As we kick off our marketing plans for the new year, entering what to me feels a bit like an unknown abyss, it’s hard to make any sort of predictions. Given all that we learned in 2020, it’s hard to say what we can expect in terms of changing buyer behavior, trade shows happening virtually or in-person (or both), or even how organic traffic will be impacted in the coming year with all the new campaigns we’ve run. 2020 threw us (by us, I mean “the collective marketing leaders of the world,” us) a freaking curveball that we’re all still feeling a bit crippled by.
This isn’t yet another end-of-year prediction piece, but rather an opinion piece. Here’s my opinion on what we should plan for as we face some of the biggest shifts in marketing strategy our industry has ever seen, specifically related to customer advocacy. Before I forget, my colleague Alejandra Melara recently covered the first topic of this series, on account-based marketing, that’s well worth a read.
No doubt, the biggest shift we have seen, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, is in buyer behavior. The obvious direct-to-consumer industries were forced to reevaluate customer experience when it comes to convenience and safety. Other industries completely shifted their model, some pivoting so quickly that they went to market with completely new minimum viable products, just to stay relevant.
If your business has weathered this storm and you have the bandwidth and resources to invest in customer marketing and advocacy, I urge you to make it a Q1 priority to conduct buyer persona interviews.
You might be thinking, “We have all our personas built out.” But have you iterated on those personas since the pandemic? Do you know what (new) problems your clients are facing, and how your products and services are helping them?
It’s paramount that your frontline marketer—the marketer who owns the relationship with your top champions and advocates—(re)establish an understanding of your customer profile. This goes deeper than maintaining a healthy relationship with your advocates that’s rooted in empathy or running a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, but rather serves as internal enablement, coaching everyone from account managers to the C-suite on the current landscape of your clientele.
Here are a few questions (and then few more questions) I suggest asking, while you conduct post-pandemic persona interviews:
For so many years, my annual marketing plan for lead generation has always been anchored on field marketing, events, and tradeshows. These events were hugely influential in how we hit our number.
When building our marketing plan for the coming year, this is still the biggest gray area for us, and where I’m still holding onto hope that we get to gather in large conference halls and wait in line to get into sponsored parties. However, I know that no matter where 2021 leads us, we need to prepare for an always-digital or always-both (digital and in-person) hybrid event model.
For customer advocacy, there are a couple of primary event models that come into play: customer advisory board (CAB) meetings and user groups.
Go fully digital with your CAB meetings in 2021, and beyond. The worst thing you can do is cancel the CAB meetings or postpone them until a later, unknown date, with the hope to meet in person someday soon.
Your advisory board is your elite group of customers who shape your messaging, go-to-market strategy, and product roadmap. In light of this pandemic, you need their feedback to carry on, now more than ever. Going always-digital for CAB meetings is, quite honestly, the absolute best way to fit into everyone’s busy schedule, pandemic or not.
Here are a few tips to make the most out of your CAB meetings:
Go hybrid for your regional user groups. It’s my opinion that marketing events will slowly be reintroduced back to our way of working, and I’m hopeful this will start at the small, local level. Connecting with your regional user groups will be a great way to start small.
That said, if you’re personally hosting the regional events (or perhaps you have a network of local champions running them for you), equip the event organizers with A/V equipment to livestream the event.
Here are some ideas for making the most out of a hybrid user group:
I think it’s fair to say that there has definitely been a shift in consumer expectation toward instant gratification. In the future, I’m sure we’ll coin this term as the “Amazon Prime'' effect, or something like that. Thank you, Bezos.
Adrian Swinscoe’s Forbes article summarized consumer needs for instant gratification like so: “In e-commerce ... Will packages arrive when promised? Can they receive text updates on the progress of shipments? Were items they purchased actually out of stock?”
The fun comes in when marketing executives start to collaborate with product and client services teams to think through how they can provide that “instant gratification” in their customer journey. What does this look like for B2B companies, services organizations, healthcare, manufacturing, and others?
Personally, I would love to see more customer marketing campaigns where we play with customer data. I don’t want to wait for our account manager to give me a QBR presentation to see how we’re trending or how well our team is using your product. I want that data now, and I want it presented to me in a creative, compelling, personal way.
Here are two examples to paint this picture for you:
Personalization is not just a function of how advanced your MarTech tools and technology are, but rather a display of how you care deeply about your customers. You’re on a good track toward instant gratification as you lean into blending customer empathy with digital personalization.
So, that’s it for me. Consumer expectations and buying behaviors have certainly changed, and we marketers are still left scrambling for creative ways to ramp up lead generation, maintain loyalty, and build relationships in a remote-digital landscape. I’m hoping some ideas I have shared here will be actionable for you in the year to come.