What Does Customer Marketing Involve? 

Customer marketing involves processes aimed at driving retention and loyalty in a business-to-customer relationship. The foundation of this relationship is built around loyalty, engagement, and trust. And while it is a type of marketing, rather than focusing on acquiring new business, customer marketing strategies rely heavily on building and maintaining strong relationships over long periods of time.

Why is Customer Marketing Important?

As we stated previously, new businesses are starting their ventures every single day. In order to stand out, you have to reach customers on a unique level. That being said, participating in customer marketing activities is important. It works to establish a strong relationship that can mold a one-time customer into a lifelong customer. B2b customer marketing is also used to create strong relationships between businesses. And no matter what industry you’re dealing with, customer marketing tactics are hard at work. From Saas customer marketing to customer marketing for HVAC businesses, it’s a vital piece to the pie of sales and retention. And it’s important to note that the future of customer marketing is looking very bright.

What is Customer Marketing?

While we already gave an overview of how customer marketing works, we’re going to dive a little deeper into the definition and compare it to other types of marketing.

A Look Deeper into the Meaning

As we gaze deeper into the definition of customer marketing, we find that there are many factors and different approaches to this type of marketing. While one strategy might work for one company, the same strategy may be the wrong approach for another. That being said, a key factor to remember about customer marketing is that best practices will depend on your specific needs and situation. Millions of companies offer many different things—while many companies also offer far different products and services compared to other companies. To better understand how customer marketing works, take a look at how this realm of marketing is different than other types you might be familiar with:

More Focused on Existing Customers    

When you think of marketing, you probably tend to gravitate towards believing that it’s all aimed at bringing in new customers and driving up sales. But while that’s always a goal of the majority of companies out there, customer marketing is more focused on retaining the customers a business already has.

Sales Aren’t Really Involved

When acquiring new business, salespeople can take weeks upon weeks to reel in that new clientele. And gaining their attention involves a lot of legwork. But when you already have the attention of your customers since you’re previously provided a great service or product, you already have their trust—and a lot of the hard work is done already. That being said, sales aren’t really a big focal point for this type of marketing.

Strong Use of Email

Another strong focus of customer marketing relies heavily on the use of email. If a business is trying to engage with their existing customers and keep them involved with new products or happenings around the business, then sending an email is the usual tactic.

Customer Marketing Examples

In order to understand a little more about how customer marketing works, it’s a great idea to look at a few success stories from customer marketing professionals. Take a look at a few examples below to determine a customer marketing definition for yourself:

Welcome Emails

Just like in our day-to-day interactions with people, first impressions also go a long way in the digital world. That being said, sending a welcome email to your new customers is an easy and amazing tactic to grow your brand loyalty. This shows the customer that you really care about them and you want to welcome them to your business. And in terms of growing sales, studies have shown that this form of marketing consistently leads to higher transactional value compared to other types of marketing.

Highlight Customer Success Stories

While often overlooked, one of the best forms of customer marketing relates to your customers’ success stories. People relate to other people and want to hear about their good experiences. That being said, one tactic is to feature a customer story on a short social media post – or if you want to go a step further – you could craft an in-depth interview as a long-form blog post. Not only will the interviewee be ecstatic about their new fame, but other loyal customers might see their testimonial and be even more gravitated towards loving your business.

Hit that “Reply” Button    

While you might think that customer marketing best practices are complicated and take a great deal of planning, sometimes the best tactic is as simple as clicking a button. To do this effectively, try replying to your customers on social media. Get involved in the comments section and engage with them on a level that isn’t very common with most companies. Instead of them thinking of your business as just a place to get products, this is a great way to reach them on a personal level and also gives a human element to your company. If you’re building a customer marketing strategy, implementing this idea can do wonders for retention and growth.

Product Marketing Strategy

When you’re implementing your customer marketing strategy, it’s important to understand that there are multiple elements that can work for your needs. One crucial part of this type of marketing involves product marketing.

What is Product Marketing?

This type of marketing deals with the promotion of a product. From before the product launch to after it hits the shelves, the features of product marketing are hard at work through every phase of the product-to-consumer relationship.    

Customer Marketing vs Product Marketing

Product Marketing jobs don’t only consist of promotion to the public that you’re offering a product, but it goes very in-depth about what makes the product so great and beneficial to a certain audience. Some of the greatest product marketing examples involve companies that have found their niche and understand how to market to their specific audience—which is how this relates to customer marketing.

Customer Success and Product Marketing

Another factor to remember is that many customers relate their success to product marketing. If they complete a race, their shoes (the product) made it all possible. If they lose weight, maybe their clothes (the product) made them feel confident enough to hit their goal. As customers lean on products to help them reach their objectives in life, that can have an ever-lasting effect on the loyalty involved in the business-to-customer relationship.

Customer Success Marketing

As another piece of the customer marketing pie, customer success marketing is focused on what a company can do to ensure it’s customers see value in the business’s products or services. The role of marketing in customer success is aimed at strategies that help determine the level of enjoyment from customers, including ways that enjoyment can improve. Common types of content you’ll see produced from a customer success marketing agency might include:

• Onboarding materials, including emails and presentations
   
• Continuous product communications and
   
• highlights of the company or products
   
• Webinars or events focused on customer satisfaction and engagement

The Importance of these Roles

A customer success marketing team is vital for the retention and overall growth of a company. And given that retaining customers is far less expensive than acquiring new ones, these teams and their strategies are strong focal points for many businesses across the globe. But as customer success marketing strategies vary based on the business and its type of audience, knowing how to approach this type of marketing can be a challenge. But once you find how to engage with your customers and give them value for choosing you as a provider, then retaining them and gaining their loyalty becomes a little easier.

Customer Marketing Jobs

While there are many customer marketing jobs out there, many of them involve different job responsibilities and require candidates with various backgrounds and capabilities. However, whether you’re looking at an entry-level job or a service marketing manager job description, these positions involve some common areas. Many of these roles include the following responsibilities:

• Constant communication with customers
   
• In-depth research of current trends
   
• Responding to customer complaints
   
• Brainstorming with the customer marketing team
   
• Working alongside a customer marketing officer
   
• Developing campaigns
   
• Making website changes
   
• Replying to social media posts

If you’re looking for an accurate job description for an entry-level position or you would like to review a typical relationship marketing manager job description, then it’s best to do research in regards to the field or industry you’re interested in. Since there are millions of different companies out there that target a diverse range of products and services, a customer marketing job description for one company might be worlds different than a description for another business.

Average Salary

The average salary for these positions also varies depending on customer marketing titles, location, type of industry, and more. But to get a general idea, the average customer marketing manager salary is $80,899, according to PayScale.    

Now that you know everything there is to know about customer marketing, it’s time to step up your customer marketing efforts.