Anne Janzer

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Anne Janzer

Why Customer Success is Marketings New Best Friend (or Should Be)

canoe

Marketing and Customer Success are like two people in a canoe. Ideally, you’re both trying to get to the same place (a successful business with happy customers). The trip is much easier when you work together well. And in choppy waters, you need to communicate or you’ll end up off course or capsized.

Many businesses are building teams dedicated to the “customer success” function. Searching for Customer Success jobs on Glassdoor today delivers hundreds of thousands of results.

If you’re in marketing, take a break from making infographics and plotting lead generation campaigns to search out people in the Customer Success role. They may be your new best friends.

What’s In It for Marketers

A successful customer is worth a hundred mediocre leads or a thousand “Likes” on social media.

  • Successful customers give your business social proof – creating credibility that originates outside of the marketing organization.
  • They refer friends and colleagues to your business, doing your lead generation and lead nurturing work for you.
  • Have a new product or feature? Successful customers are a ready-made market for your next new thing.
  • By engaging with successful customers, you can learn more about the market needs and concerns, ultimately creating more effective messages and products.

And if your business uses a subscription model, your current customers account for a large and growing percentage of revenues. It only makes sense to invest marketing efforts with existing customers.

Guess who’s engaging with those customers: customer success teams.

Customer Success has knowledge that can make marketers more effective:

  • What problems customers are really solving
  • What “good fit” and “bad fit” customers look like
  • The issues that trip people up.
  • What’s In It for Customer Success Teams

The benefits of collaboration flow both ways. Marketing messages set the expectations for the customer experience. Customer success teams that collaborate with marketing can make their own jobs easier by making sure new customers set off on the right path.

Marketing is how you do customer success at scale.

Finding Ways to Work Together

Organizational and cultural barriers may get in the way of collaboration across teams. Start with one or two well-defined projects to explore collaboration and prove its benefits. Here are a few ideas:

Audit the new customer experience together: Marketing and Customer Success teams can sit down together and walk through the new customer onboarding process. Exactly what does the customer see when signing up, or when they first use the service or buy the product? Does the experience match the implicit marketing promise? Look for any mismatches between expectations and experience and find ways to address them.

Create a launch campaign: Work together to identify and plot the first steps of successful customers, then create a customer launch campaign to support those steps. The launch plan might be a simple series of drip emails or a game with clear objectives.

Answer common questions: Customer Success teams should share frequent customer issues and questions with marketing teams and look for ways to solve them. If issues cannot be fixed in the product, marketing teams can develop videos or other materials to help the customers get started.

  • For more ideas about integrating marketing and customer success, see the third edition of Subscription Marketing.

Image by Matthew Clark on unsplash.com

An Insider’s Guide to the Membership Economy

A Review of The Membership Economy by Robbie Baxter

Question of the day: Are memberships one variation of the Subscription Economy (as suggested in John Warrillow’s The Automatic Customer, which I reviewed here)? Or are we really experiencing the growth of a Membership Economy, for which subscriptions are merely one revenue model?

Which is a subset of which? Or does the reality look something like this instead?

Membership venn

The question arises after reading Robbie Kellman Baxter’s book The Membership Economy. The book takes the position that subscriptions are one revenue model within the broader Membership Economy.

The terms Membership Economy and Subscription Economy are different filters into the same set of trends and businesses. When you’re looking at these trends from a revenue perspective, you’re likely to think about subscriptions. If you focus on human behavior, as this book does, membership is a more interesting angle.

Here’s a quote from this discussion in the book:

“What makes a membership organization is the attitude of the organization and the feelings of its members—not whether members subscribe. Companies’ failure to see themselves as part of this bigger trend can limit their potential to build relationships and strengthen their models.” (Robbie Kellman Baxter, The Membership Economy.)

My own book (Subscription Marketing) speaks of the Subscription Economy, but I love the emphasis on human relationships that is inherent in the term Membership Economy.

Enough about terminology, let’s get to the book.

Membership cover

In The Membership Economy, Robbie shares her insider’s perspective into the challenges and opportunities of building a membership-based business. After the necessary discussion of terminology and trends, she dives into seven key strategies and tactics for membership businesses, including onboarding, pricing and technology. I’m particularly interested in the customer retention strategies. I love that in addition to retention, she stresses the importance of letting customers go gracefully.

The third section of the book digs deeper into different types of subscription companies (online communities, online subscriptions, loyalty programs, etc.), with case studies of each. The fourth section offers guidance on making the transition to one of these models within your own business.

The book is well written and engaging, with interesting stories and examples. If you’re considering making a transition and want a thoughtful discussion on topics such as the uses of freemium or risks of different pricing models, this is a terrific resource.

If there’s a fan club for Robbie Kellman Baxter, I’ll be a member.

And if you’re interested in this topic, sign up for my monthly newsletter, exploring the subject of marketing for businesses with recurring customers.

