Product Marketing 101: Templates, Strategies, and Examples

 

In this article, you’ll learn all the fundamental components of a product marketing plan based on tips from experts.

Included on this page, you’ll learn how to create and implement a product marketing plan with free downloadable templates, key elements of a product marketing strategy, and how product marketing aligns with your company’s growth strategy.

How to Create and Implement a Product Marketing Plan

To help kickstart your product marketing plan, download any of the following free, ready-to-use templates to help you plan, strategize on, and track your product marketing plans.

Product Marketing Plan Template

Once you’ve mapped out your product’s essentials, it’s time to create the go-to-market plan that guides how it will be promoted and sold. This launch plan covers everything from developing the pricing and messaging for the product to creating training materials for your sales staff. It keeps everyone on the same page and makes sure that your team is ready when the product is ready. The plan also spells out timetables, release schedules, resources, and tasks.

Marketing Mix

You can frame your product marketing plan, or marketing mix, with the Four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, a process developed by E. J. McCarthy in 1960. In 1981 Bernard Booms and Mary Bitner added three more components: process, people, and physical evidence. Read the Definitive Guide to Strategic Marketing Planning to learn more about the Four Ps here. These are some of the key elements you’ll need to start framing your marketing plan:

Product: While you will spell out the unique designs, features, services, and other elements that describe your product, your marketing plan covers more than the details. It’s a positioning statement that defines what makes your product different.

Price: When you set your pricing, you need to consider several factors. First, you know how much it costs to make your product. Then, you need to know how much value customers will assign your product. Consider marketplace conditions: Is your product in high demand? Are there a lot of competitors who will respond with pricing strategies of their own? What kinds of discounts, sales, payment periods, or other terms can you include with your pricing? The bottom line is that your product is only worth what your customers are willing to pay, so make sure you understand your product’s value in the marketplace.

Place: Place can mean the brick-and-mortar store where customers find your product, but it also extends to include all the distribution channels you use to get your product to your customer. (Software startups, for example, typically sell online.) Delivery methods vary widely depending on the product, but the goal is getting your product into the marketplace.

Promotion: This may seem like the most natural part of product marketing. Promotion includes all the channels and methods you will use to reach customers about the value of your product. Tactics include advertising, sales, events, email marketing, content marketing, social media, and more. Every aspect of your promotion is centered on your product messaging.

Process: Think of process as the pipeline for your product. This is especially important if you deliver a service. For a startup, the first product launch has several benefits. First, you get your product into the marketplace. Then, you also learn how to improve your process in subsequent product development. For any company, the process always reveals your strengths and your opportunities for improvement.

People: The people behind your product are critical to marketing the product. From the engineers and product development team, to sales and support, your success depends on your people. Do you have enough staff to handle the launch and product fulfillment? Have you given your sales team everything they need to explain what sets your product apart?

Physical Evidence: Successful product marketing fosters a superior customer experience. How does your messaging shape the perception of your product, whether it’s in a store or online? The consumer experience could be the biggest differentiator of your product.

The Four Ps as the Four Cs

The Four Ps are business focused, but product marketing is customer focused. To accommodate product marketing and put the customer ahead of the seller, the Four Cs approach was developed in the 1990s: Customer, Cost, Convenience, and Communication.

• Customer Solutions, Not Products: Customers want to buy a solution to their problem, not simply purchase a product.
• Cost, Not Price: What is the value of the product to the consumer, and is the price point something they are willing to pay?
• Convenience, Not Place: How easy is it for customers to find and buy your product?
• Communication, Not Promotion: Promotion is one-way messaging from the company to the consumer. By setting up social channels and other ways for customers to offer feedback and insight, you create value and loyalty.

Creating a Sales Guide

By working through the marketing mix, you will identify the differentiators and details of your product. This is the information your sales team needs. One more responsibility of product marketing is to turn these positioning statements into materials that help your sales team sell your product and achieve the company’s revenue goals. The sales guide should not focus on price, but on the differentiators of your product:

• Features and product details
• Advantages of your product
• Benefits of your product   

In addition to a sales guide, you should develop data sheets, training materials, and other collateral that your sales team can use to take your product to your audience.

Coordinating the Product Launch with the Promotion

Product development and product marketing have to work in sync so both are ready simultaneously. Imagine releasing a product and not letting your customers know it’s in the market - you won’t get many sales, and you also can’t create positioning statements that are inaccurate about the product’s features and benefits. Either way, you are alienating yourself from your customers. Customer satisfaction is your primary goal, and one you can share across departments to help you achieve it.

Communicating Across Departments and Summarizing Findings

Time is your most precious resource. Don’t waste it by working independently of other departments or leaving key stakeholders out of the loop. Create a marketing brief at the beginning of your process and use it for regular updates across the organization. Your project brief should include:

• Product goals
• Timeline
• Budget
• Positioning and messaging

Product Marketing Brief Template

Elements of Product Marketing Strategy

A product marketing strategy goes hand-in-hand with the product strategy — the plan that identifies and defines what you want to accomplish. A good strategy points everyone (from the CEO to engineering to sales and customer support) in the same direction. It keeps you focused on your customers and your market. It’s your guide to working together on what matters most.
 
A product marketing strategy will have several components:

Vision
A product starts with your organization’s vision. The product must sit squarely in the strategic vision of the organization. That vision feeds the development of the product and conveys energy and excitement to your customers. It outlines your customers, what they need, and how you will address those needs. You might even get a sense of the life cycle of the product, what it could become and when it might reach its end stage.
 
Insights
You have a vision about what you want to achieve. Now you need the information that turns this vision into reality. Here are some vital areas:

• Your Competitors: What companies are offering what you want to offer? (Find at least the top three.) How will your product be different? What makes it unique? Who are their customers? What problems will your product solve for those customers? Competitive research, also known as a market review, is key to your success. Learn more about conducting a competitive analysis.
• Your customers: Which ones will you target with this product? What is their pain point? What is the customer or buyer persona? What are the demographic and psychographic traits (age, gender, education level, values)? What are their buying patterns? How are they using current products? How many customers will you talk to? (These conversations will help shape your product messaging down the road and help target your marketing and advertising.)
• Your market position: How will your product offer value? What is the real problem that your product solves? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

You may have had a rough idea of how you wanted your product to function. Armed with these insights, you can nail down all the details that will make customers happy and drive your business forward. You will be able to speak with confidence about the specific product functions that meet the consumers’ requirements — from features and colors, to additional services and warranties. The product description you craft tells the story of how this product meets your customers’ needs.
 
