Your best customers are right in front of you. Can you see them?
Companies seeking new revenue often fall for the mistake of pouring their marketing and sales resources and efforts into new customer acquisition. But according to surveys recently conducted by SBI, the better option – very often – is to focus on existing customers.
In the surveys, CEOs and go-to-market leaders report that in 2023, 60% of their net-new revenue will come from existing customers. That’s an increase from just over 40% at the end of 2022.
That’s a significant increase.
And just as significant is that nearly 70% of the CEOs surveyed see customer marketing as an essential component of reaching their 2023 goals.
Truly effective customer marketing requires a coordinated effort involving a multidisciplinary team working together collaboratively on a range of four core integrated activities:
- content and communications
- customer success initiatives
- identifying and nurturing advocates
- cross-sell/upsell campaigns
The key to success lies in how well-coordinated the initiative is. The critical elements include customer data analysis, segmentation and modeling, and well-defined roles and responsibilities.
The ability to synthesize and interpret product, customer success, sales, and marketing data will enable more meaningful customer engagement. How are customers utilizing your products? How are they interacting with your communications? Having clear visibility into the specifics of each step of individual customer journeys is invaluable.
With a clear view of customer behavior through data analysis, it’s easier to segment customers to help ensure you’re engaging with them in ways that are mutually beneficial. This data-driven approach enables you to see where the real opportunities for growth are, and therefore focus specific initiatives on the most responsive customers. More granularity in customer intelligence leads to higher-impact customer plays.
But that won’t happen without clearly defined roles and responsibilities across a well-organized group of cross-functional teams. Unfortunately, this is where revenue teams often struggle. Of course, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ – not every organization can be structured the same way. The rule of thumb, though, is to involve a wide range of account service, customer success, and marketing people.
When this kind of concerted multidisciplinary approach to customer marketing is done well, it results in drive retention, loyalty, advocacy, growth, and community participation – all of which contribute to net-new revenue. And when done even better, it turns your customers into advocates that provide positive social proof, testimonials and references for your products and services. And it can inform deeper commercial insights, content and engagement strategies that can be repurposed for new customer acquisition initiatives.
This is just a glimpse of the power of customer marketing. For a more in-depth look, download our latest white paper, Unlock the Potential of Customer Marketing.