Minimum Viable Messaging for Startups

Few things make a content developer (aka writer) happier than a complete product messaging roadmap. For details, see What the Writer Wants from a Product Messaging Document. We know that content development and review cycles will be smooth sailing if there’s a well-developed product messaging map at the start.

But as with any rule, there’s an exception – the early stage startup.

Product messaging is critical in any business, start-ups included. But in an early startup, product messaging has a shorter shelf life than a peach in summer.

In the early stages of a product or solution’s life, messaging is bound to change, no matter how much work and research you’ve put into the messaging process.

What’s your minimum viable product messaging?
In The Lean Startup, Eric Reis recommends coming out with a minimum viable product and seeing how the market reacts. This protects you from spending a time (and money) on the wrong strategy.

Marketing teams can take a similar approach, even when the solution is ready for production. Come up with a minimum viable messaging platform, then test and perfect it based on its reception.

The elements of the minimum viable messaging map
An ideal messaging document is concise, so you can change it easily. Most startups go out the gate with the messages that their founders and investors feel are most important. If those messages don’t resonate with buyers, you want to know quickly.

The startup messaging map includes all of the main points of the standard product messaging map in a condensed version. Doing research is good, but experience with real customers is better.

Here’s what the product messaging map might look like for a startup:

  • Target markets/buyers: Start with just one or two, and assume there are others you don’t know about yet.
  • Key pains addressed or problems solved: Identify the key issues you’re trying to address and what people are doing about them now. Continue to listen to the market to validate those pains. Your solution may solve problems you don’t even know about. Did Apple know that the iPad would be a hit with octogenarians? No, but my mother is one of its biggest fans.
  • Top benefits: Identify what you think the top two or three benefits are, then let early customers tell you what they think based on their actions. They may surprise you.
  • Competitive differentiators and unique value proposition: Start small and test the messaging about why you’re different. Things you think are critical may be unimportant to customers.
  • Key features: Choose a few essential features and see which are most interesting or important to early users.

Put the most energy into testing the target market and top benefits. The key features and value propositions depend heavily on the value that people perceive they are getting from the solution.

You can track what people think about your messaging in several ways:

  • Use your content:  structure the website by benefits and features, and track where people click and read.
  • Track which kinds of content they download from your site or which blogs they read.
  • If you have insight into product usage, identify which features people are using.
  • Use customer research for additional insight.

Be ready to rewrite and revise the content produced in the early days, because it almost always changes. Revision isn’t a sign that you failed in your messaging – it’s a sign that you’re learning.

If you have other strategies for handling messaging in the fast-changing start-up world, please share them in the comments.

Create a quick corporate style guide

If multiple people create content for your business, you need a corporate style guide. Otherwise, you risk having a corporate identity with personality disorder.

Style guide

Keep a consistent voice across your content

If you don’t already have a style guide, don’t fear. It doesn’t have to be a huge project. Here’s a case where the perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s better to have a basic, barebones guide that people will actually use, rather than a complete AP Style Guide discourse.

At a minimum, the style guide should cover terminology specific to your company/industry, as well as the most common mistakes you see from writers.

Here are the five basic elements that I include in the ‘quick-and-dirty’ style guides I sometimes create for clients. (Note that logo usage, fonts and color schemes are out of scope – although the style guide is a good place to include them.)

1. Product naming and usage

It seems obvious, but needs saying. The style guide should include:

  • Product names (with correct capitalization)
  • Product name usage – For example, should you “install seven Acme Gizmos” or “install Acme Gizmo on seven servers?”
  • Product category – Be consistent about how you refer to the product.

2. Voice

Share the overall tone and voice, based on the ‘corporate style’ you’ve identified. Considerations include:

  • Second person – Do you write ‘you’ when referring to the reader?
  • First person plural – Do you want to say ‘we’ in your website? In which situations? (For a discussion of using “we”, see Gini Dietrich’s recent post about “eliminating the French” from your website.)
  • Active/passive – Encourage people to avoid excessive use of the passive voice.
  • Authoritative vs. collaborative – Do you want to be perceived as the font of authority, or do you want a more engaging style?
  • Humor – Is it appropriate, and if so, where and how much?

Blog contributors will write in a personal tone and style – that’s appropriate and expected. They have more leeway on sentence structure and the use of first and second person. But blogs should still use the same grammar rules, product naming and terminology as pieces written in the corporate voice.

3. Punctuation

Use the AP style guide or Chicago Manual of Style as a final arbiter for punctuation. However, your style guide can resolve the most common dilemmas for writers, including:

  • Commas – Choose a side in the great serial comma debate and stick with it. (The serial comma is the last comma before the ‘and’ in a list).
  • Dashes – If dashes are consistent with your corporate style, do you use an m-dash or n-dash? Lay out for people exactly how you want dashes to appear, and whether you want a space on either side or not.
  • It’s and its – This is such a common mistake that it’s worth putting in your style guide. The possessive does not have an apostrophe, the contraction does.