Understanding the Product Life Cycle
Few products last forever. From the beginning of your product, you should prepare for the growth, maturity, and drop in demand. At some point, sales will decline. Competitors will offer a comparable product. Insights are the key to identifying the stage your product is in. Always monitor the life cycle of your product and be ready with improvements, updates, or even a new product that builds on what exists. (For example, while pay phones barely exist today, the problem they once solved still exists, and has been replaced by cell phones.)
 
Goals and Initiatives 
Management guru Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, "You can't manage what you can't measure." That’s not only true in the C-suite, but also extends to every product and department in your company.
 
Once you’ve defined the product, it’s time to define what you want to achieve. Without goals, how will you know whether your product succeeds? Use simple, clear, and precise goals (whether it’s improving your market share, re-engaging with customers, or driving revenue) to keep on track. Keep in mind that the product goals don’t stand alone. They need to align with your company’s strategic and business goals. After all, your product is part of the company’s success. For more information on writing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals, read this article. 

Finally, ask how this product fits with the initiatives of your business. Your product may be a better mousetrap. It meets customer needs by making them feel safer with fewer mice. (They buy solutions, not products.) The product also addresses the company’s initiative to move into new neighborhoods, territories, or areas. You can map your product’s features to the larger initiatives of your company.

Use the free template below to map out your product marketing strategy.

Product Marketing Strategy Template

What Is Product Marketing?

The key function of product marketing is connecting your consumers to your products. Not only does product marketing require deep knowledge of your customers, but you must also understand your product and how to position it in a crowded marketplace. As the product marketer, you are responsible for the success of your product. Key deliverables include:

• A clear market position that distinguishes you from the competition
• Product pricing and packaging
• A marketing and promotion plan to help your sales channels succeed
• Analysis of customer response and keeping the product relevant
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What Product Marketing Is Not

As noted earlier in this article, product marketing started as brand management and works directly with product development. While the two roles work together, they have different areas of responsibility: Product management focuses on the product and its features and requirements, whereas product marketing focuses on the customers who will use the product.

Who Uses Product Marketing Plans and Strategy?

Because product marketing is at the heart of connecting the customer to the product, everyone from CEOs to engineers and salespeople relies on their work. Internal communication across and among departments is just as important as the external messaging to customers. Everyone needs to understand the key messaging and be on the same page. Your messaging builds a strong connection among all the stakeholders in the company who are committed to the product’s success.

It’s important to get approval and buy-in from key stakeholders. Once you’ve got it, you’ll find it easier to get the necessary resources and generate excitement about your work. It’s also important to make sure all the stakeholders have what they need. A CEO may not need the sales brochures and spec sheets that your sales staff relies on in the field. The engineers may not need the strategy overview that your CEO reads. With a solid product marketing plan, you can keep everyone on message while making the relevant materials available without wasting their time.

What Does Product Marketing Do?

While all departments in a company may think about customers, product marketing puts the customer at the front and center of everything it does. The goals of traditional marketing include building brand awareness, growing new markets or audiences, and even strategic communication. By contrast, product marketing focuses solely on existing customers and keeping them happy. To succeed, you need deep knowledge of who your customers are, what they want, what influences their decisions, what problems they need to solve, and how they perceive that your business can provide a solution. Keep in mind that, while it seems as though people buy products, they are actually buying solutions to their problem. So, knowing their problem enables you to build and market the best solution to that problem.
 
Having this expertise gives you an influential voice in shaping the goods and services your business provides. Product marketing works with product development and the marketing and sales teams to plan the packaging, features, pricing, and promotion of the end of product. Because the work of product marketing crosses so many areas of a company, product marketing can be aligned with product development, product management, and sales and marketing. The most successful product marketers learn to work across departments, regardless of the official structure of their company.

According to David Fradin, an expert Product Leader, Product Manager, and Product Marketing Manager, product marketing emerged in the 1930s at Procter & Gamble as brand management. Over the years, the duties of the brand manager have evolved into two roles: the product developer and the product marketer. By 2015, 84 percent of the companies surveyed by Regalix Research said they invested in product marketing. You can read more from Fradin in his books: Building Insanely Great Products available now and Foundations in the Successful Management of Products, available soon from Wiley. 

What Is the Value of Product Marketing?

Product marketing brings many benefits to your company. By identifying the right product and getting it to the right customers, product marketing drives sales and profits. Using customer data wisely also helps your company develop new products, as well as create smarter overall marketing strategies. In an increasingly competitive (and innovative) marketplace, product marketing is your key to success.

For start-ups, your company is your product. Product marketing is really marketing for your entire company, since the only way you can grow is by knowing your audience and knowing how your product meets their needs.

At the B2B level, product marketing faces additional opportunities and challenges. According to Kapost article by Gerardo Dada, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at SolarWinds, B2B buyers are 57 percent through their purchase decision-making before they ever talk with a sales representative. The challenge is that purchasing decisions with B2B customers are made by a range of stakeholders, from CEOs and other C-suite executives, to sales and marketing teams. The opportunity here is to demonstrate the value of your product in a way that deepens the relationship with your customer—and can’t be duplicated by the competition.

Whether you’re just getting started or your business has years under its belt, product marketing helps your company scale by:

• Gathering and analyzing detailed information about customers
• Defining which products will meet audience needs
• Identifying and evaluating your competition
• Setting the price for the products
• Creating the go-to-market plan, with consistent messaging

 As your business grows, product marketing gives you key insights into which new products and services you should add. With consumer insights, you will be able to identify needs in the marketplace and create a successful strategy. In an innovation economy, your skill at anticipating your customers’ needs (whether B2B or B2C) will help your company survive and thrive. In the digital age, customers can go anyplace, anytime to find new products and services to meet their needs - you must be one step ahead so they consistently turn to you to solve their problems.

Do You Need Help in Product Marketing?

