In today’s highly competitive market, proven growth methods are critical to increase revenue streams for both current and existing customers. Consider that customers driven by referrals have a lifetime value that’s 16% higher than customers generated by other methods. Or, the fact that almost 90% of consumers state customer ratings and reviews have the most significant impact on the purchasing decisions they make. Customer marketing is paramount to reaping these benefits.

Whether you are building from the ground up or simply looking to refine your current customer marketing strategy, there are predefined steps and tools like Orca that enable success.

What Is a Customer Marketing Strategy?

A customer marketing strategy combines various customer marketing techniques into a cohesive, actionable roadmap. While there are several types of customer marketing methods that businesses can utilize, some of the most common include:

• Case Studies: As one of the most common customer marketing examples, case studies take a deep dive into how a customer leveraged your product to solve one or more challenges. Illustrating real-world ROI can be especially useful in bottom-of-the-funnel discussions.

• Events: Some of the most dedicated customer evangelists may be willing to join an in-person or virtual event, webinar, or podcast to share their experience with your brand. Hearing directly from your advocates about the difference your product made can be quite compelling for those tuning in.

• Reference Calls: Sales experts know that oftentimes the best way to move the needle is by bringing in existing customers to speak with leads. For prospects, these conversations feel authentic—the information isn’t coming from a seller, it’s coming from a peer. 

• Referrals: One of the more powerful B2B customer marketing strategies, leads from referrals are 30% more likely to convert as compared to leads generated by other means. It’s vital to empower—and incentivize—your brand advocates to share your product with their network to gain these benefits.

• Reviews: B2B buyers spend over one quarter of their time associated with buying activities performing research online; this likely includes organic web searches, reading company websites, and perusing review sites. By encouraging your advocates to share reviews, you can boost brand awareness from the start.

• Customer Advisory Board (CAB): The best way to fully understand your customers is to simply speak with them. A CAB is composed of influential customers who are tasked with providing feedback about your products or services and help strategically advise the direction of the business. CABs provide invaluable insight into your customers and their needs, and they’re an excellent way to build brand loyalty by showing your care about their experience.

When done well, these customer marketing ideas enable businesses to improve both retention and growth rates to positively impact both revenue streams. However, implementing customer marketing without the appropriate guard rails in place can cause significant challenges, which is why a strategy is so critical to success.

How to Write a Marketing Strategy with a Customer Marketing Platform like Orca

Developing your customer marketing framework begins with identifying your ideal customer profiles and ends with building and engaging brand evangelists who can generate brand awareness and new business. Use the following customer marketing strategy process steps as you iterate toward a plan that truly drives outcomes.

1. Identify your ideal customer profiles. Define or refine your ICP to fully understand who you should target. This should include not only demographic data, but engagement, behavioral, and attitudinal data as well to provide a holistic view of your target market. With a customer marketing platform like Orca, for example, you can parse customer data to pair prospects with the fully-aligned advocates.

2. Invest in brand awareness. One of the best ways to validate your customer marketing plan is to leverage the backbone of your business. To do so, it’s critical to invest in brand awareness so your customers can understand the value of your business. By telling powerful stories and sharing customer experiences and real world ROI, you can promote customers through your business brand.

3. Engage with leads and prospects. Identify crucial points in both the sales cycle as well as the customer journey to inject customer lead growth material or action. This prompts sales teams to not only personalize pitches and demos, but match them up with the appropriate customer marketing strategies.

4. Move customers through your sales funnel. Sales plays should include customer marketing strategies that align with each stage of the sales funnel to fully enable your team to use the right resources at the right time. 

5. Offer a top-tier onboarding experience. Customer success begins from day one. From onboarding resources to training and ongoing support, it’s vital to quickly integrate your customer into your product or service. Not only does this decrease time to value, but it sets a precedent for a positive customer relationship. 

6. Focus on retention rates. By definition, brand evangelists must be loyal customers. Companies that are laser-focused on the activities necessary for retention—positive relationships, customer delight, service quality, and more—can turn retained customers into loyal customers and brand advocates.

7. Collect customer success stories. As your customers successfully leverage your product or service, begin gathering data, quotes, and stories of their results. Not only can these equip your team to understand customer insights, but it also provides content for your marketing materials. 

8. Identify and recruit brand advocates. Those customers who consistently praise your brand and the results it has driven are excellent potential evangelists. For those companies with multiple ICPs, identifying one or more advocates in each category will set you up for success. Customer marketing platforms like Orca offer a cross-team platform to better understand how often each team communicates with an advocate to avoid fatigue.

9. Adopt the right tools. Finally, effectively enabling a robust customer marketing strategy requires tools that empower you to bring structure, planning, and insights to the table. Orca’s 100% native Salesforce platform allows you to manage your program, expand marketing efforts, and maximize efforts to streamline your customer marketing strategy.

Orca: Supercharge Your Customer Marketing Strategy

Orca enables B2B organizations to level up their customer marketing strategies to improve key metrics for customer loyalty, brand advocacy, retention, conversion rates, revenue growth, and more. With Orca, businesses can access features and functionality, including:

• Program strategy and management, such as fatigue management, workflow management, and streamlined notifications. 
• Expanded customer marketing, including reference calls, referrals, and a content hub.
• Maximized metrics and KPIs with dashboards and the Orca hub to track results.

If you’re ready to engage your customers, build a team of brand advocates, and ultimately fuel organizational growth, turn to Orca’s 100% Salesforce native platform. Schedule a demo today to see our solution in action.