What Is Customer Marketing?

Written by Danie Zaika | August 2, 2016

In our eBook released last month, we covered the typical roles you'd find on a Customer Success Team and why they're important. In this post, we'll specifically discuss Customer Marketing and the role it plays post-sale.

Customer Marketing is responsible for communications to customers after the initial sale. The goals are to drive product adoption, generate customer advocacy, and encourage renewals, upsells, and cross-sells.

Responsibilities may include:

Announcing product updates via email, in-app messaging, and other channels (sometimes shared with product marketing);
Producing a regular cadence of customer-specific and industry- wide thought leadership;
Promoting brand awareness through existing customers;
Ensuring that customers are aware of adjacent products and services that the company offers;
Soliciting reviews on software advice sites (e.g. Capterra, G2Crowd); and
Generating testimonials, referrals, and case studies.

Customer marketing works cross-functionally with Marketing (demand generation), CSMs, and Product. Of all the customer success team roles, this is probably the most ambiguously defined. In many cases, this person may even report to Marketing (for more on this subject, read our blog post: Who Should Own Customer Marketing?).

Hear a bit more about Customer Success Operations from Sarah Bolt at InsightSquared:

“My role is about driving product adoption by amplifying customer education efforts, building advocacy with community engagement programs, and leveraging happy customers to influence new business.”

- Sarah Bolt, Customer Marketing Manager, InsightSquared

For more on Customer Success Teams:

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