If all your products are selling quickly and your only feedback is kind notes from happy customers, you likely have a successful product marketing strategy. However, these covert signs might indicate that you need help: 

• Decisions about audience, features, and pricing are made by people who don’t have the data or understand the market.
• Products are developed and put into the market without a launch plan or a budget.
• Sales staff have to create their own collateral and spec sheets.
• Your company doesn’t have relevant data about its customers, market share, and sales.
• The role of marketing is simply to write web copy or social media messages or design brochures.

Don’t hire product marketing professionals simply to help your overworked product development team get the product finished. The jobs, while related, are not the same. Product marketing will not make the product faster. It will make the product better, because they understand what your audience needs.

How Product Marketing Aligns with Your Growth Strategy

No company wants to simply maintain its current level of revenue and audience by keeping a static line of products. Using a combination of markets and services, you can identify how your product will help your company grow. Each of the following growth strategies is based on a combination of markets and services. Growth strategies are based on:

Market Penetration: The combination of current products and current market. Your product marketing strategy focuses on increasing your market share and getting existing customers to use more of your product.
 
Market Development: The combination of current products and new markets. Your product marketing strategy focuses on new audiences and communities with different packaging and pricing.
 
Product Development: The combination of new products and current market. By listening to your audience you stay ahead of your competitors, developing new and innovative products. 
 
Diversification: The combination of new products and new markets. Your product marketing strategy must clearly define your goals, since your current product is not growing at the rate you need for business to flourish. There are two types of diversification: 

Related diversification means you develop (or buy) products that are related to your current offerings. One example is the line of beverages that Coca-Cola offers.
 
By contrast, unrelated diversification means you create products in a completely new area. For example, Samsung has developed solar panels, bio-tech drugs, medical devices, and more. In fact, their mission statement describes their product marketing strategy: “For over 70 years, Samsung has been dedicated to making a better world through diverse businesses that today span advanced technology, semiconductors, skyscraper and plant construction, petrochemicals, fashion, medicine, finance, hotels, and more. Our flagship company, Samsung Electronics, leads the global market in high-tech electronics manufacturing and digital media.”
 
There’s one more way to think about diversification: Horizontal (buying companies that are your direct competitors or are directly related to current products) and vertical (buying the suppliers and distributors of your product or developing your own channels). Each of these strategies has risks and rewards, so your decisions should be based on a solid understanding of your audience and your competitors, as well as an examination of your business strategy.  
 
Key Growth Questions to Help with Product Marketing  
Product marketing is at the intersection of product development, marketing, and sales. It covers a lot of corporate ground from defining product details, tracking customer data and market testing, creating marketing collateral, setting price and promotion strategies, training the sales staff, and even giving product presentations. To ensure your efforts stay on track with the company’s larger strategic goals, ask these questions:

• What are our revenue goals for the next year? Overall and by product line?
• What resources changes will be made in the coming year, including marketing staffing and budget?
• Do we anticipate any strategic partnerships, mergers or acquisitions?
• In which existing markets do we want to grow? What existing markets are we willing to move away from? What new markets do we plan to pursue?
• What existing services do we plan to maintain and improve? Which are at the end of their life cycle? What new products are being discussed?
• What are the biggest challenges we will face this year?

The Future of Product Marketing

David Fradin is a Distinguished Professor of Practise and Advisor, and Product Management Programs at Manipal Global Academy of Information Technology. He is also the author of Building Insanely Great Products and the soon-to-be-released Foundations in the Successful Management of Products, available soon from Wiley. Fraudin thinks the biggest change in the role of product marketing is the advent of social media and tools to manage social media.  

“The product marketing manager should be working strategically not tactically, thereby developing and maintaining the product’s marketing strategy including social media,” explains Fradin. “Social media is a huge part of marketing now and it is important for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing and sales.”

He also recommends a shift in titles to reflect the changes in product marketing. “The product marketing manager’s title should be changed to product marketing success manager to reflect the actual role played,” he adds. “They are given the budget for the marketing that needs to be done, so they have the authority they need to go with their responsibilities. Accordingly, they should not be the demo god. That should be done by pre-sales support.”

Improve Product Marketing Plans with Smartsheet for Marketing

The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

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Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement: Templates, Advice, and Proven Examples

 

By Joe Weller

In this article, we have collected top tips from customer engagement experts, templates for planning, KPIs for measuring, and proven examples of customer engagement success.

Included on this page, you’ll find a customer engagement model, a customer engagement plan, customer engagement KPIs, and expert tips for improving customer engagement.

What Is Customer Engagement?

Customers become (or remain) engaged when they interact with a brand in a way that creates or enhances their relationship with the company. Real engagement happens when a customer begins to have an emotional connection to the brand, instead of merely viewing their relationship as a product or service transaction. Forward-thinking brands are shifting from thinking of customers only as people who buy their products, and instead as valuable relationships that require long-term nurturing. 

The customer and brand can interact throughout the customer journey, starting with the customer's increased awareness about the organization, all the way through purchase and retention. Each interaction between the customer and the company adds to the engagement level – either positive or negative. Touchpoints on this journey can involve every type of contact: online, phone, and in person. The most popular contact most often takes place through content, social media, and email.

Coca-Cola has done an exceptional job of creating deep customer engagement across decades through various types of interactions. Many consumers immediately think of Coke the minute they hear the opening notes of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," from the famous commercial initially created in 1971 and revived over the years. In 2011, the brand combined all media – television, physical, and digital – to create the "Share a Coke" campaign, which helped bring people together over the product.

Today's consumers engage with brands in many different places and ways. Customers expect the conversation that begins in one place to carry over to the next interaction. Organizations focusing on customer engagement must have a holistic omni-channel strategy – which means providing consistent experiences across all offline and online channels. 

Retailers selling products both in their brick-and-mortar stores and face-to-face direct sales in consumers' homes particularly struggle with regular engagement across their online and in-person interactions. They often suffer from lack of analytics data, organization silos, and difficulty identifying customers across channels.

Characteristics of Engaged Customers

Engaged customers are more than people who buy your products. They become fans who are loyal, involved, and responsive. 

These customers seek out your brand when they need industry expertise and interact consistently with you on social media – your brand becomes a part of their life. Even more important is how these customers demonstrate this attachment through their actions, whether by promoting your brand online, through word of mouth, or both.

