As a marketer for a manufacturer or a technology firm that sells into manufacturing, you uniquely understand the challenges that come with driving quality leads.
How to Drive Growth with Existing Customers
As a marketer for a manufacturer or a technology firm that sells into manufacturing, you uniquely understand the challenges that come with driving quality leads.
One approach for generating new leads that frequently doesn’t get the resources and energy it deserves (because perhaps it’s not as novel or exciting) is customer marketing, where an organization focuses on existing relationships to drive growth. Here are some proven ways to increase revenue by meaningfully adding your existing customers into your marketing mix.
What Is Customer Marketing?
Customer marketing is a marketing strategy that targets existing customers rather than prospective customers. The primary goal of customer marketing is to promote additional offerings to an established customer base, but it is also a vital strategy for retaining customers, building customer loyalty, and turning customers into advocates.
Many studies over the years demonstrate that businesses spend up to 25 times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. B2B marketers sometimes focus exclusively on capturing prospects and overlook the low-hanging fruit—the customers who are already in their database.
More Benefits of Customer Marketing
Engaging with your current customers can yield up to three times the annual value of other customers. While it is okay to create strategies to convert prospects, it is just as crucial to retain your existing ones. In addition, your likelihood of selling to existing customers is around 65%. But your likelihood of selling to new customers is less than 20%. Here are five more benefits of deploying a robust customer-marketing program.
Benefit 1: Increase Customer Engagement
There are various techniques for encouraging retention, but customer marketing is one of the most cost-effective options. After all, you already have the means to contact your current customers. Regular communication with your customers puts you at the forefront of their decision-making process, and strengthens your relationships. Providing them with educational materials and timely updates keeps them engaged with your brand and your industry solutions.
This practice also opens the door to repurchases and additional income from supplemental products. Once you earn a customer’s trust—and maintain that trust over time—they are more likely to continue doing business with your firm rather than looking for a new supplier.
Benefit 2: Increase Customer Retention
Giving your existing customers the VIP treatment makes them feel appreciated. Naturally, the better your relationships are with your customers, the more likely you are to build loyalty. Loyal customers can do wonders for any organization. They spend more on your products and services, recommend you to other buyers, and in other ways encourage prospects to consider your brand. Using the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue comes from only 20% of your buyers—the loyal ones. For this reason, you should always include them in your marketing efforts.
Benefit 3: Boost Revenue
Do you want to boost your revenue without spending all your budget on marketing? You can save a significant amount by reaching out to your existing clients.
With your marketing team, create exclusive upselling, cross-selling and bundling campaigns for your clients. Timely messages increase the likelihood of getting more purchases or upgrades.
If you are still on the fence about customer marketing, a survey shows that acquiring a new customer costs almost four times more than using upselling techniques. Do not be one of the many companies that spend all their precious resources on generating leads and nothing on engaging high-value clients. Remember, adding value for your clientele can drastically improve your sales.
Benefit 4: Improve Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures a company’s potential total income from a typical client. To compute this value, follow this formula:
CLV = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan
This method lets you determine the group that contributes the most toward your revenue. Often, they are the most loyal customers with a low chance of switching to competitors.
Some of the country’s longest-running organizations take CLV to heart. If you want to join the big leagues, you should prioritize this metric, too. Instead of focusing only on attracting new customers, encourage more sales from customers and keep them on your list of active buyers for as long as possible.
Benefit 5: Enhance Acquisition Efforts
Another reason to practice customer marketing is that it has the power to influence prospective clients. After all, satisfied customers will not hesitate to share their stories about their experience with your brand. With the right strategies, you can ask them to spread the word about your products and services through user-generated content.
Here are some ways to use this technique:
- Build an online community: Customers who feel like they belong to a group of like-minded individuals are more likely to share reviews. This strategy takes some time to perfect, but the results are worth the time investment.
- Incentivize happy customers: If you need short video clips, images, or testimonials, offer satisfied customers incentives for such content. Doing so will spark interest among previous and current buyers.
- Visit third-party platforms: Check your LinkedIn and Google reviews for some inspiration. Afterwards, quote your favorite testimonials from customers to gain the trust of prospective ones.
Customer Marketing Challenges
Naturally, you will face challenges when you practice customer marketing. Here are some of the top challenges—and how to overcome them.
Challenge: Exhausting All Opportunities With an Existing Account
Customer marketing has various benefits, and is an ideal way to increase retention, build loyalty and boost revenues. However, if you do not play your cards right, your marketing efforts may come off as too aggressive. Overall, customer marketing is helpful, especially for B2B businesses. Once you get over the learning curve, you are on your way to success.
