We’re over halfway through the year, and the 2024 version of our iconic State of Customer Marketing Report is on its way. We wanted to reflect on the stats discovered last year, and how this year shapes up. 

This data was drawn from our State of Customer Marketing Report 2023. In this article we’ll go through: 

• Customer marketing aspirations
• The biggest rewards of customer marketing
• Some top customer marketing tips. 

Let's get going. 

Customer marketing aspirations

As of 2024, the customer marketing industry has continued to grow. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global customer experience management market size, which includes customer marketing, was valued at $10.11 billion in 2023 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.1% from 2024 to 2030. 

This is an industry that is growing at a positive rate, and customers marketing professionals are well aware of this. We asked our survey participants, “What are your career aspirations for the next year?”. 

Customer marketing and advocacy professionals seem very secure in their desires to progress within their current role - 60.9% stated they wanted to progress up the career ladder (a 22.4% increase from 2023!) And we also saw that another 20.3% said they were happy where they currently were.

This is the overall increase we hoped we’d see. Seeing such a big jump in those who want to remain in this industry and develop their career within it is a fantastic sight.

Customer marketing is not going anywhere anytime soon!

The biggest rewards of customer marketing

When it comes to customer marketing success, 2023 saw a variety of answers, most emphasizing the changes they’d experienced during the year that impacted their process and KPI success. 

When collecting data for this survey, we asked customer marketers what specific part of customer marketing they felt would reap the biggest rewards in the upcoming year. 2023, saw customer marketers focus on the desire to take advantage of customer lifecycle marketing and retention in general. 

Due to the financial crisis still impacting businesses, some customer marketers prioritized retention from day one:

“Lifecycle marketing targeted towards tangible business impact. Many companies are struggling financially, those working on programs directly tied to ARR and NRR metrics will reap the rewards.”

“Scaling Lifecycle Marketing, globally - building the post-sale journey to deliver experiences to deliver on customer outcomes, which will translate to achieving business outcomes.”

“Shifting our focus to ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes first will lead to endless advocacy opportunities. Instead of recruiting advocates and reviews and stories, we should be pouring more time and energy into helping CS make customers successful from day one.”

Ari Hoffman shared how customer marketing has changed for him and his team in the last year.

“There’s been a heightened focus on metrics that matter. We’re seeing more and more companies ditch the traditional activity-based metrics (tactical) and start to concentrate more on outcome-driven results. How many case studies you produce doesn’t matter as much as how those case studies are driving engagement, adoption, and sales. 

How fast you fulfil a reference request doesn’t matter as much as measuring the delta on the sales velocity between opportunities that close with a reference compared to those that close without (or the delta in ARR). And, how many advocates you have in your program doesn’t matter as much as the NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CES (Customer Effort Score) compared to the rest of your install base. 

Quantifying your customer marketing programs into business-based metrics has started to turn the value offering from a tactical necessity into a strategic growth opportunity.” 

Our other contributors spoke a little bit about the programs and functions they were most looking forward to implementing in the upcoming year:

“Call me crazy, but I’d say leveraging more video into our strategy — both in terms of how we communicate with customers, and how customers engage within our community! Whether live or on-demand, video is an engaging way to share more, tell more, fit into busy schedules, and reach more people in a fraction of the time. Beyond media, I am looking forward to working with our data and operations teams to further streamline and scale customer advocacy touchpoints, and bring those insights to a broader range of stakeholders internally.” -  Emily Glover, Customer Marketing Lead at Vimeo

“I’m excited to work closer with our product teams on implementing more concrete adoption goals and tracking processes. This is going to ensure we’re building strategic customer marketing programs with those goals in mind and showing key performance indicators beyond the typical channel engagement metrics.”  - Cetiera Carmona, Senior. Manager, Customer Growth at BigCommerce

“Looking ahead, we’re enthusiastic about integrating more technology-driven personalization and AI insights into our ABM strategies. By tailoring our interactions based on customer preferences and cultural nuances, we aim to create even more impactful engagement. Additionally, we’re focusing on internal enablement initiatives to empower our teams in identifying potential advocates, showcasing their achievements, and letting their successes shine brightly on the global stage.” - Florian Engel, Director, Customer Marketing at Aiven

Customer marketing will always continue to grow and develop based on company needs, customer preferences, and the market ecosystem. With this in mind, our 2023 survey also asked what our contributors were most excited to implement in the upcoming year:

“Like many in the tech space, customer marketing teams have been faced with tightened belts (and budgets). The last year has compelled me to focus my work on areas of advocacy that will truly make an impact — recognizing that I can’t do it all under current resourcing and being more strategic about what we put in motion. It also encouraged our team to re-evaluate what we mean by the word “impact” in terms of quantifiable outcomes, and iterate as needed.” - Emily Gover, Customer Marketing Lead at Vimeo

“Over the past year, customer marketing has evolved significantly. We’ve embraced a more personalized and tailored approach, employing the power of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to connect on a one-to-one level with our customers. This shift has allowed us to better understand their unique needs, preferences, and cultural nuances, fostering deeper relationships and driving greater advocacy.” - Florian Engel, Director, Customer Marketing at Aiven

“For me, customer marketing has changed primarily in the way the function is seen. It seems that so many more companies are investing in customer marketing and seeing the value in it. There’s still a lot of work to be done but it’s so encouraging seeing the growth in the industry and all of the amazing things CM teams across the world are doing to support their customers.” - Cetiera Carmona, Senior. Manager, Customer Growth at BigCommerce

Over this past year, we’ve observed some trends emerging within customer marketing when it comes to the big hitters. These are the ones that drastically change the way customer marketing responsibilities are run or change how much influence customer marketers have on overall company revenue.

So far, we’ve seen: 

• Continued focus on customer retention: This trend from 2023 has remained strong in 2024, with companies increasingly recognizing the value of retaining existing customers in uncertain economic times.
• Growth of AI in customer marketing: The use of AI for personalization, predictive analytics, and customer insights has expanded significantly in 2024.
• Emphasis on customer data privacy: With increasing regulations and consumer awareness, there's been a growing focus on balancing personalization with data privacy in 2024.
• Rise of community-led growth: Building and nurturing customer communities has become a key strategy for many B2B companies in 2024.
• Integration of customer marketing with other functions: There's been a trend towards better alignment between customer marketing, product teams, and customer success teams.

Looking for specifics? Check out our most recent report here. 

The no. 1 customer marketing tips: 

To round off the ending of this report, we asked for some advice from our participants. We asked, “What’s your number one customer marketing tip?”, and our participants delivered:

“Always keep the customer at the centre of all you do. They give your company purpose and are the key to success.”

“Promote Customer Marketing activities to Customer Success and Expansion to leadership every month to share the results of your marketing activities and show the impact and how it influences the top-line business objective of the company.”

“Listen to your customers and tell their story as best as you can. Create a community that your clients feel comfortable being a part of.”

“Data!! Data is the most important key to customer marketing. Find creative ways to get the most comprehensive and accurate customer data, such as having customers update their own data.”

“The most successful customer marketers possess people skills that can’t be taught. Hire people that have the people skills and then teach them how to do customer marketing.”

Cetiera Carmona also shared her tip on how to improve customer marketing functions:

“Look for opportunities to positively impact the business beyond your current scope, utilizing the customer marketing expertise you have. For example, if you run email programs, think about what other comms can be scaled via customer marketing. This will leave a lasting impact on cross-functional stakeholders and help expand your current reach.”

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