In our recently published eBook, The Rise of the Customer Marketer, we gave you a glimpse into the growing opportunities available for customer marketers in a world that is becoming increasingly customer-centric. Hot on its heels, we bring you results from the newly released Customer Marketing Benchmark Study Report by Demand Metric.
Sponsored by Influitive, this study – the first of its kind – dives into the resources and investments companies are making in customer marketing, as well as explores the activities, measurement and effectiveness of customer marketing activities. Armed with these insights, marketers can more confidently build the right mix of activities to maximize return on their own advocate marketing programs.
“The value of this benchmark study is that it identifies some best practices that will help organizations get a real revenue impact from their Customer Marketing efforts,” says Demand Metric Chief Analyst Jerry Rackley.
Read on for the highlights, and then download the complete study for further details.
The growing importance of customer marketing
According to the report, 85 percent of leaders who participated in the study rate customer marketing as somewhat or very important as a strategy for generating revenue.
Even more encouraging for customer marketers, the study also shows that customer marketing is expected to grow in importance over the next year for 84 percent of participating organizations, and more than two thirds of these businesses plan to dedicate human and financial resources to implement that strategy.
The following figure shows us just how significant customer marketing is projected to become, with 55% of respondents indicating that it will be far more important in the coming year.
“We know from this study that most organizations feel that Customer Marketing is an important strategy for achieving revenue goals,” Jerry says. “However, just under half are satisfied or very satisfied with the results of their current efforts.”
Which customer marketing activities generate the most revenue?
With a firm idea of the status of customer marketing, let’s take a look at what the study has to say about the effect of specific activities on revenue.
Leaders participating in the study noted a variety of customer activities being conducted by their customer marketing staff, including customer and user group events, customer reference programs, online communities, and customer advocacy programs.
However, three activities were shown to generate more revenue than the others: customer satisfaction programs, customer referral programs and renewal campaigns.
The study shows that those companies reporting a greater revenue impact of customer marketing are emphasizing these three activities more than those reporting no or low revenue impact. And, surprisingly, they are among the least used activities in many companies!
For maximum impact, be sure to include customer satisfaction, customer referral and renewal programs into your advocate marketing program mix.
Customer marketing, revenue and customer satisfaction
On the revenue and customer satisfaction fronts, the study reveals that companies with successful, revenue-generating customer marketing programs report higher levels of customer satisfaction than their less successful counterparts.
And, since satisfied customers are a primary source for identifying potential advocates, this is an important revelation.
Specifically, those organizations with customer marketing efforts that yield moderate to significant revenue impact are almost twice as likely to report customer satisfaction at the highest level.
Conversely, those organizations with customer marketing efforts that produce no or just minor revenue impact are more than twice as likely to report customer satisfaction as neutral or worse.
Customer marketing metrics, staffing, budget and more
Get a more complete picture of how you can use customer marketing to step up your advocate marketing efforts by downloading your copy of the Customer Marketing Benchmark Study Report today.
“There is plenty of room for improvement, and the study provides compelling reasons for investing in making customer marketing perform better,” Jerry explains.
In addition to details around the topics mentioned in this post, you’ll find answers to questions such as:
- How satisfied are today’s organizations with their customer marketing efforts?
- Which metrics are most related to moderate or significant customer marketing revenue?
- Which people skills are most important for staffing a successful customer marketing team?
- Which role does technology play in the success of customer marketing?