Challenge: Creating Industry-specific Content
Modern business buyers do not appreciate generic materials. If you want to stand out from a sea of competition, create top-notch content for your audience. Learning how to conduct a content competitive analysis helps you cut through all the digital noise and provide value for your clients.
Challenge: Experiencing Approval Roadblocks
No matter how much time you spend developing customer success stories, there is a possibility that their internal legal or PR team will not agree to share some information. This scenario is common among customer marketers. There are ways to work around this loophole, including anonymous case studies. Whatever challenges you face, a solid customer marketing plan helps you overcome them.
How to Create a Customer Marketing Plan
Now that you know the importance of customer marketing, it’s essential to learn how to build a custom strategy. Below are some crucial elements to success:
- Segment existing customers: Nowadays, nobody likes receiving generic content. If you want to make customers feel special, develop personalized materials for them.
- Set goals: As with any business endeavor, you should determine your targets for your customer marketing plan. Make sure they are SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
- Prioritize efforts with the greatest growth potential: There are many ways to prove your value to existing clients. However, it is best to concentrate on low-cost, low-effort and high-impact campaigns.
- Create account-based marketing (ABM) programs: ABM is a strategy that focuses resources on select target accounts. Since most of your revenues will likely come from a small group of accounts, it is logical to allocate most of your budget to them.
- Measure results: Once you start tracking your key performance indicators, you can create more effective campaigns in the future. Doing so improves your return on investment for every activity.
Enhance Your Manufacturing and Industrial Marketing Efforts Today
Sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of your existing customers while pursuing new ones. But your goal as a marketer is to consistently add value to your customers, deepen your relationships, find new problems to solve for them, and find other new buyers within your existing accounts.
Ultimately, turning buyers into loyal customers should be one of your long-term goals. If you do not have an experienced marketing team on your side, you can still take all the guesswork from your efforts with a little help from experts.
Pro tip: RH Blake’s 5 Key Steps to Developing a Digital Marketing Roadmap to take the guesswork out of your digital marketing.
Free Download: 5 Key Steps to Developing a Digital Marketing Roadmap
A Must Have Digital Marketing Guide for Manufacturers
Getting your article published in a trade journal is an accomplishment that speaks to knowledge, expertise, and professional success. But why stop there?
Getting your article published in a trade journal is an accomplishment that speaks to knowledge, expertise, and professional success. But why stop there?
If you want to make the most of your article and ensure maximum impact, you must go beyond the “one and done” approach. To ensure you hit all the marks, we’ve made this checklist of 53 ways to go beyond simple placement in a trade journal.
From taking advantage of social media and email marketing channels, creative tactics take your accomplishments further.
Social
- Social media is a great way to maximize your trade publication’s reach. That’s why you must use your company’s social media platforms to reach a broader audience.
- Your audience is more likely to interact with easily-digestible nuggets. Use your trade publication article and break it down into nuggets for social media. That way, more people read them because of increased accessibility.
- Hashtags and other social media campaigns are excellent ways to involve people with your trade and publication article. Run challenges based on your article’s theme and see your engagement rate intensify.
- Go a step further and engage your followers on LinkedIn. Transform the highlights of an article into a carousel post, making sure to capture its key points.
Industry Groups
- Get your article in front of the right people by posting it to relevant industry forums, LinkedIn groups, and other online communities. Spark conversations that get everyone talking.
- Showcase your professional expertise to colleagues and peers by sharing your trade publication article with relevant associations and groups in the industry. These professionals and associations provide a valuable platform for promoting your work.
- Keep your subscribers informed by delivering your article directly to their inboxes with an email marketing campaign.
- Highlight the key takeaways of your article when sending your company newsletter. Shortening your information encourages customers to continue reading your email until the end.
- Hyperlink your trade publication article in you’re the signature at the bottom of your email and in your company’s email signature.
Blog
- Transform your expert-level industry knowledge into a unique blog post on your company’s website. Share and showcase the insights from your trade publication article to expand both readerships.
- Further extend the reach of your trade publication article by repurposing it into a series of targeted blog posts. Each post explores different facets and perspectives of your article, helping you maximize engagement with readers.
Podcasts
- Take your industry insights and get creative by transforming them into engaging podcast content. Entertain, educate, and inform listeners with a captivating series of audio stories that spotlight the critical findings in your trade publication article.
- Even if you don’t create podcasts, offer your article as a helpful resource for podcasters. Your expertise could be just the thing they need. Plus, the promotion you get from influential podcasters attracts a wider audience.
Lead Generation and Nurture
- Engage your audience with an interactive and informative webinar. Use your trade publication article as a resource for this webinar and position yourself as an authority.
- Your company’s landing pages present an opportunity to showcase your article. Offer your article as a resource on these pages when people visit them.
- Transform your trade publication article into a PDF that your sales team can use as a lead magnet. Many business buyers want free resources, making this an excellent opportunity to showcase your expertise.
