers, but only 42% of B2B marketers employ demand marketing channels for the enrichment phase of the customer lifecycle. A redesign is overdue. We predict in 2022 that an emerging cadre of growth marketers will drive how success is defined, pursued, and measured. B2B marketers will rebalance resources from 70:30 (i.e., new customers to existing customers) to 50:50, on their way to 30:70.” 

We’re not saying the funnel is dead, just that it’s undergoing a redefinition, and – to take a page out of HubSpot’s redesign – it needs to be cyclic, like a flywheel. The engineering logic of the flywheel says that the more you increase speed (support your customer’s growth), and decrease friction (deliver better customer experience), the more you will create promoters of your business. And, real customers vouching for you is by far the most effective marketing strategy out there.  

While many of you may not have been around for the Inbound r/evolution, some of us were, and we remember the growing pains all too well. So, while much of the above may seem high-level today, I assure you the revolution is well underway and the magic is so “other level” that once you get started, you’ll never look back. Want to know more about the benefits of being customer-led? Have a look and let me know if I left anything out.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for part 3, can you guess what it is?