In the ever-changing landscape of marketing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one constant has been that knowing your customer is key. But how do you harness the voice of your customer in a sea of software?

Victoria Blackwell, G2’s senior research analyst, marketing and digital advertising, along with resident customer marketing director and practitioner Katlin Hess, discuss how industry changes have impacted customer marketing and what makes the perfect customer martech stack today.

The past and the present of customer marketing

Historically, customer marketing meant writing case studies, coordinating webinars, and maybe running an advocacy or references program. Now, those are just table stakes. Customer marketing today, of course, includes all of those things but also looks at the overall customer journey and focuses heavily on the holistic customer experience.

Customer marketing is a continuously evolving field, and roles, responsibilities, and team structures tend to vary from company to company. At G2, our customer marketing team is focused on three key pillars—creating customer story content, managing customer advocacy programming, and supporting customer adoption and education. We’re very closely aligned with our customer-facing teams, like customer success, support, and account management. We’re also actively involved in managing customer communications and are part of the product marketing team at G2.

That said, while customer marketing doesn’t manage this at G2, there is also an upward trend in customer marketing directly managing upselling or cross-selling marketing activities.

Habits and expectations of the customer from a practitioner's POV

Noticeably, over a period of time, one can assume that they know what's best for their customer. However, as landscapes and personas shift, it can be easy to lose sight of how a market need or sphere of influence is impacted. 

Our resident customer marketing director, Katlin Hess, shares her perspective below:

“I think that expectations of B2B customers today are heavily influenced by their B2C experiences. Customers want options and transparency, and there’s a level of expectation around self-service and quick responses.”

She continues, "I always recommend that customer marketers new to a role start by mapping the customer journey. Identifying friction points and customer milestones is a great way to uncover opportunities for marketing to impact the customer experience and also helps you understand where you might be able to start building community or advocacy programs into the overall customer experience.”

Relevance vs. reality

Ideally, the perfect strategy for retention and loyalty is time and effort directed at your base. But when dealing with a global crisis, many factors of customer behavior are erratic at best. To get the best results, it’s crucial to understand that base. Producing and pushing relevant content may seem like an obvious answer to knowing the base mentioned above, but how do you get them to advocate for you?

Below is G2 category traffic data for some of our customer marketing categories over the previous three months. Categories like Employee Advocacy and Customer Advocacy continue to rise, indicating that our buyers are looking for ways to better involve and align themselves with their customers. Interest in Direct Mail Automation is unlikely to be consistent due to its versatility.

When deciding which customer marketing product would be the best fit for you, think about what the implementation process and ROI look like for your specific business model.

G2’s take on customer marketing

In the G2 taxonomy, we pride ourselves on creating a perspective that is buyer lead. So when looking at how best to showcase customer marketing software, our method is to best align with how tools are being used rather than industry-specific categorization. The most popular software used by customer marketers live under different larger categories (think Sales Software, Content Marketing, Brand Advocacy, etc.) on the G2 site.

The types of products listed under those categories, like Customer Advocacy and User Generated Content, may be used by most customer marketers but serve vastly different purposes and have distinct features and functionalities. To have a singular customer marketing category consisting of the above types of products wouldn't be beneficial for buyers (or sellers, for that matter) as it would be essentially comparing apples to oranges due to their diverse applications. The goal of any software is to make a job easier and more efficient. The software space for marketing applications has grown exponentially in the last five years. From expansion in personalization or the introduction of social media advertising, marketing software is ever evolving, as is its buyer.

Growth in the industry and its importance 

According to CNBC, the role of customer marketing manager is the third fastest growing job market in the US. Businesses now more than ever understand the value of reducing their churn and boosting retention. Regardless of current practices, there are always opportunities to take a deeper look into the current martech stack to identify improvement. Within the marketing landscape, there are many avenues to better understand your customer. When adding customer marketing tools or specialists to your roster, remember these three things: resilience is crucial, adaptability is key, and customer experience should be top of mind.

Edited by Jigmee Bhutia