Our Customer Marketing Industry and Salary Reports will be launching at the end of this year, but we wanted to give you a sample of the kind of data you can expect from theses reports. In this article, we’ll be going through the responsibilities and metrics of customer marketing teams in 2023/24.
Psst…. Our survey for this year’s reports is out now. If you haven't already, we'd love for you to take the survey - the more responses we get, the better the reports we share with you and the rest of the community will be!
Eve Chatfield
Customer marketing responsibilities
Customer marketing core responsibilities remained much the same this year, with program management (23.3%) and customer feedback collection (26.7%) making up similar percentages of the answers.
Customer conferences & events made up a slightly larger percentage, rising from 11.2% to 18%. The further many regions move away from pandemic-era lockdowns, the more opportunities companies are finding to organize events to connect with customers.
The increase in these kinds of events shows an increased awareness of the importance of connecting with customers face-to-face.
N.B. Responsibilities covered in the ‘Other’ section include voice of the customer, product adoption, managing investor relationships, managing client programs connected to advocacy, and lifecycle marketing.
What are the biggest value drivers for your business?
Using these categories, we also asked which of these responsibilities were the biggest value drivers for the business. Interestingly, customer feedback collection and cross-selling/upselling made up the largest percentages at 29% and 21.8% respectively.
When compared to the 8.7% that cross-selling and upselling made up in the previous question, there seems to be a disparity between the responsibilities that make up the largest percentage of the role, and the ones that are the biggest value drivers for business. This may be due to a lack of resources (which was one of the biggest pain points for customer marketers last year) or may be placed under other responsibilities like program management.
Contact with customers
Looking at the change in the current business ecosystem when it comes to increased costs, and the slight drop in the percentage of advocates we noted in the last section, we wanted to see if contact with customers has changed in the last year. As with last year, the most common answers were 2-3 times a week (36.2%) and a handful of times a month (20.3%).
The number of responders who contact their customers at least once a week (be it every day, multiple times, or just once) increased to 65.2%, over a 10% increase from last year.
Another notable achievement for this year is that none of our participants said they never talk to customers compared to the 3.7% of answers last year. Given how vital customer insights are to the success of customer marketing, this is really nice to see. It’s good to see that a majority of customer marketers maintain this connection with their customers. Hopefully, we’ll see the number of participants who never speak to their customers remain zero in the future.
During economic downturns - as many are experiencing this year - maintaining these customer connections needs to be even more of a priority. With the economy being what it is, it’s your existing customers that will maintain and stabilize your bottom line. Considering this was asked Ari Hoffman for his tips on how to maintain conversations with customers without risking burnout. He had this to say:
“ABV - Always Bring Value — Ensure that every communication with your customers offers value and respects their time to avoid fatigue. Remember, your customer probably has 3-7 other vendors that they are dealing with at any given time.
Many people are vying for their attention with a limited scope of bandwidth, all while still delivering on their day job, so make sure you’re communications are always geared toward helping them grow. Share useful information, relevant news, or content that aligns with their interests and needs. Avoid purely promotional or sales-oriented messages.
Instead, focus on educating, entertaining, or solving problems for your customers. That doesn’t mean you can’t send the occasional ‘surprise and delight’ email that helps keep the human connection alive. It just means focusing on delivering value for them to keep the channels open and engaged.”
Metrics
Team metrics
Another change we saw was when we asked our participants, “What metrics does your team use to measure your efforts?”. Last year the largest percentage, 34.6%, said they measured their efforts by acts of advocacy.
This refers to specific acts advocates are asked to participate in. However, this year the metrics used were much more divided with the number of case studies taking the top spot at 17.5%. This was closely followed by acts of advocacy (16.6%) and the number of testimonials at 14.1%.
At slightly smaller percentages we also had renewal rate and Net Promoter Score at 10.7% each.
N.B. Answers in the ‘Other’ section included product adoption, event attendance, number of reviews, and revenue metrics.
This year, the number of customer marketers that don’t use any metrics dropped from 7.7% to 2.1%.
Last year, Kevin Lau, Senior Director of Global Customer Engagement, F5 stated that because customer marketing roles are about relationship-building first, the impact is usually trickier to measure:
“There’s a little bit of playing catch-up. Until the point where we have the tools, the resources, the budget to make it easier for us to do that holistically, it’s going to take some time.”
Noting the drop from last year, it’s good to see that we’re already seeing the start of this catch-up - though there’s yet to be any formalized set of metrics used by most customer marketers.
Metrics for stakeholders
As with last year, we also asked which metrics would be most useful, not necessarily for measuring performance, but ones stakeholders find most valuable.
Again we saw a notable change from last year, with the most common answer changing from churn rate and renewal rate to the number of case studies (17.20%). This is a big increase from the 11.1% last year.
This year the top metric for both teams and stakeholders is the same. Case studies are an interesting metric, as it’s one of the metrics that involves active participation from customers - case studies not only measure success but have a very practical application within the work a customer marketer does (when compared to other metrics like customer satisfaction, which is impacted by a variety of factors).
Customer marketing tools
When considering customer marketing tools, answers remained much the same from last year. We saw customer relationship management (31.4%) and messaging (27.7%) remain the top choices.
As additions this year, we saw advocacy management tools place third (13.4%), with analytics and measurements close behind (12.8%). The placement of these tools is pretty self-explanatory, with how these roles rely on and actively develop customer relationships. Messaging is a very common tool for those in advocacy and marketing - and the appearance of advocacy management tools is on trend with the uptick in advocacy programs we’ve seen this year.
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