What is the best way to create a marketing plan

Marketing to customers is an incredibly significant form of marketing. While most marketing functions focus on finding, attracting, and securing new customers, marketing for customer strategically uses marketing strategies to keep customers, expand the usage of their product and create a network of brand advocates.

If customers feel confident about your brand trusts your brand, they will be loyal to your products and are more likely to tell others about their experience, or recommend others. That is, naturally, the type of marketing that all companies dream of. Not only does it feel natural and natural, but it also lets your customers take on most of the heavy lifting to help you.

But a lot of work is done behind the scenes in order to reach a point that customers do the marketing for you. If you can leverage the power of the power of customer-driven marketing, you can get there as well.

In this guide in this article, we'll guide you through the core aspects of customer marketing and how you can get started as well as ways to connect with your customers using video.

What is marketing to customers?

While marketing, in general tends to focus on winning over potential clients, customer marketing is solely directed at the existing customers. This helps to increase the retention of loyal customers, community, and advocacy and aims at creating your existing customers into the primary part of your growth engine.

Each business will define the various marketing strategies that make up customer marketing. Our team breaks the process of customer marketing down into three key aspects that are part of the customer experience.

Three elements of marketing to customers

The Success

Customer marketing is built around the idea that customers who are happy) spend more money and) communicate their experiences. This is why we need to begin with satisfied customers. Contributing to a fantastic customer experience starting from the first day is an essential aspect of customer-centric marketing.

Think of a delightful client experience to be the basis of your marketing plan for your customers.

Advocacy

 Content that is driven by customers not only can help you demonstrate the potential of your products, but also works as a wonderful method to inform your customers and create a community of users learning from one another.

Customer advocacy works so well as it helps potential buyers understand the value of your product . It's not only the features the product does, but the reason it's there. Buyers who are considering buying your product are more likely to trust a testimonial from a customer who is glowing regarding your product rather than the advertising copy.

Expansion

There's an assumption that sales teams are solely responsible for expansion and upsells. However, if you think of it this in a certain way, you could have missed an enormous opportunity as there are multiple ways that a team of Customer Marketing can set the Sales team up to succeed before time.

At , our Customer Marketing team works closely with Sales to determine how we can grow the reach of our products in our current customers' accounts. It is often about determining the best opportunity to upsell and strategically market to them in line with these moments.

If you approach customer marketing with only a focus on advocacy, you're missing out on opportunities to create these advocates via customer satisfaction and expanding.

How to get started with your customer marketing strategy

If you're trying to design a a more comprehensive customer marketing strategy, it might be overwhelming.

However, here are a few steps you can take to speed up the process of building your marketing plan for customers.

Create a customer journey

Start by sitting down with representatives from the Sales, Product and Customers Success teams to map out the customer's journey. From the moment a customer signs up or purchases your product, keep track of their interactions with your team members and the types of communications they're getting regularly.

Some exploratory questions you can put here would be:

• What type of content for education will we be providing our customers throughout the customer journey?
• What signals are we getting from our customers to determine if they're a suitable candidate to change their plan?
• What kind of feedback do we have received from our customers regarding our current communications or our content?
• What time do Sales contact clients to attempt to increase sales? Does that timing make sense?

Know your customer inside out

If customer marketing is all about delighting customers It is essential to understand your customers requirements, desires as well as their vision. Try to see your business and products through their eyes as well as learn their questions, frustrations as well as their desires.

It might involve reviewing standard support requests, sending out surveys, having conversations directly with customers, listening in on QBRs or tracking their actions on your website and product. It is important to understand the points they cross throughout the journey of a customer that range from the reasons for them to churn to signs of their eagerness to work even more with your product.

Prioritize each aspect of marketing to customers

Once you have your customer journey mapped out, you'll be able to establish your priority and goals for your customer marketing strategy. This is another point where it is beneficial to consider customer marketing as three specific segments.

When it comes to supporting customer success, start with your customer onboarding communication:

• Are your onboarding messages making a an impression? Do they excite you?

• Do your emails get the user up and running on your product?
• Are you providing onboarding material with the correct pace to your customers?
• As customers finish onboarding, are you still serving them content regularly which helps them experience more success with your product?

Don't forget to consider which style will ideal for the successful content or the customer onboarding content you create. It all depends on the type of content as well as the learning style and goals, you might want to look at a short video (like the example below or help center articles, and one of the emails).

When it comes to advocating for your customers, determine the types of customer stories you want to tell:

• Do you know the customers' stories you would like to draw attention to?
• Does everyone within the company conscious of the narratives you're cultivating?
• What is the best time to ask a potential customer their experience?
• Are there opportunities for co-marketing?

When it comes to expansion, focus on understanding customers' changing needs and their timing the content you deliver:

• Have you identified the levers you could use to stimulate expansion?
• Do you know what a potential customer may need additional features from your product?

When you've identified the solutions to the above questions, it's time to plan a strategy that will engage customers at precisely the right timeand provide them with precisely the details they require.

Plan your approach on the road in your company

Customer marketing is by nature, a very co-operative function. Multiple teams across your organization are talking to customers daily and it's important that you're all on the same page and assisting each other in your efforts.

When you've decided upon your top customer marketing goals Make sure that the teams throughout the organization are on board and know their part to meet these goals. This means meeting with Sales, Leadership, Customer Success, Product Marketing along with Product and other departments to ensure that the approach is clear and in line with the mission of the team as well as the overall organization.

Five tips for building a an effective customer marketing strategy

Once you're ready to execute the strategy for marketing to customers, here are a few tips you can use to make your process smooth.

1. The key is timing

No matter what aspect of customer-focused marketing you're working in such as Advocacy, Success, or Expansion -- be sure to consider the timing of your communications and content. You must ensure that you're delivering educational content to your customers in the appropriate time and that you're contacting the customer with a experience after their experience of a thrilling success using your product, and that you're only upselling when a customer really does need new options.

A seamless customer marketing experience must be able to occur in the context of the consumer's schedule-- rather than the timeline of the business.

2. Be gentle with it.

An important question to consider when considering a contact with a customer is: "Does it appear like something you would expect from a natural person?"

If your strategy feels forced, then your strategy won't work as well. In order to succeed, every article you write must flow in line with the user flow and natural path that your customers will take when they visit the product.

3. Help your customers become empowered

When you can provide your customers by offering them valuable and motivating details, your product stops being simply a product to them. It becomes an device that's vital to their success, whether that be a company expanding revenue, or an individual enjoying their work.

If you are focused on helping your clients, then your product are likely to be sold by themself.

Let your customers be empowered by creating helpful guides, ebooks, and more importantly, video. They're not just tips and tricks (such for how to make use of Create) They're complete guides to help users get results using video, do better in their jobs, and thrill their customers.

4. Create a community

The process of building community can be carried out through a myriad of formats, from running events featuring customers, to running a lively community forum for customers. Explore, find out which methods work best for your clients, then keep iterating from there.

5. Take part in the long-game

Marketing to customers generally doesn't provide short-term gains.

It takes time to put in place different processes, and to see the effects of them. But once you do build out a strategy that looks towards the future You'll see success that's largely self-sustaining. When you've reached the point in which your success seems to have a life on its own.

Remember that it's all about the client.

When it's done right, it's practically invisible to the outside world. It's not going to go unnoticed by your customers, they feel valued, appreciated and empowered with every interaction you have with them.

Want to start running online events or creating instructions for customers?