Ep. #3, Tactics for Customer-Focused Marketing

Malia Powers: Welcome to The Pitch Room. I am Malia Powers with Heavybit. On this show, we regularly talk about all things PR, including current events, crisis comms, PR tools and tips, reputation management. All with a special focus on developer communications.

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Hi all, thanks for joining this episode of The Pitch Room. Today we're going to be discussing customer marketing and tips on how to do it well. I'm excited to have Ashley Waxman here from Runscope.

Ashley Waxman: Hi everyone, I'm Ashley Waxman and I am communications lead at Runscope. Previously I built and managed the customer marketing program at Mashery. I also have my master's in mass communication studies from Boston University. So I have a lot of tech and marketing in my background.

And I'm really excited to talk about how to take that goodness that we all love from customers and turn it into really actionable, valuable content.

Malia: Great. We're excited to have you here today.

Defining Customer Marketing

I'll go ahead and kick it off with one definition of customer marketing. I think we can all agree that this definition is evolving given the rise of digital. But one way I like to think about customer marketing is to help increase the profitability of a client.

I think the first thing many people think when they hear the word marketing is acquiring new clients and really focusing on what a business has to offer and really creating appeal. And this is associated with common marketing strategies on one range of products.

I think one example of this is, say you buy something like a soccer ball. When a retailer sells you a soccer ball, they're probably gonna try to entice you to buy cleats and socks, maybe one of those cool water coolers. At this time, it's less common for a retailer to cross-market and attempt to sell something unrelated, like, I don't know, candles.

With customer marketing, however, the focus is really shifted to existing customers and his or her future desires. And once you are able to tap into these desires, profits for the provider can be made out of marketing to these future desires. And so when a business is able to really increase profit by increasing customer relationships, the business builds a competitive edge.

Ashley, I don't know, your thoughts on this definition of customer marketing?

Ashley: Yeah, I think that that definition has held true for a really long time. I think that with the advent of the web and the cloud and having the ability to put your brand anywhere and have people actually be in an open forum where they can ask for references, like you've got Yelp and things like that, that a lot of companies have evolved this definition of customer marketing to also including marketing your customers as a part of your marketing campaigns and your marketing tactics.

So, I mean, companies like Salesforce, Marketo, a lot of other companies have designated people in the role of customer marketing that are dedicated to gathering customer stories and sharing them in an appropriate way to help get the word out about what they're offering.

So it's kind of using your existing customer stories to expand your brand and get new customers as well, or increase the value of your current customers. Right, right.

Approaching Customers the Right Way

Malia: I think it's important to talk about how you approach the customers and how you really sell why they should be engaging with your company and the value that they're gonna be receiving at it. What approach do you use at Runscope?

Ashley: Yeah, so obviously, you always want lots of customer stories. You see people talking about your brand and you want to sort of grab that and hang on to it. But not everybody's gonna say yes, and you really have to approach it the right way.

So for me, it's all about framing it in a way that is the most valuable to them. Your customers doing success stories or blog posts or quotes for a press release or what have you, those things to you matter a lot and to them, they may not realize that it's providing value also to their own brand, but it's not a part of their day-to-day job. So it's of less importance.

So you really need to, A, frame it in a way that's valuable to them, show how the synergy is going to impact the market and impact them as well, give them that social goodness and raise awareness for what they're doing.

Also, you want to make it as little barrier to entry as possible for them. So really making sure that they understand that you are doing all the heavy lifting, give them very clear timelines and really organize what you want from them so that they know what they're getting into.

Malia: Yeah, creating value is really important. I think I read somewhere in Forbes that customer retention is just so important and the responsibility that you have when you're doing public-facing communications with your customer is so important because it costs ten times more to gain a new customer than it is to keep the ones you have. Which is a very interesting stat.

Another tip I had as far as customer marketing is going back to creating customer value programs. Something that I think airlines do very well. Southwest does it with their frequent flyer miles, as well as all the other airlines. And one way to do customer marketing is to exceed expectations on certain aspects.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. Things like that. And also if you're looking at both definitions of customer marketing, you're looking at trying to get customers to buy more or increase their value, but also leveraging them in your own marketing, both of those require a lot of coordination of efforts.

If you are an airline and you're trying to get your customer to upgrade or, you know, add this, "Pay for this and it'll add a lot of value to you," etc. That requires a lot of coordination on the back end as far as who has already been talking to the customer, what have we already asked them to do, what have they said no to, what have they said yes to, because bombarding a customer when they don't want to be spoken to anymore by you, when they want to be left alone, is a really bad tactic in customer relationship management.

So one thing I always say is that above everything, your customer is your customer, and you need to treat that relationship with a lot of care and respect.

So when you're looking at the other side as far as how to get the most value from customer stories when you're using them in marketing, you really want to maximize the time that you have with them because their time is really valuable. If you set up a call with a customer to do a content discovery call, to discuss their story, talk about how you're gonna use their story, really make sure that you are asking all the questions you need and that you're getting all the information you need.

So don't just look at it as, okay, I really want to do a success story with this customer or I really want to do a blog post with this customer. Look at how you can leverage that content in other ways or how this can be a door that opens for more opportunities in the future.