Why Is Customer Engagement Important?

It's easier and less costly to sell to an existing customer than to attract a new customer. To gain loyalty and commitment, an organization must deliver value throughout the customer journey — which starts with engaging a customer.

Customers have a wide range of options when it comes to any product or service. Successful brands make a cornerstone of keeping current customers engaged, as existing customers are excellent sources for recommendations and repeat purchases. Gallup research shows that customers who are fully engaged represent a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer.

Alternately, disengaged customers can mean much more than lost revenue for companies. Disengaged customers can detract from your brand and cause you to lose other potential and existing customers. Unlike engaged customers who offer positive recommendations, disengaged customers often criticize your brand. 

The good news is that increasing or improving your engagement activities can often help you win back disengaged customers.

Customer Engagement Models

Companies can’t focus on customer engagement only once – or even only once during the customer journey. Organizations that want to achieve high levels of customer engagement must focus on engagement throughout the entire relationship with the customer, which begins well before they purchase their first product from you.

The stages of the customer journey include the following:

• Awareness: The potential customer is in the process of developing awareness of a particular marketplace. They do not know they have a problem that can be solved by your product.
• 
  
• Consideration: The potential customer knows they can use a product like yours, but it may not be in their budget. During this phase, they are aware of their challenges and the fact that your product can help solve their issues, but have not yet made a decision to purchase.
• 
  
• Evaluation: The potential customer intends to purchase the product from a brand. During this phase, the customer actively researches products, including your brand’s offerings. You no longer need to convince the customer that they have a problem or that the product will help make their life or business easier. Now, you must convince the customer to choose your specific product over competitors.
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• Purchase: The customer purchases a product from your brand. Their experience during the purchase process, especially in terms of service and support, plays a significant role in their satisfaction, loyalty, and future engagement.
• 
  
• Growth/Retain/Nurture: Customers in this phase are exceptionally valuable and should be treated as VIPs. By continually providing value to these customers, you can grow engagement, which means that they will likely advocate for your brand.

The following model demonstrates the stages of the customer journey and examples of outreach and education that can contribute to engagement at each stage.

Customer Engagement Strategies

The goal of a customer engagement strategy is to develop a plan that will earn your customer's loyalty and return business. The strategy is the process of identifying and understanding your audience, engaging them, acting on feedback you receive, and monitoring KPIs.

How to Build a Successful Customer Engagement Strategy for Your Company

Engaged customers directly impact profit and growth, so organizations must develop a strategy that appeals to their target customers. Understanding the brands they frequent, how they buy, what they do with their free time, where they work, and how they spend their money will feed your strategy. Your customers' emotions drive all of these actions – and you need to understand how to tap into them.

Once you understand your customers' habits and emotions, consider how your customers engage. One of the most appealing methods for engaging customers is to provide them with a seamless omni-channel experience. For example, doesn’t it make you happy when you refill a prescription online, and when you call the pharmacy, they immediately provide you with an update based on the telephone number you are calling from? 

Integrating interactions across all channels is essential to providing consistent and personalized engagement. This means that your engagement strategy must consider all touchpoints: mobile, laptop, social media, chat, and website. The message and interactions must be consistent with seamless transitions.

Nancy Bhagat, CMO, Serviceaide, suggests the following: "Consider integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into your already established customer success initiatives. A virtual agent can quickly learn and respond to requests previously handled by employees. This allows you to meet the needs of many of your customers, leverage natural language processing (NLP) for relevant communications, and proactively anticipate problems and connect similar service requests.

 

“In addition to improving your service and support, you can free up your IT staff for more strategic workloads. We have seen success across many industries, including travel and hospitality, government, and financial services, as companies look for efficient and meaningful ways to improve their customer service and prospect outreach," Bhagat says. 

Aberdeen found that "companies with well-defined omni-channel customer experience management (CEM) programs achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average, compared to organizations without omni-channel programs. These organizations also average a 3.4% increase in customer lifetime value, while those without omni-channel programs actually diminish customer lifetime value by 0.7% year-over-year."

Use the following process to create a customer engagement strategy:

• Identify the Target Audience: To create meaningful experiences that build engagement, start by fully understanding a customer's needs and challenges. While many companies define their target audiences with customer personas, these personas often identify only basic demographic information (i.e., sex, age, and possible income).
  
  Carhartt took this concept to the next level. The company’s interactive videos contain imagery and voice overlays that speak directly to its target audience of people who work outdoors in cold climates. Instead of simply watching the videos, consumers can click on products for more information and see the different layers inside the Carhartt jackets. According to KERV, the video production company that created the campaign, the videos averaged a 2.4% click-through rate (more than 1,040% above the 0.21% industry standard), which demonstrates a high level of engagement.
  
  Start by building customer personas that clearly define all aspects of the customer: their needs, wants, challenges, concerns, and passions. This persona then becomes the cornerstone for every decision in creating the customer journey for your brand. Without this level of detail and understanding, it is likely that your efforts will miss the mark, resulting in unengaged customers – and potentially disengaged customers.
  
  Use this buyer persona template to create a greater understanding of your customer's motivations, challenges, and buying habits.

• Define the Customer Journey Map. Without a defined customer journey, you leave the interactions between your customers (and potential customers) and your brand to chance. This means that you are not controlling the interactions and delivering experiences that build relationships with your customers. Gartner found that According to the 81% of brands using customer journey maps report exceeding customer perceptions. According to Gartner, “in our 2019 CX Management Survey, 81% of brands that have and use journey maps say they exceeded customer perceptions.”
  
  Gartner “Use Gartner’s Buy/Own/Advocate Framework to Map Customer Journeys and Deliver Better Customer Experiences,” Augie Ray, 1 October 2019
  
  Starbucks has a long history of high customer engagement that centers around creating a customer journey through its mobile app. With over 16.8 million active users and 41 percent of its sales worldwide in 2019 Q2 from rewards users, the program is one of the largest and most successful, reports Starbucks. 
  
  But the company doesn’t simply use the program for advertising – the app also saves customers time when ordering, shows additional menu options, and earns customers free personalized rewards. Starbucks proactively interacts with rewards members by reminding them of special events and offers and even putting the events on their mobile calendar (with permission, of course).
  
