The Life-Long Customer

One of the challenges of being a newcomer is changing the minds of brands or customers from what they're accustomed to. 

In today's podcast, Candace Sheitelman, Chief Marketing Officer at Edify shares with us some useful tips on brand building, especially as a newcomer. Tune in to learn more!

"It's always tough to be the new kid in any space, but I think it even has a layer of additional complexity when you're the new kid in a space that's been around for a long time. The natural state of being in the customer experience space is resistance.

'These are the companies we've always used to do this.'
'These are the brands that people trust in this business.'

Being the newcomer, you have a little bit of a hill to climb. It's getting brands out of the mindset of 'the way we've always done it is how we have to keep doing it.' That's the challenge of being a newcomer in an existing space."

- Candace Sheitelman, Chief Marketing Officer, Edify

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- Casey Carey, Chief Marketing Officer, Kazoo

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The difficulties of organizing on-site physical events, especially during the pandemic, have led to more organizations doing virtual events. Even though this might seem to have addressed the concern of accessibility in the time of social distancing, organizing virtual events still has its challenges. 

In our episode today, we sit down with Dana Freker Doody, VP, Marketing and Communications at JUNO. She shares with us her learnings and insights on creating and organizing engaging virtual events.

"Creating the sessions that enable more people to talk and share is great. Again, there's technology limitations in certain platforms that allow for that or disallow for that. The connection piece is really the big one. 

We've used social media to begin and advance relationships for years. So using the virtual event, thinking about it in that term of what relationships can you be beginning? And what relationships can you be advancing with this virtual event? And what kind of content will actually help you achieve that? Think about the best conversations that you've had at a physical event, or even at a party with your friends or after your church service, right? They're not groups of twenty people that gather to talk. The best conversations are when there's three, four, five, maybe pushing into six and seven. So keeping those round tables small. The other thing that we find helpful is to give specific talking points. 

Have that available and have a moderator, or at least someone who's seeded with what the next question should be so that they can get the conversation going.”

- Dana Freker Doody, VP, Marketing and Communications, JUNO

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"Kevel has evolved as we've rebranded. As we picked up funding, our go-to-market strategy has drastically changed. For the longest time, it was heavily dependent on inbound leads, and we've since started to focus a little more on building an outbound team for cold emails, building out our account-based marketing strategy.

If we hadn't have done these, we wouldn't have seen the recent growth we've had this year. It's crucial to adjust based on the stage of your company and market dynamics to what that go-to marketing strategy is. That should change.

As an example, as a marketing team, we have different quarterly goals: This quarter, I want to focus on site traffic. This quarter, I want to focus more on social proof, et cetera.

Identifying those micro-goals and adjusting your strategy allows you to capture the fact that stories evolve, companies evolve, and you can't stick to just the same tactic and execution every year.”

- Chris Shuptrine, VP of Marketing, Kevel

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"The challenge with developers is everybody wants to market to them, but they have no interest in being marketed to. It does come off as a challenge for folks because a typical marketer wants to tell you why their product is so great and all the great things it's going to do for you.

From a developer's standpoint, they really want to see it. It’s a ”Don't tell me, show me. Let me get my hands on it. Let me try it out and show me how to do it.”

It takes a lot of what we refer to at Liquibase as outside-in thinking, instead of inside-out. We could sit and say, “Here's what we want people to know.” The reality is you have to sit and do the outside-in and say, “What do they want to know? What do you need to show them that they're interested in?”

The effort there really is around educating. It's around helping them achieve the goals that they have, helping them, you know, making it, so that it's easier for them that things are streamlined, that they can find the documentation that they have, and have a community that they can lean on. As we go through and look at our product definition, look at all of the things that we're doing.

The biggest focus that we have is just making everything easier, making it super simple for people to come in, get going, find the value while they're actually using the product as opposed to trying to go out and really sell it to them."

-  Matthew Geise, VP of Marketing, Liquibase

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✔️Respect definitely goes a long way! ✔️

AgriWebb swears by this when doing their marketing initiatives. According to Elizabeth Moore, AgriWebb’s VP of Global Marketing, listening to and respecting the experts of the farming industry not only strengthens customers’ trust with their company but also helps them better tailor-fit solutions to help their target customers.

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"The end product of customer advocacy is you've got someone pleased with your brand and loves using your product or service. They are at the point where they are willing to write reviews on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, any of those other review sites. They will write a review, rate, take that initiative on their own. That could be good or bad.

At the same time, they'll be willing to raise their hand and become a sales reference for you. They'll be happy to get on a call with a prospect and share their experience about why you should consider using a company's product or service.

There are lots of different ways that customers can advocate for you. That's part of a broader and more mature category in marketing, which is called customer marketing.

Too often, marketing was spending too little time on the post-sale after you acquired that customer. Marketing needs to spend more and more time in the post-sale journey and engage with customers, create relationships with them, and understand what motivates them to continue buying your product or service. That's what customer marketing is all about. It's engaging with your customers, building relationships, and hopefully getting them to the state of advocacy."

- Dan Cote, VP, Chief Marketing Officer, Influitive

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“I saw a stat in the latest report the other day that the CMO tenure is the shortest it has ever been.

One of the core reasons is that not enough marketing leaders can draw a straight line from marketing to revenue.

I fundamentally believe that marketing exists to start and continue conversations for their sales team. To me, that's what demand generation is all about.

You find folks that say that demand generation is about lead generation. That is just not true.

You can do lots of things to generate leads that will never result in revenue for your business. That's a core component.”

- Kate Adams, SVP of Marketing, Validity

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Data-driven marketing can mean a ton of things. It can be the super extreme: AI and advanced analytics that you get into accurate hardcore data. It can also be as simple as metrics reporting. 

I don't know how you can be a CMO or Head of Marketing these days without being a data-driven person. In my mind, what I've found is that you have to touch everything across-the-board to be successful. Everything moves so fast that you have to make decisions very quickly. If you don't make the right decisions, it could have a lot of repercussions. Data helps you do that.

Data can be a few different things. It could be conducting market research, insights about the markets, your competition, customer analytics or segmentation, bringing some intelligence about your customers to the business, conducting surveys. It could be product analytics, looking at what works in your product and what doesn't, what makes your customers tick, and how can you amplify that?

It could be setting benchmarks in the industry. It can be something as simple as business metrics or marketing metrics, like how many leads did we bring in? How many converted?

- Christina Kyriazi, VP of Marketing, Ekos Software, Inc.

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“My definition of customer experience is it's the process of putting the customer at the center of what you're doing very simply. For marketing and marketers, it is ingrained in your marketing strategy and everything you do. It is driving the usage and adoption of your products.

It's in the DNA of how we work day-to-day. It affects brand loyalty. It affects customer retention. It affects bottom-line revenue.

The experiences that we create, both good and bad, are some of the largest determinations of customer retention.

Many marketers know the data is there. It shows which customers see the value of what you're selling and are more likely to buy. It's about acquisition, but it's also about retention.

That's what marketing is ultimately doing: it's creating experiences.”

- Angela Earl, VP Global Marketing, RFPIO Inc.

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To listen to more The Life-Long Customer podcast episodes, follow us on LinkedIn
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Follow the host Brad Hammond https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-hammond

#thelifelongcustomerpodcast #customerjourney #marketingleadership #b2bmarketing