A product-led growth strategy is successful when the product sells itself (duh 😜). So let’s say you know your product is great, and your customers know your product is great. Awesome! But how can you communicate your product’s quality and efficacy to potential new buyers? Here’s the answer: customer content.
When planning your marketing and sales strategies, you’re focused on one thing: ROI. Any new processes or tactics need to deliver tangible results, boosting your overall revenue and brand awareness. Social proof accomplishes this beautifully. In fact, 89% of marketers say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. Influencer marketing relies on the types of peer reviews and word-of-mouth marketing that make up social proof. Essentially, social proof creates online peer pressure that motivates your buyers to make a purchase. But how do you determine the ROI of social proof? How do you know which forms of social proof are most influential for your target audience?
These days, standing out in a saturated market has become a real problem for product marketers. Consumers are inundated with countless options for similar solutions in so many categories — just think of how many different cell phone service providers are available, for instance. Creating a competitive marketing strategy in the face of market saturation can seem nearly impossible. How can you cut through the noise when consumers are being bombarded with marketing content showcasing similar solutions to their pain points?
How many times have you seen a family member or friend using a product and thought, I have to have that? Next thing you know, you’ve got a new pair of headphones and your dog is eating a new brand of food. This effect is called “social proof,” or the theory that consumers change their behaviors based on the influence of those around them.
By now, we’re sure you’ve heard that customer marketing is on the rise as the latest and most powerful way to reach your target audience and boost business. But why is this? After all, relying on your usual methods of social media and email marketing has worked fine thus far. Well, here’s the catch: the cost of digital marketing is rising 5x faster than inflation. 🤯 Your digital marketing budget simply isn’t going as far as it used to!
For customer marketers, harnessing the power of your community and customer enthusiasm is key. When customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t, building a customer-centric community is becoming more of a must-have than a nice-to-have. One of the best ways to empower and build your customer base is through community software solutions designed specifically to help you strengthen community, loyalty, and referrals.
As the customer marketing technology landscape grows, new tools are emerging to solve for different customer marketer pain points. Which is pretty awesome, right? The problem is all these disparate tools often cause friction and inefficiencies, slowing down productivity. When customer marketers have to piecemeal certain aspects of their tech stack, accomplishing simple tasks can feel like an added chore on top of their already bustling workload. Here’s where DIY all-purpose tools shine. 🤩
It’s often difficult to get leadership buy-in for customer marketing technology, as it’s hard to demonstrate its value without actually implementing it within your enterprise. That tech might be just the boost your organization needs to accelerate sales and drive revenue, but that needs to be proven to leadership before they make a decision. With 68% of CMOs expecting their spending on Martech to increase during 2022, management might just be prepared to splurge on the right platform. But that poses a new question: how do you prove what the right platform is? 🤔
It was only a matter of time before the B2C/consumer buying behavior leaked into B2B/enterprise buying (after all—it’s the same humans). As consumers, we do a lot of research online before buying a TV or choosing a restaurant, and a huge influence in that research process is peer reviews (e.g. on Amazon, Etsy, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.).
If you have a decent-sized sales team, and you are a customer marketer, you are probably very familiar with Slacks and emails from reps at all hours asking for references and case studies for their deals, “Do we have any customers in financial services, in EMEA, using our cloud analytics platform, where we beat IBM?”