  While the three main phases of the customer journey – buy, own, advocate – are the same across brands, each brand should customize and expand the phases based on their specific customers and products.
  
  Here are four steps to designing your customer journey:
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  • Observe and document all multiple-target customer types' behavior in real time. Document similarities (and the number) of prospects that accept the offer and take action. Determine how many engaged users bounce off without taking action, such as a prospect following a social media link to the blog, but not subscribing.
  • 
    
  • Identify points of interaction. Note where customers are likely to reach out to the brand. For example, do most newsletter subscribers eventually purchase the product, or are support calls common during the first seven days of ownership?
  • 
    
  • Determine breaking points and action points in the journey. Look for places where the brand loses contact with potential customers or actions that happen before customers do not make another purchase. Also notice actions that are common in customers who become advocates, such as interacting with the company weekly on four different channels.
  • 
    
  • Design the ideal customer journey. Use the information gathered in the previous steps to purposely create a journey (with intentional interactions) that leads to engaged customers. Start small, such as rolling out a portion of the journey, then add more interactions after seeing success and positive results.
  • 
    
• Define KPIs/Metrics. By defining key performance indicators (KPIs), you can measure both the successes and failures of your business. KPIs measure the level of customer engagement and allow you to make changes based on performance. However, many companies mistakenly pick the wrong KPIs to monitor, which limits their engagement. Select the KPIs that directly tie into your business and engagement goals.
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• Humanize Your Brand with a Voice. When you speak to your customers in a consistent way throughout every interaction – in person and digital – your company sends a consistent message. By having a set brand voice, your brand becomes more human, which makes it easier for your customers to have a relationship with your company instead of viewing your brand as only a product or service provider. MoonPie’s Twitter account is an exceptional example of a company cultivating a unique brand voice through humor. This strategy has attracted a large following (over 300,000) for a snack cake.
  
  If you don’t already have a brand voice, make it a priority to create the tone that represents your company. You want your brand voice to reflect the culture and values of your company. More important, the voice needs to resonate with your target customer. Since many different people interact with customers and create digital messages, document your brand voice and ensure all messages are in line.
  
  Also consider putting faces on your brand voice by identifying influencers and key employees. Look within the company for people who are passionate about the brand, and help them become thought leaders and brand evangelists. Provide ways for those people to share their voice in blogs, videos, webinars, and e-books.
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• Engage with customers on social media. Social media allows brands to become a regular part of a customer's daily life, and it allows customers to interact with the brand more casually. Social media offers a unique opportunity to engage customers on topics that they care about. Many brands miss this chance by using social media primarily for self-promotion and not as a two-way conversation with customers.

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• Alison Munn, Social Media Marketing Consultant, says, "Social media customer service can be an effective alternative to traditional customer support channels. Twitter, for example, allows you to personally engage, meeting customers where they prefer to communicate. 
  
  “Whether it is a question, feedback, or complaint, customer service representatives can utilize social media to quickly provide relevant information rather than asking the customer to take to a channel that they may consider less convenient, such as email. In addition, your customer success team can further engage by following socially active customers on their preferred channel. Sharing content, commenting, and messaging builds an invaluable one-to-one connection that may provide you with the coveted customer recommendation the next time you need one," she says.
  
  Consider this: If a friend or family member never responded to your texts or calls, you likely would not continue the relationship – or you'd at least step back from it. Brands that do not personally respond when customers interact over Twitter are, in essence, saying that the customer does not matter. But brands that quickly respond to tweets, mentions, and comments quickly see customer engagement rise. Additionally, social media allows brands to easily measure engagement and interactions, as well as test out new messaging and ideas with very little expense.
  
  In addition to creating campaigns, look for opportunities that come from customer interactions. When 16-year-old Carter Wilkerson asked Wendy's through Twitter how many retweets he would have to get to earn free chicken nuggets for a year, the brand's response was brilliant: 18 million. The result was an exceptionally popular Twitter campaign, #nuggsforcarter, that broke the world record for most retweets. 
  
  Instead of ignoring the tweet, the brand created an authentic experience that inspired many Twitter users to engage with the brand. Wendy's then created even more engagement, both for Carter and his fans, by giving him free nuggets for the effort.
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• Personalize customer experiences and communications. Simply putting a customer's name in your emails is no longer enough. Customers expect a personalized journey based on information that they have shared and on past interactions. Accenture reported in its 2018 Personalization Pulse Check report that 91 percent of consumers make purchases from brands that provide personally relevant offers and recommendations.
  
  Use the following tips for personalization:
   

1. Create quizzes and deliver information based on the results. 
2. Recommend products based on browsing history. 
3. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
4. Show your appreciation for your engaged customers by mentioning them on social media or sharing customer profiles. 

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• Create useful content that provides value. Today, when you have a question or challenge, you likely head straight to Google or your favorite source on the topic. When a brand provides the answers that a person needs, a relationship begins to form.
  
  As the consumer increasingly turns to the brand for information and finds content that solves their problems, that consumer begins to trust the brand – that is the underlying reason brands increasingly turn to content marketing. When the customer goes to purchase a product, it's almost a given that they will buy from the brand that has already proven they understand their needs.
  
  LEGO taps into user-generated content to keep customers engaged, and its efforts have resulted in currently more than 8.8 million subscribers for the brand. One of its most successful campaigns is LEGO Ideas, where customers of all ages nominate their creations and the best result in an official set. In addition to encouraging consumers to use the product, it helps other customers stay engaged with more suggestions for building projects. 
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• Act on feedback. Brands that are genuinely committed to customer engagement not only proactively solicit customer feedback, but also make changes to their processes, products, and interactions based on that feedback. Make sure that opportunities for feedback are available at critical points in the customer journey. Additionally, create processes for managing the input and ensuring that you address each comment. While customers like to be asked for their opinions, when brands provide no action or response to their feedback, customers can become less engaged.
  
  Use this customer feedback template to gather customer feedback online automatically.

A strategic planning template is perfect for getting started with customer engagement. This template can guide you in summarizing where you are now, where you want to be, your goals, and how to achieve them.