So for instance, if you want to do, say, a webinar with a customer, which is a great tactic for bringing new leads in. If you wanted to do a webinar, when you're talking to the customer, talk about other uses for this webinar.

If they're approving the content, then you can take this webinar, the content from it, once you post it on your website, you can take that content, spin it a little bit, and put it on your blog. You can spin it again and make it into a success story. There's a lot of things you can do. You can promote it on social.

And if that customer was that willing to do a webinar, perhaps in the future when you have an analyst or somebody from the media asking for a customer quote, you can call on that customer. It's all about, again, coordinating your efforts, maximizing value and maintaining the relationship.

Malia: Yeah, internal teams really do need to be coordinated. It's important to get marketing, sales, and PR in the room prior to a webinar to discuss individual goals and how you can, like you said, make the most of the customer's time and receive the most value for both your organization and their organization.

On the other side of the customer marketing front, on increasing profit for your current customers, it's also really important that internal teams be coordinated. For example, a software company that's selling an HR or a marketing or an events platform, for customer marketing to be most effective, there needs to be a very high degree of cooperation that encourages workers to view a business as a whole rather than a segment.

So we have tips on how to do customer marketing well and kind of two different definitions of what customer marketing is.

Customer Marketing for Developers

I'd love to discuss a little bit about customer marketing specifically for developers.

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously a lot of us are marketing and creating products that are for developers specifically. And, I mean, everybody wants to know who else is using a product. They don't want to be necessarily the first one.

So there are two things when it comes to developers that I see as a really good opportunity for your customer marketing tactics.

Developers want to see social proof. They want to see who else is using this out there, like what brands, what job titles maybe, if they're a QA person and you have nobody that's doing QA on your website and your customer stories, then they might not want to select your product because they don't think that it applies to them, when in fact maybe it does.

So social proof, who's doing this, as well as how are they using it. A lot of times they're looking for guidance or use cases. So you want to make sure that your customer stories are organized in a way that they're really centered around specific uses of your product.

At Runscope, we do API monitoring and testing, and we have customers who use API monitoring for their partners' APIs for third-party integrations to make sure that they're meeting their SLAs. We also have customers using them internally for a microservices architecture, monitoring their microservices.

So making sure that those stories are very clearly delineated and that you're using those keywords up front makes it very easy for developers to see, oh, so-and-so is using this to do this and this is how they're getting value. That's exactly what I need. So I think those are the keys.

Also when it comes to just marketing to developers in general, particularly customer stories. Customer stories are really great to use in marketing overall, but when it comes to developers, really know where your audience is living.

Obviously, you want these things on your website in a really easy-to-access way, but also including customer stories in blog posts, because developers do read a lot of blog posts. Getting really more technical with customer stories is a really good way to market to them, as well as being on social media, particularly Twitter. I mean, that's a huge one. So if you're looking to promote customer stories or get customers or prospective customers involved, put it out there and you'll get more response.

Malia: Yeah, I think another huge part of customer marketing for developers is the idea of network effect, where the value of your product is increased by the amount of users. Some of our members here at Heavybit, Stripe and Rainforest and I know Meteor, all have really great network effect programs in place. Meteor hosts the largest meetup globally to date, Rainforest and its QA and engineers all are working together on a common solution.

There's this real value in community and, like you said, people want to be seeing what others are talking about and a platform for engagement is also extremely important for developers to be able to share tips and tricks and engage in real time on specific needs, which also goes to this idea of providing convenience for your customer, which is an important aspect of customer marketing.

Take an outside view and think about the convenience for your customers first. I think when it comes to customer service, this is a good example, having 24 hours help. Think about when your customers are gonna be using your platform, when they're gonna be needing help. It's most likely may not be in the eight to five hours. So this idea of a 24-hour service or helpline is also great for customer marketing and customer engagement.

Ashley: Absolutely. I mean, I think that anyone who engages with customers at any time is essentially customer service. Because they are your paying customers, you really need to treat them with that sort of care.

You would never want something that, you know, if the product is working great, but something else for some reason caused them not to be customers anymore or caused them to have a bad experience, that would not be a good thing. So really maintaining that relationship and getting clear paths to communication, absolutely.

Where Customer Stories Go

Malia: So something that I'm wondering is, what are the different ways you can market these customer stories?

Ashley: Yeah, certainly. It's wonderful to have customer stories that are ready to be published and be made to the public. But if you don't know what the different avenues are and the different channels, then it can be challenging.

So customer stories are pretty much a gold mine for any marketing tactic that you have.

And I really think of customer marketing as sort of a branch of integrated marketing because it really applies to every single aspect of the whole marketing function.

You can use customer stories in demand gen campaigns, use in digital, sprinkle quotes throughout a website. References for sales calls are always good. White papers, success stories, blog posts, PR, analysts, you do webinars, you can do video, there's a whole number of things that you can do.

I think that when you're starting out, a really good way to start as a small company is to get some of those power user customers who are willing to talk. Write success stories about those and put those on your website.

And then you can start using those to promote on social media, use them in your Twitter ads, use them in promoted posts on Facebook, tell analysts and press that you have these stories.

