AMA: Morningstar Global Head of Demand Generation, Nicolette Konkol on Customer Marketing Strategy

Most answers to this question focus on the buying journey and tend to sum up the post-sale experience in one bullet point but there's definitely more to it than that. Indeed the customer experience starts with the buying experience where you come to understand the problems your potential client is trying to solve and the outcomes they'd like to achieve and continues through the handoff to customer success or account management. The post-sale stages of the customer lifecycle generally include: a. Activation, Onboarding, Adoption b. Renewal & Expansion c. Advocacy

I find the definition and scope of customer marketing vary widely from company to company. Still, the main work areas can be described as Onboarding/Adoption, Renewal & Expansion, and Customer Advocacy. Responsibilities can be boiled down to answering: how quickly can you validate that the customer’s decision to purchase was the right one? And then continue building on that foundation to create a raving fan base of customer advocates.

Depends on how you’ve defined the scope and priorities of the customer marketing organization but some to consider are: * Monthly active users or utilization rate * Engagement in onboarding/education programs * Percentage of customers that use “sticky features” * Number of customer advocates * referrals * Net Promoter Score * Retention rate * Avg. Customer Contract size * Account spend * Growth in customer communities * Influenced new deal/upsell/renewal Pipeline & Revenue from customer references, case studies, etc.

There’s plenty of tech out there to enable any number of strategies and subsequent tactics but the place I’d start is with customer data. Do you have the data you need to inform your customer marketing strategy? This can be as simple as the CRM & Marketing automation data or as advanced as a customer data platform that drives a personalization strategy. Reference program tech, investments in review sites like G2, Trust Radius, or Gartner Peer Reviews, Gifting platforms, PLG, and in-product coms like Pendo. Tech is only as good as the strategy it supports.