Measuring Customer Engagement

While building a solid customer engagement strategy is key, many companies overlook the cornerstone of customer engagement: measurement. Without solid data, organizations may end up making decisions based on anecdotal evidence of engagement coming only from customers who proactively provide feedback to the brand. Additionally, it's easy for brands to have a rosy view of customer engagement when they don’t actively measure key metrics that indicate actual customer engagement.

Measuring engagement poses numerous challenges, says Eddie Rice, Content Marketing Manager for Spirion, largely because people don't want to be tracked on a website. He expects to see an uptick in people exercising their "right to be forgotten" via the CCPA, GDPR, and similar privacy statutes. 

"With a customer's permission (through opt-ins and permission-based marketing), you can evaluate their engagement based on reading times, content downloads, and direct conversations through chatbots and live conversations with sales reps. Ultimately, you need a strong back-end system that can measure these interactions and sync them to the ultimate sales that are made," says Rice.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

Because customer engagement impacts profitability and revenue, brands can opt to measure engagement success in several ways, including the customer engagement index calculation and cost-benefit analysis.

• Customer Engagement Index Calculation: Brands determine engagement by measuring the frequency in which customers interact with the brand. Common KPIs include the number of comments on a post, subscribers, clicks on a call to action, or shares.
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• Cost-Benefit Analysis: By looking at the impact that different types of costs have on revenue, a cost-benefit analysis can yield concrete results to develop reasonable conclusions around the feasibility and advisability of a decision or situation.

KPIs for Customer Engagement

While KPIs are the foundation of a successful customer engagement strategy, they are not all equally useful. Companies face challenges in measuring because a single, accurate customer engagement metric does not exist. Therefore, brands must select the KPIs that are most effective for the specific customer journey and holistically review the measurements. 

Consider measuring the following KPIs for customer engagement:

• Retention and Churn: The best sign of customer engagement is high retention and low churn rates, which indicate you are keeping your current customers. Although you should not look at a single metric alone, this metric is a strong indicator of engagement.
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• Customer Referrals: Because the highest level of customer engagement are referrals to friends and family, this metric should be a key number to track and actively increase. By having a program where customers earn a bonus for referrals, you can track, reward, and encourage referrals.
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• Purchase Order Value: Engaged customers buy more, so tracking this metric shows over time when your brand's engagement decreases or increases based on customer engagement strategies.
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• Purchase Frequency: A customer who purchases once a month is significantly more engaged than someone who buys a product once per year. By understanding the average purchase frequency, as well as the frequency for customers with different levels of engagement (such as loyalty members and subscribers), you can determine which customer engagement strategies are most effective.
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• Guest Checkout Rates without an Account: Customers who check out without an account are not highly engaged, especially when they are repeat customers. By tracking these customers and actively reaching out to them, you can both increase engagement and measure the number of customers who are not overly engaged.
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• Repeat Purchase Rate: A one-time customer indicates dissatisfaction with either the product or experience, so this is a key metric to measure and track. Customers who have a low repeat purchase rate also indicate warm leads that may be converted to engaged and repeat customers with additional offers and interactions.
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• Subscriptions: When someone chooses to receive your content regularly, it shows that they want to continue their relationship with the brand. An increasing number of subscribers to your email list is a positive sign of engagement.
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While the following are not critical KPIs for customer engagement, consider tracking them to supplement the KPIs listed above:

• Frequency of Visits: Customers who have a relationship with a brand regularly visit the website to check for products, content, and purchases. A high average-frequency rate indicates very engaged and involved customers.
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• Depth of Visit: When a customer visits a website, looks at one page, and quickly leaves, their actions indicate low engagement. By looking at the average visit time and number of pages visited, you can gauge the average depth of visits.
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• Click-Through Rate: Every time someone clicks a link from social media or an email to visit your page, they indicate that the content they were viewing created enough interest for them to take additional actions.
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• Customer Reviews: Because people must have a high level of engagement and satisfaction to leave a positive review, a high number of good reviews indicates that customers are not only engaged, but moving toward advocacy.
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• Social Media Followers: Similar to subscribers, followers can indicate engagement with the brand. However, the number of followers should only be considered alongside other engagement metrics.
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• Email Opens and Click-Through Rates: When a subscriber does not open your email, their inaction indicates low engagement. In contrast, high open and click-through rates show that your subscribers are actively engaged.
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Customer Engagement Examples

You have read about Starbucks and LEGO brands earlier in this article. Here are three additional companies — Marketo, SAP Ariba, and CAVU Aerospace — that have worked hard to create first-class customer experiences through active engagement. 

Marketo: Marketo, a leader in marketing engagement and automation software, created Marketo University, an education program for customers. The education team initially relied on manual processes and decentralized platforms to manage course data. As the company grew and customer enrollment, attendance, and payment data expanded, the need to improve customer service through automation became clear. Smartsheet became their single solution for managing the expansive disparate data. Smartsheet dashboards allow education team members to access data instantly, speeding up processes that directly impact customers such as payments and enrollment changes.

SAP Ariba: SAP Ariba helps customers digitally transform their procurement operations. They understand the need to create a delightful and effective customer experience. Large SAP Ariba customers require accurate data to get their suppliers on board. Smartsheet forms and real-time dashboards allow for data validation and early issue diagnosis that improve the overall procurement processes, resulting in better customer engagement.

 

CAVU Aerospace: CAVU Aerospace, an aircraft disassembly and recycling service provider ran into a complexity when dismantling commercial airline planes. The manual efforts to salvage intact aircraft parts so that third-party customers can recoup their investments of up to $12 million was time-consuming and unreliable. The customers were unable to access real-time aircraft part information to resell the parts quickly. 

CAVU developed a proprietary API and form through Smartsheet for customers to view real-time inventory. This solution not only doubled the number of planes CAVU can dismantle, but improved their relationship with customers.

How to Increase Customer Engagement

Following a customer engagement strategy and applying revenue-related metrics is the perfect way to increase customer engagement. Understand customer profiles, follow the customer journey, humanize your brand, and deliver consistent communications and useful content, gathering feedback along the way.

The Role of Marketing in Customer Engagement

Intelligent and strategic marketing is the foundation for excellent customer engagement. The responsibility for developing the foundation of engagement does not mean that the marketing team is solely responsible for each element of engagement. If that were the case, marketing would be involved in every interaction with a customer, which is impossible. 