And also then you can sort of continue that out and start asking customers to write guest blog post, or you can do a really quick interview with a customer and write it up as a Q&A and publish sort of a Q&A series with customers on your blog. That's a great way that also speaks to that social proof as well as how are you using this sort of thing, and it comes directly from the customer.

Once those things are in place and you're sort of growing as a company and you see you can apply more resources to this process, a great thing to do is use your blog as sort of a stepping stone for bigger projects.

So for instance, if you are writing about customer stories on your blog that are of a particular theme, say you have a bunch of healthcare customers and you want to write about healthcare, incorporate those into your blog posts, have a mini campaign about it, and then later on you can sort of stitch those blog posts together and make a really compelling white paper that has social proof, that has themes and that's already been verified on your blog.

So that's sort of the evolution for me of how you might want to go about introducing a customer marketing campaign into a growing company. And then obviously further down the line, those resources are there for you to integrate into any demand generation campaign, to do any lead generation, anything like that, as well as forward on to analysts and press to show them that people are actually using you and they like you and so forth.

Tough Questions and Hard Numbers

Malia: Playing a little bit devil's advocate here. Working with the press very closely, they often come to me and say, "Well, of course you're gonna give me a positive customer quote or you wouldn't publish it." "Or of course you're gonna put me on the line."

So sometimes I think there's a fine line of figuring out what value people are seeing out of just a customer quote when they know it's gonna be positive. And media is coming to me as of recently to really discuss what challenges were faced in this implementation and how did you overcome it, or what were your oopses, or what went wrong?

Do you have any strategies on how you get your customers to say yes to maybe a little bit more sensitive topics?

Ashley: Yeah, I think that a lot of customers are okay with doing a lot of different things and it's really about, A, maintaining those customer relationships, and then, B, understanding what each customer is comfortable with.

I've had opportunities or challenges in the past where we've had a significant brand, power user that we would love to have told their story publicly, but they were very against it. However, they were super willing to speak to an analyst under NDA.

So finding those opportunities to promote a customer story, even though you're not promoting it completely publicly, can still impact your business and add value to the customer.

As far as speaking to the press about more in depth than just a very positive quote, I think that from the customer relationship side has to do with knowing, and this ties back to sort of working across disciplines and having coordination among teams, like talk to your customer support team and find out which customers really love, like, they're already big advocates for you, even though they've had struggles.

Because there are two different kinds, right? There are customers who are having a lot of struggles with your product and maybe just are not happy with you. And then there are the ones who just are like, "Hey, I love you guys so much. You're so great. You've done X, Y, and Z for me. I'm really struggling with this, can you help me out a little bit?"

Those are the customers that you would want to send to the press because if they have had trouble with you before, they're clearly having positive outcomes. So it's really about working with your customer support team, your engineering team, customer service, and just making sure that you understand who's who. And also, obviously you want to ask first and depending on the response you get, that might inform whether you still want to use that customer in the press anyway.

Malia: Makes sense. And a lot of that is also your relationship with the press and how much they trust you to be qualified in customer stories prior to giving to them.

Something that's also really important with the press is using statistics and numbers, and for developer tools and services in particular, sometimes this is very tricky. For example, microservices. Right now I'm looking to find numbers that we can use on traction in the landscape and the future of the landscape. Numbers like X percent of all data on the web is now pushed through microservices.

So how important is using kind of data within your customer stories? Have you found that it's made a significant impact?

Ashley: Yes, absolutely. I would say that data is a huge challenge in customer marketing. One thing about data and customer stories is, A, it's undeniable proof that something's working.

B, not only is that useful for a developer audience, but when you are looking farther down the line at sales enablement and giving your sales team tools that they can use in the field, that is gold to them. Like, having numerical data that shows success is absolutely important.

But to go back to it, a lot of customers maybe aren't able to speak to certain data. So, A, you want to find ways around that by asking them if you can use percentages instead of actual numbers, asking if you can use proportions, looking at every possible angle that you can take and trying to find a sweet spot that they'll agree to is one way.

Another way is that there are customers who are willing to share data but they just don't have time to look it up or they don't care enough to look it up because it's working for them and that's all they need. So if you on your back end have the opportunity or the ability to do that for them and present it in a way that doesn't look like you've just been snooping around their account,

just be like, "Hey, we've seen that you guys have completely grown by X amount in the past month. I was wondering if you'd be willing to let us share that." They'll probably say yes because that looks really good for them too.

So sometimes you have to do a little more work to get those numbers, but it is definitely worth it.

Malia: Great. And I think, yeah, just again going back to value and the value of the numbers and how it shows the impact that your company's doing and how you're driving the industry forward when you have numbers to proof point it. It's just kind of how we're wired to think numbers.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely.

Malia: Well, great. Thanks so much for joining us today, Ashley. We've loved having you on the show and would love for you to come back in the future.

Ashley: I would love to be back. Thank you guys so much. This has been great.

Malia: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Pitch Room, brought to you by Heavybit. Heavybit is a nine-month program and community for developer-facing startups. For more information, visit heavybit.com.