Customer marketing is a relationship-centric approach that moves away from the transactional mode of operation. The idea is to transition your current satisfied customers into advocates (through a mutually beneficial relationship) to grow your reach and engage other potential clients. Your business needs a customer marketing strategy to lay out the specific plays for reaching your marketing targets. In this article, we’ll talk specifically about B2B customer marketing strategies that provide substantial value with measurable ROI and give concrete examples to inspire your own marketing strategy development.

What Is a Customer Based Marketing Strategy?

A customer based marketing strategy is geared toward meeting the needs of customers as its primary driver. The biggest difference between product-based and customer-based marketing strategies is that customer-based marketing puts the customer at the center and tailors marketing efforts accordingly while product-based marketing focuses more on the features and benefits of the product itself and its positioning in the market. Both approaches can be effective depending on the marketing goals and the nature of the product or service being marketed. However, customer-based marketing tends to be more personalized, relationship-oriented, and customer-centric.

There are many ways this customer-focused approach to marketing can be utilized to drive business growth and enhance customer programs. Here are a variety of the types of customer marketing that are popular today:

1. Customer Advocacy Programs
2. Loyalty Incentives
3. Reference Calls
4. Customer Generated Content

What Are Four Strategies to Attract Customers Using Customer Marketing? 

Let’s take a closer look at how each of the four customer-focused marketing strategies listed above can be fully integrated into a strategy to drive new qualified leads, including customer marketing examples for each.

1. Customer Advocacy Program

Create a specific workflow to enable satisfied customers to seamlessly transition into advocates through advocacy onboarding, exclusive program opportunities and campaigns. Having customer willing to participate in a program at a company is one thing but enabling them to have a voice and a platform to do so are very different things. Even the simplest of programs can centralize the strongest relationships for your business and will organically drive leads and deals.

Orca makes this all easy with automatic lead tracking, attributions, and metrics. Our Salesforce-native application integrates with Zapier and Slack to make managing advocacy interactions seamlessly fit into your team’s existing workflows.

2. Loyalty Incentives

Reward customers or internal staff who are excelling at adopting advocacy plays with benefits that truly add value. Gamifying your loyalty program can increase its effectiveness, and Orca’s integrations with Tango Card and Tremendous give you built-in fulfillment solutions.

3. Reference Calls

For many potential customers interested in becoming clients, a reference call from another satisfied customer can be the impetus they need to fully engage. Although studies show that 83% of happy customers would be willing to provide a reference for your product, under 30% of them actually do. That’s why Orca’s platform makes it easy to find the right customers, request their help, schedule reference calls, and reward their participation.

4. Customer Generated Content

There are many ways that satisfied customers can help you generate content for your website and social channels or collateral for your marketing and sales departments. Asking a client who has seen the benefit of your product or service first hand to leave a positive review on social media is one way to get started, but it can go far beyond this. Customers can provide testimonials or quotes that can be used on your website or product pages. Interviews can be recorded for podcast or webinar content where a customer expounds on the benefits they got from using you. Case studies including important metrics of their success can be written up and shared. 

With any customer marketing activity, it is important to be respectful of your customer’s time and not over request from the same sources too frequently. Orca’s scheduling and contact frequency tracking features make it easy to ensure you are using the resources you have, but not overusing clients’ time and good will.

What Are the Four (4) Major Steps in Designing a Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy with Examples?

When you design your customer marketing strategy, there are four commonly used steps that are worth considering: market segmentation, targeting, positioning, and differentiation. Let’s explore each step, along with an example of how this would work when designing a strategy specifically for a B2B organization with a focus on customer advocacy and marketing.

1. Market Segmentation

In order to effectively market a product, it is important to identify your target market attributes, and the different segments within that market. If a business accounting software company were to apply market segmentation to their marketing strategy, they might identify their target market as small to medium sized businesses started in the last 12 months. Within that market, they could determine several market segments, like new businesses in the healthcare, retail, and manufacturing industries. 

2. Targeting

When planning their customer marketing strategy, they would want to determine which specific segment they want to target with their customer marketing campaign. Generally, a business will choose one segment to focus on at a time, adding additional targets as their business and marketing budget grows. Our example B2B accounting software company might identify small retail businesses as their largest market segment. Therefore, they should focus on finding satisfied customers within this segment as part of their brand advocacy campaign.

3. Positioning

Each company should identify their position within their specific market in order to know how to best create a robust customer marketing strategy. Examples of possible positions include low cost-to-value services, high value perception, or strong brand recognition. The accounting software example may position themselves as a very high value, boutique accounting platform that offers customized, individual solutions for high-end retailers. When approaching customers for brand advocacy, they would want to focus on customers who fit their brand positioning, as well as within their ideal customer market segment.

4. Differentiation

Differentiation is what sets a business apart from their competitors, and can be particularly important in very competitive industries. Our high-end retail B2B accounting software example may differentiate itself from other similar options by its focus on unique and visually attractive point-of-sales interfaces. In their customer marketing strategy, they would want to target their customer’s positive experiences around this differentiating factor in interviews, reviews, and case studies. They could craft questions and review metrics tailored towards this important differentiator, like “How did your custom sales interface delight your high-end customers?”

Orca: Customer Marketing for the Success You Deserve

When you are ready to realize all the benefits inherent to customer marketing, Orca provides a one stop solution. We are a Salesforce-native application, so we streamline your workflow without adding yet another product you need to log into and add to your process. 

We aid the optimization of your customer marketing strategy with: 

• Advocate Campaigns
• Loyalty Programs
• Rapid Adoptions
• Communities
• UX Feedback Initiatives
• Real-time Metrics
• Security

You get real results, simplified.