Still, marketing shapes the customer engagement strategy, including developing customer personas, messaging, content, and marketing programs. The marketing team, along with company leadership, must arm the entire company with the resources necessary to engage with customers consistently across all channels.

Traditional Marketing vs. Customer Engagement Marketing

Most forward-thinking organizations have realized that building a better relationship with customers is the key to success. In the past, the company governed how, when, and where their product or service was purchased. 

Today, because of digital technology, brands are a part of their customers' lives in a way that was not previously possible. And the roles have reversed: The customer now decides when, where, and how they purchase a product. Additionally, customers self-educate and research their way through the sales cycle, and they build relationships with the brands that provide the resources and content they seek. 

Traditional marketing uses well-known media, such as email, print, broadcast, billboards, and direct mail. The limitation of conventional marketing is that there is no interaction or engagement between the customer and the media. 

Engagement marketing focuses on understanding individual customers, their buying habits, and everything else you can gather, then marketing through media that enable personalized interactions. Engagement marketing is not an instant revenue-generating activity; rather, engagement requires you to build an audience based on nurtured relationships using interactions that are personalized and relevant.

Steve Jobs famously stated, "Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." This statement is the key to marketing in a time when customers expect (and look for) engaging brands.

Because brands can interact with their customers more casually and frequently, customers now develop relationships with brands that go beyond transactional. The value of a customer who feels genuinely engaged with a brand is significant – in terms of their lifetime purchasing potential, referrals, and advocacy reach. Brands can significantly increase both their revenue and retention by creating a customer engagement strategy that's focused on relevant KPIs.

Customers can have this deep relationship and engagement with only a limited number of brands, and not with competing brands. Because many companies are increasingly focusing on customer engagement, brands that neglect this strategy are likely to find themselves losing both customers and revenue. An engaged customer is not merely another customer — engaged customers have the power to help transform and grow your business.

Customer Engagement Technologies

Analytics solutions that aid in understanding your customers, marketing solutions for personalized nurture programs, instant messaging, social networks, and artificial intelligence are just a few of the tools that will help you break through the competitive noise with improved customer engagement.

Elizabeth Griffith, Web Marketing Manager, Spirion, says, "When it comes to your organization's website, customer engagement is about becoming a student of the customer's behavior. Become an expert in your customer's wants, needs, and questions by studying data with tools like Google Analytics, heat mapping, and SEO platforms. 

“In turn, let them study you. Provide content that answers their questions without form restrictions — proving both thought leadership and building your domain authority. Remove your ego and lofty marketing language, and replace it with simple, data-backed facts. And when you need that lead or conversion that requires handing over personal information, promise a carrot that is of real value and make that experience as easy as possible. By that touch, you have proven value, and they trust you," says Griffith.

Look for these features in technologies that impact customer engagement:

• Campaign Personalization: Customize campaigns based on interaction history and industry, so they are relevant to the customer.
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• Data Analysis: The ability to capture, aggregate, and analyze customer data from multiple sources such as website forms, transactions, loyalty programs, surveys, and sales tools.
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• Diverse Communications: Meeting customers where they like to communicate (text, email, social media, and chatbots) is essential.
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• Filters and Segmentation: Categorize and group customers based on industry, interests, or other details with the ability to monitor and measure trends.
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• Integrations: Customer engagement relies on gathering and sharing information across different teams throughout the customer journey. The tool should integrate with other business solutions that contain customer information to ensure customers have a seamless, personal engagement across all channels in an omni-channel experience.
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• Marketing Automation: Set up workflow rules so that when a customer meets certain criteria, an action is triggered, such as an email offer, invitation, coupon, or content suggestion.

https://www.smartsheet.com/

Part 1: Types of Customer Engagement

Merlene Leano

While it is not an unfamiliar buzzword in the business industry, customer engagement is often overlooked by most businesses. Most businesses have the mindset that customer engagement solely revolves around transactions.

That is no longer the case at present. Engagement is not just limited to a mere television ad or a sales pitch. Rather, there are several inherent characteristics involved in this practice that you must know to make your customer involvement strategies work.

The first part of our four-part blog series will explore the four types of customer engagement that you can maximize to help improve your current customer-centric approaches.

Let’s break them down one by one!

1. Interactive Engagement

Interactive engagement involves the combinations of different communication channels to foster an interactive conversation with your customers. The use of traditional customer engagement methods combined with advanced channels like mobile and social media allows you to create a two-way communication atmosphere where clients can proactively discuss their experiences and difficulties with your brand. In response, you gain customer insights and feedback that will prove valuable in producing user-focused products and services. Before you know it, you’re able to expertly anticipate your next marketing move.

2. Emotion-Driven Engagement

One of the few mistakes that businesses tend to commit is being aggressively competitive. Sometimes they focus on launching different products to counter competitors.

Don’t misunderstand this, aggressiveness in this highly competitive landscape is an expedient approach towards becoming successful. Unfortunately, when not done right, it completely overlooks the importance of customer emotion in the process.

Little do they know, emotion has been proven to be instrumental in creating stronger engagements. Since you are operating to cater to a crowd with emotionally motivated purchasing decisions, it is only practical to deliver products and services that coincide with their personal preferences. Customers that bear an emotional-level connection to your brand are more likely to stay loyal and spread the word about how great your brand is.

Several studies show that the majority of customer purchases are based on emotions, which is why colors, designs, messaging, and other subjectively stimulating factors must be considered at all times when creating your business logo, promoting your services, or disseminating information about your brand.

3. Logical Engagement

In today’s time, customers’ buying decisions are highly influenced by the knowledge base they gain from the internet even without requiring them to be present physically in the store. And with the internet gradually reshaping the usual sales process as we know it, it becomes easier for customers to gain such knowledge just by reading comments on social media or merely skimming through their newsfeed.

Businesses must see to it that they maximize the power of the internet to provide concise and insightful information about their products and services. There needs to be in-depth details about best-sellers among the company’s array of products because this will likely entice prospects to subscribe or make a purchase. Layout a comprehensive FAQs page on websites and other online channels to serve as a self-service guide for buyers or first-time visitors on your pages.

Embedding a conversational communication tool into your website is also a plus. It helps create more personalized communication with your customers and dramatically attracts more leads to visit your website.

