We’ve previously written about customer success – what it is, why it’s important, and how to achieve it. This week, we continue to explore this key idea of customer success, and the role marketing plays in helping your company highlight its dedication to customers.
What is customer success marketing?
Customer success marketing lies at the intersection of customer success and customer marketing. In short, if your company excels at making high revenue from customer marketing, it is likelier to report customers who are satisfied (in other words, higher customer success). Therefore, customer success marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on retaining customers.
Marketing and customer success are not two unrelated spheres of business that never interact. Quite the contrary, a better marketing strategy will help customers feel that they are being better served. Customers will be more receptive to their vendor’s products, strategies, designs, and changes or new introductions. Furthermore, a company that has a robust customer success team will better understand the needs of its clients, and use feedback to refine and improve its overall marketing strategy.
How can marketing and customer success teams help one another?
Once your company has linked its marketing and customer success strategies and opened a channel of communication between the two, it can use both to achieve its goals.
A good customer success team focuses on making sure the company’s products provide value to its customers. This team looks at the entire customer lifecycle to onboard, retain, and receive feedback from customers. The marketing team can take information gathered during this process to identify potential new clients, as well as broadcast client success stories or product improvements. The blogs, social media posts, and other materials publicized by customer success teams are useful from a marketing standpoint as well.
Likewise, marketing teams can help with customer success by ensuring that customers feel that the company is being open and transparent, and that it continuously upgrades and improves its product. Marketing data gets funneled to the customer success team, which uses it to get a better sense of the company’s client base and potential client base.
How can a company align customer success and marketing?
The first step is to develop a strong focus on customer success for the entirety of the client lifecycle. Your company should have clear goals not just to attract customers, but to retain them. Once you have a sense of who your clients are, and receive steady feedback from your customer base, collect and centralize all of this data. Your marketing team can then use this to tailor content specifically to your type of customers.
Furthermore, the marketing team can tap into your network of employees to further its goals. Customers satisfied with your product will naturally serve marketing goals by spreading the word to others. However, you can accelerate this process by actively engaging your existing customers as potential advertisers of your brand.
Part of your marketing budget should be dedicated to customer success. After all, you don’t just want to attract new clients, you also want to retain and bring value to existing clients. Use this part of your marketing team to communicate with your clients the benefits of your product, any additional features or changes you’ve made, or new products you’ve added. This helps you stay visible and relevant.
Events, conferences, and meetups are perfect venues to bring together your customer success and marketing teams, and have them interface with clients. Use large-scale events to promote your product to new customers, seek feedback from existing ones, improve relationships with potential and current clients, and promote your brand across the board.
Customer success and marketing are two aspects of any company that cannot function without one another. See here for more resources on developing customer success marketing strategies that will elevate both you and your clients.