- More than lead generation, use your PDF article to nurture opportunities with your customers. Your PDF resource moves customers along the pipeline, pushing them closer to making a purchase.
Thought Leadership
- When making presentations, use your article as your basis to position your company as a subject matter expert. As a result, you become more credible as an information resource.
- Expand upon the information of your article through whitepapers. Use them to demonstrate your article’s relevance and provide valuable insights.
- Reach out to industry influencers with your article and invite them to join the conversation. Ask for their perspective, or to share it with their network.
- Transform your article into an eye-catching infographic to make it easier for readers to consume. Infographics make data in your article more accessible, encouraging more users to use it as a resource.
- Offer your users insights into the author’s mind through a Q&A session with them. After that, publish the Q&A in various formats across your social media channels.
- Create a slide deck summarizing key points from the article and share it on SlideShare. Industry professionals use SlideShare as a resource for their presentations. Publishing your slide deck in SlideShare exposes your article and company as a trustworthy industry expert.
- Elevate your audience’s experience by turning the article into an interactive quiz or other engaging tool. Invite them to test their knowledge and discover more about your topic.
- Gather insights from your published articles and compile them into a comprehensive special report or white paper to provide in-depth case studies.
Industry Events
- Make sure your work reaches a wider audience by taking advantage of speaking engagements or industry events. Offer your article as an expert resource.
- Make the most of your next trade show and use your article as a valuable handout for attendees. Showcase it to increase brand awareness and foster meaningful conversations with potential customers.
Internal Use
- Give your team the tools to build successful networks with your article. Your article equips them with invaluable resources that position them as experts and helps to extend your reach.
- Keep internal stakeholders informed of industry trends and your company’s direction by featuring key takeaways from your article in your internal newsletter.
- Equip your interns and co-op students with the tools they need to become champions of your brand by providing them access to resources, such as your article.
- Equip your customer success team with an article to provide a more impactful and advantageous experience when interacting with customers.
- Leverage your article as a powerful resource to inform and improve product-development strategies within your organization.
- As part of your onboarding program for new employees, introduce them to the expectations and responsibilities within their role with information from your article. It ensures everyone is on the same page from day one.
Sales Enablement
- Turn your article into an invaluable asset for improving sales and business development success. Tap its potential to give a boost to every step in the process.
- Leverage your article in internal sales training and development programs to equip employees with the skills needed for successful outcomes.
- Help your sales team close more deals by providing them with your article packed with helpful information.
- Transform your article into an informative and visually appealing poster that empowers sales team presentations.
Training
- Create an online training course on LinkedIn or another platform using the content of your article to help build knowledge.
- Guide your customers through a unique learning experience by transforming your article into a learning pathway.
- Provide your article as an invaluable resource for training and equipping support and service teams to be successful.
- Give your article to the executive team as an invaluable resource for their training. Your article is a resource for professional development and keeping tabs on industry trends.
- Upload the article to your intranet as a training resource.
- Use your article to inform and shape the strategic planning process of your company.
Video
- Reach a bigger audience with your article by creating an engaging video summary and sharing it on social media.
- Share an exclusive video interview with the author of your article on social media. Give viewers a behind-the-scenes look into their creative process. Get up close and personal.
- Capture viewers’ attention with a series of short, engaging videos that provide insights into the critical points of your article. Customize each video to highlight important details and help you get your message across.
Partners
- Get your industry partners involved. Share your article with them and solicit their feedback.
- Showcase your article during the company’s upcoming earnings call and investor update to emphasize its value.
Publicity
- Draft a press release to share news of your article’s publication and get people excited about reading it.
- Share your article as a valuable resource with journalists or writers within the industry.
- Increase the reach of your article by submitting it to leading industry-specific blogs and online publications.
- Showcase your article in your company’s annual report to emphasize its significance and to reach a wider audience.
- Reach key business audiences by submitting your article to prominent publications and media outlets.
Leverage Your Articles with RH Blake
We hope these 53 ways to leverage your trade publication article help you develop ideas to use your content. With some creativity and elbow grease, that one article transforms into many blog posts, social media updates, infographics, and resources.
If you’re looking for more help with digital marketing best practices and how to get the most out of your content strategy, be sure to read the RH Blake guide to developing a digital marketing roadmap.
Free Download: 5 Key Steps to Developing a Digital Marketing Roadmap
A Must Have Digital Marketing Guide for Manufacturers
Industrial Marketer’s Guide to Creating an Effective Marketing Program
147 pages of actionable ideas to help you create a winning marketing strategy and program
Industrial Marketer’s Guide to Creating an Effective Marketing Program
147 pages of actionable ideas to help you create a winning marketing strategy and program
Related Clients
