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From nominating to analyzing, Orca is there to guide you through your customer marketing journey to ensure you have the industry's best practices implemented
As the B2B space becomes increasingly competitive, the need for advantageous customer marketing strategy intensifies. Far too often, businesses forget that customers can, and should, play a highly active role in raising awareness and establishing the credibility of a brand. To get ahead, companies must reexamine the role of a customer in marketing. Customers are more than passive purchasers—they are your greatest allies.
Gartner research finds that B2B buyers spend nearly half of their time conducting independent research before committing to a purchasing decision. Much of that time is spent reading trusted reviews from other B2B buyers. In fact, recent studies indicate that 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to sign a deal after reading a trusted review. Suffice it to say that strong customer relationships are a powerful tool to have in your marketing arsenal.
It is for these reasons, and many others, the power of customer advocacy should not be overlooked. But where should a company start? You must begin by crafting a foolproof customer marketing plan.
Ultimately, your plan is the crux of your customer marketing framework. Without explicit goals, and measurable steps to achieve them, optimal customer marketing outcomes are inevitably compromised. The prime directive of a customer marketing plan is to develop strategies for identifying right-fit customer advocates and showcasing genuine connections between customers and businesses All while ensuring that leadership supports the program from top to bottom—easier said than done. To ensure success, you must follow six crucial customer marketing plan steps.
With so much to consider, and so much at stake, crafting your customer marketing plan can be intimidating. To help you get started, Orca outlined the 6 stages of the marketing planning process for B2B customer advocacy.
Typically, gathering all of this information takes a significant amount of time. However, platforms like Orca automate the advocate identification process and simplify monitoring and updating your book of advocates—saving time and ultimately better serving the customer.
To effectively launch any customer marketing endeavor you must achieve executive backing. But how can you wow the C-suite and get them to approve your plan? Here are four essential steps to keep in mind as you craft your pitch.
Ultimately, the key determinant for executive buy-in is care for the customer and data—lots of it. In the past, businesses have relied on disparate tools to track their customer advocacy metrics, an approach that can quickly become cumbersome. Orca aims to solve this issue. Our platform integrates directly with your Salesforce account and enables you to track your engagements, set parameters for how often you can reach out to customers, and more.
Part of your customer marketing plan must be dedicated to creating a diverse set of customer engagement methods. In this area you have a variety of methods to choose from; here are a select few.
Social Media | This is one of the most popular and simple tactics used in customer marketing. Encouraging your customers to share your content on their social profiles requires little commitment on their part, but can significantly boost your brand awareness and credibility—especially if your customers possess a large following. For your reference, here is a social media post Orca created to highlight an upcoming event hosted by our partners.
Events | Building strong relationships with customers can often lead to cross-organizational collaboration. For example, if you want to highlight a particular win, specific project, or overall successful partnership with a customer, inviting them to a speaking engagement could be enticing. Not only do you get a chance to highlight your company's good work, but it also gives the customer a chance to gain brand recognition as well—it’s a win-win. Some examples of high-value engagements are:
Case Studies | Case studies offer many benefits. From the customer perspective, they provide a chance to highlight the customer’s business and success with a project. From your perspective, case studies are a way to highlight your company’s capabilities and showcase a positive partnership. Some key case study ingredients include:
Our mission is to help customers leverage your relationships and powerful customer data to accelerate business growth. Our user-friendly, Salesforce-native interface allows for quick adoption and provides a streamlined workflow that aligns with your sales cycle. But what about features? Our platform optimizes critical advocate tasks via streamlined communication, scheduled events, and gathered feedback. These automations save time and help you better nurture your customer advocates to achieve:
But this is only the surface of what Orca can do. Experience the full solution and sign up for a demo today.
Customer marketing leverages the opinions of happy, loyal customers to generate buzz for a business through referrals, reviews, and more. Learn how.
Consumer marketing focuses on brand loyalty and advocacy using referrals, references, case studies, and public event management. What is an example?
Learn about how you can leverage loyal customers’ perspectives to enhance your marketing initiatives and attract new business.