4. Contextual Engagement

Over the years, technology has become increasingly useful in gaining an in-depth understanding of different consumer behaviors. Gathering sufficient customer insights results in more effective end-user retention, considering that marketing strategies are more accurate and carefully tailored to reflect customer needs.

By using diverse channels to reach your customers, it becomes easier for you to connect with them in real-time. Consequently, your pre-engagement and after-sales services are enhanced at an impressive rate. Specifically, you can communicate with your past customers by sending them monthly updates about your new products along with free, exclusive content and special offers. Examples of these content include newsletters, eBooks, or even limited-offer discount vouchers based on their recent purchases.

The customer engagement tactics proposed in this blog are best combined with interactive and logical approaches. Don’t forget to add a hint of emotional touch because the sentimental component goes a long way when it comes to delivering impeccable branding that captures genuine customer interest. Stay tuned for the next installment of The Ultimate Guide to Successful Customer Engagement!

Part 2: How to Boost Customer Engagement?

Admit it—sometimes, no matter how hard you try to produce the best content, it seems insufficient to win the interests of your target audiences. It is almost as if you are being left behind.

Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with your content. Maybe what it is, is that you’re falling short on using effective brand engagement strategies to connect with your customers.

Yes, the term customer engagement may sound like an easy feat the first time people hear it, but in belittling the weight of its influence, they overlook the real essence of capturing audience interest. Businesses undermining customer engagement are those that tend to fail to survive or prevail.

As the unwritten rule of business management and growth goes, ‘The more efficient your efforts to get people to commit to your brand, the more they become satisfied with your products and services.’ Fostering an interactive and emotionally engaging connection with customers increases the likelihood of them staying loyal to your brand.

We know customer engagement may sound a little bit tedious, but the moment you perfect it, the more likely it will pay off in the end. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! This article will tackle everything you need to know on how to increase customer engagement using different customer engagement ideas and strategies.

Now that you know the “whats” of customer engagement, it is time to know the “hows” of it. Let’s have a look at five effective customer engagement strategies that you can use now!

1. Produce Content Relevant to Target Customers

Before you get started devising content aimed at your intended audience, the first step you need to take is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Collecting information on their needs should be at the top of your list as a solution provider because it helps you highlight their pain points.

Finding ways to assist your customers whenever they ask for it should be your core focus when you create branding content. It can be in the form of blogs, how-to videos, webinars, written guides, and other source materials that they can use as references. The point is you’re sharing something valuable that will help meet their demands, solve their challenges, and push them to perform well (in their jobs, for instance).

Deliver content exclusively tailored to accommodate dynamic customer pain points along with their pressing difficulties. Maintain a space for communication with your audience. Merging the two practices is the secret to nurturing and fortifying the foundations of your customer relationship for long-term success.

2. Nail Your Social Media Engagements

The impact of social media is enormous. Use it well and it will anchor your business no matter how big the waves of changes in your industry may be.

Social media is a great place to market your services without creating much of a hassle for your customers. Most people are on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, so it is more accessible to the public and it is also more appealing to the majority of internet users today. Maximizing social media introduces your identity as a reputable brand and makes your customers feel at ease.

Analyze how to be more socially visible if you want to change how your prospects perceive your brand. Showcase your brand’s identity by sharing relatable, unique, funny, and meaningful posts to pique the sophisticated interests of modern audiences. Go beyond promotional content. Think beyond your boundaries to transform a mere promotional post into more enticing, personalized content.

3. Be Responsive

Responsiveness is key to establishing customer relations that go beyond monetary transactions or the exchange of goods and subscriptions. Being interactive bridges the gap between you and your potential customers. Use different communication platforms to initiate continuous discussions and rapport with them.

Facebook, one of today’s social media giants, allows businesses to use the comment section to answer user queries aptly and instantly. The feature strengthens online credibility but improves your customer relationship at the same time.

While it is true that starting long discussion threads on your pages takes time, that shouldn’t leave you discouraged. Why not try adding a follow-up question to your post to create an opportunity for your customers to share their thoughts, suggestions, and feedback. At the same time, you are inviting your supporters to communicate with fellow supporters and share their DIY tips, struggles, and relatable information concerning your brand.

4. Build Your Own Community

Don’t feel like limiting B2C interactions on your page’s comment section? Take it a notch higher by creating a digital community for your supporters. It is a great way to keep in touch with your patrons.

The community serves as a space where they get to build genuine connections and fortify your standing and credibility amid a tough and competitive industry.

Make sure you are consistently present in your forums and groups for that strong and lasting impact on your followers and members. As always, be responsive. Allot a time to assist them whenever they ask questions that fellow members cannot answer.

Use the data you gathered from customers to determine which topics would resonate well with them. Stray from posting purely business-related content as it will leave a bad aftertaste in all your pages and communities. Mix it up with quizzes, polls, and fresh content such as articles about the latest events, a meme, or any other content as long as it can keep your members engaged.

Moreover, post future products, milestones, upcoming webinars, and other related content.

With the feedback and insights you gathered from your community members, Creating a community for your supporters allows you to know which part of your business needs improving or reassessing. The more you initiate open communication with them, the higher the value you associate with both your new and avid supporters. The closed groups you share with your followers lets you be one with their standpoints, beliefs, and ultimately, create more organic engagement.

5. Maximize Omnichannel Approach

It is important to have a website that lets customers reach you faster.

You can also use it to tap into different communication channels such as media, messaging apps, email marketing, live chat, and all other forms of communication channels to boost traffic and keep visitors deeply interested in what you have to offer!

Maximizing omnichannel availability not only provides customer convenience; it also gives you tons of opportunities to strengthen the ties between your business and your patrons.

As exaggerated as it may sound, the benefits you get with impeccable customer engagement are endless. All you have to do is map your next strategy thoughtfully. When done properly, you inspire more individuals to spread the word about your brand. Eventually, more business opportunities follow through. It’s a domino effect.

Customers switching to other brands is inevitable, so don’t fret too much when it happens. You can always open newer ways to encourage them to come back. Using the right strategies, earning their trust for the second time becomes more feasible and manageable.

There’s more to learn about how to be successful with your customer engagement strategies.

Merlene Leano