It’s no secret how much people rely on word-of-mouth when they’re considering a purchase. According to Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers trust a product recommendation that comes from someone they know. This form of customer marketing outshines most other marketing strategies businesses use—and it’s not even close. The same report found that the most effective non-consumer tactic (editorial content) only swayed 58 percent of people, and some methods even slipped as low as 28 percent (text ads on mobile devices). The data is clear: consumers trust other consumers, above anything else. That means that a customer marketing strategy is the best marketing strategy to improve business performance. This goes double for B2B businesses, where your target audience (and the options for attracting them) are even slimmer.

Many organizations develop their customer marketing tactics by trial and error. But rather than relying on more heuristic methods, we at Orca believe the best strategies rely on more than chance. With the right tools at your fingertips, you can transform your customer experience into a bonafide win for your business, with higher retention, increased conversion rates, and of course, a better customer experience.

What Is a Customer Marketing Strategy Done Well?

A good customer-based marketing strategy aims to give more than it takes from a customer base. Providing exceptional customer services, professional growth and development opportunities for your customers, and a genuine powerful relationship will return dividends tenfold what a business puts into them. These customers are known as “customer advocates,” and if given the proper care and motivation, customer advocates can become some of your best salespeople. This is particularly critical in B2B customer marketing, where clients may be resistant to adopt new practices—especially with profits or job security at stake.

What can you do to make sure your customer marketing plan is on the right track? Whether you’re improving an existing strategy or starting from scratch, there are a few key questions you should ask:

• How do you identify and maintain good customer advocates?
• Are your advocates involved in more than one facet customer marketing?
• What systems are in place to track, monitor, and simplify your advocate program?

While those questions are at the forefront of your mind, let’s look at ways you could answer each of them, especially with a customer marketing management tool like Orca.

Improving Your Customer Advocates

First, you need to know what you’re looking for in a customer advocate. You have to pinpoint your power users, and among them, identify who is most passionate about your brand. But that’s not all it takes to form a good customer advocate. Ideally they should also:

• Be willing to offer feedback, data, and other means of assisting with improving your offerings
• Want to advocate for your brand in their workplace or other professional settings
• Have concrete, measurable data that represents how working with you has benefited them
• Be connected to stakeholders, decision makers, and adjacent businesses that are potential leads

In addition to finding good advocates, you also need to keep them. You do this simply by building positive relationships with them, and making them feel like they have a true stake in your brand. This can be as simple as having incentive programs or having recurring meetings with them, but the more touch points you can have, the better off you’ll be. For example, some companies even create a Slack channel between their marketing team and their customer advocates, where the two groups can share feedback and discuss ways to improve the brand.

Diversifying Your Types of Customer Marketing

Most people think of word-of-mouth referrals or customer testimonials, but there are many tools and techniques that have the same results—or better, depending on the situation. If you want to boost your customer marketing program and want to try something more unique, here are a few ideas:

• Video Testimonials | Many companies will use written testimonials, but few take advantage of video—a missed opportunity, as videos capture a much more personal tone than written words. When you’re at an event, capturing a quick bite of video from a customer advocate can be a powerful way to demonstrate your brand’s impact upon people. And with a program like Orca, you’re able to easily store and access that content when you want to use it.

• Customer Advisory Board | Feedback is an important part of any business, which means you need to create as many opportunities for quality feedback as possible. One great way to boost your feedback loops is getting your customer advocates involved, via an advisory board: a group of customers that meets with you regularly to share feedback and advice. Using Orca, you can easily track customer activity and collect feedback to surface influential customers to invite to serve on your CAB.
  
• Customer Online Community | As digital commerce grows, so does digital discourse—and the best companies know how to capitalize on both. Forming an online community of customer advocates gives them a space to share experiences, talk about your product, and even brainstorm ideas for improvement. This is a win-win scenario for both your customers and your business; consumers get support from each other and a direct way to send feedback, while you hear directly from your target audience and get inspiration for your business’s next big idea.

Strengthening Customer Marketing Management

The ideas we’ve mentioned, among others, can work wonders for your customer marketing program. However, a strategy consists of more than good ideas. You also need to have a clear, easily navigable, scalable system that synergizes with your cross-department functions. Without good planning, customer marketing plans can struggle with coordinating reference calls, archiving testimonials, or asking the same advocates for feedback so often that they eventually burn out. Customer marketing is the most palpable real-world example of how good business ideas can fall flat without proper planning. 

But that’s where a B2B solution like Orca can take customer marketing to the next level. Orca empowers businesses to create customer marketing plans that not only work, but are simple to maintain. Our management application consolidates everything into one cohesive platform, and because it’s 100% Salesforce-native, our clients don’t even have to adopt a new platform to use Orca.

Work With Orca for Killer Results in Customer Marketing

How do you create a customer marketing strategy that runs smoothly, has clear ROI, and benefits the customer advocates who make it possible? While the question is complex, the answer is simple: Orca. Our management application gives businesses the ability to run successful, organized marketing campaigns that are customized to their operations and centered around their consumers. You’re able to collect consumer data, schedule reference calls, track incentive programs, and anything else you might need to boost your marketing efforts. 

The benefits of working with us are clear, and our metrics for success are even clearer. We offer a solution that is easy to manage, and a price that is hard to believe—one that doesn’t change as you add more users. 

Visit our website today to learn more, or even book a demo for a firsthand look at an Orca deep dive!