4. Capitalization

Which terms/words common should you capitalize? Legitimate candidates include:

  • Product names
  • Terms for which you have trademarks or registered trademarks
  • Terms that make up an acronym (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD)
  • Initial words of headings (depending on your heading styles)
  • Industry terms like “Internet” or “Wi-Fi”

Note that when it comes to capitalization, more is not better. Do not capitalize words within sentences without good reason. Make a strong stand against random capitalization.

5. Blacklisted words

Come up with your personal list of overused or stale words and ban them from your content. Anyone using a blacklisted word should present a convincing business case. My personal blacklist includes:

  • Leading – This word is overused to the point of meaninglessness (I’m a leading provider of content marketing strategy – bleh.)
  • Impactful – Need I say more? Even “impact” is often used incorrectly.
  • Utilize – 90 percent of the time I see the word ‘utilize’, it is an ugly substitute for the simpler ‘use.’

Share and collaborate on your style guide

Now share your barebones style guide with everyone creating content on your behalf – from writers to bloggers, designers and editors. Be sure to put a date on it. An effective style guide will continue to change over time.

Using a style guide will help you create consistency across your content marketing efforts and reinforce your brand image.

Finding your corporate style

If you’re ramping up your content marketing, you need a distinct and consistent corporate style. You want to create a corporate personality that is consistent across all of your communications, starting with your website.

My last post talked about identifying your corporate tone and style. But what if you’re just getting started or trying to reposition the company?

Corporate branding is beyond the scope of this blog. If you’ve done branding work, then that will inform your writing style. Otherwise, here are a few ideas to help find your authentic tone and style.

Find your adjectives

Pick three adjectives to identify the corporate image you’d like to portray. Are you:

  • friendly, responsive and expert?
  • trusted, secure and authoritative?
  • edgy, innovative and fun?

With only three adjectives, you cannot try to be all things to all people.

Make sure that the style will appear to your core customers. What works in the B2C space doesn’t always work in B2B. But B2B doesn’t have to be boring – just look at Box or AppDynamics.

The adjectives should be based in reality – if they don’t reflect the corporate culture, the perception won’t stick. If you’re a company fully of geeks, then embrace your own geekiness.

Try the goldilocks strategy

Once you know what you want, you have to decide how far to take it. Just how edgy do you want to be?  If you’re not sure, use the Goldilocks approach. Look at the websites of other companies to find the extremes, then determine your own comfort level.

Too formal -> just right -> too casual
Too serious -> just right -> Too flippant

Maybe you want to push the boundaries.  Every company will have a different take on what ‘just right’ means for their business.

Once you’ve identified some ‘just right’ websites, share them with your content developers to give them an idea of the tone and style you want to achieve. This will help ensure consistency across all of your content marketing efforts.

Messaging part 2: The messaging review

In my last post (There’s always time for messaging) I talked about a few strategies for selling the ‘messaging’ part of a content marketing project. It’s important to nail down key messaging before writing website content, white papers or other content.

How do you conduct a review of the messaging, particularly if it’s something that you had to champion in the first place? I doubt that there’s one correct answer – but here are a few strategies that may be useful.

The ‘creative brief’ strategy
For smaller or contained content projects, you can include messaging in a ‘creative brief’ or an extended outline for the piece. Asking for a review at this phase saves time down the road – and protects you from review cycles that dramatically change course.

This is a very palatable approach to messaging: nobody complains about reviewing an outline. Just make sure that the outline contains a bare-bones messaging component, with:

  • Audience: Who are you trying to reach with this piece?
  • Objective for the piece: What’s the explicit messaging –and sometimes the implicit messaging for this paper/website/brochure?
  • Competitive differentiators: What are the key points we need to make sure come across in this content?
  • Tone/style: What are we trying to communicate about the author or the organization represented by this piece?

I’ll take my best stab at each of these, put them on top of the outline and ask for comments. Sometimes this outline review generates interesting discussion that focuses the project. And, I let clients know that I’ll interpret lack of comment as a green light.

The explicit messaging review
If the messaging discussion is bigger than you can fit into this format, you may need to prepare a messaging document or presentation for the client. Use whatever format you think best fits the client – if you’re able to have a meeting, then a presentation can be effective. If you’re doing everything offline, a document works well.

The trick is communicating clearly that this review is around messaging only – not execution. To bring the point home, make sure that the messaging material looks nothing like the end product – and is delivered in the way that best serves discussion.

  • If you’re doing a Word document, consider using tables to lay out messaging, so it’s clearly not an early draft of the deliverable.
  • If you are using a Powerpoint presentation, don’t add graphics or special effects. Make it as bare bones as possible. Otherwise, people will start to focus on the medium, not the message.
  • Use a ‘map’ created from a program like MindNode if that fits the format well.
Sample of a MindNode map for messaging

You want people to focus only on the content – not the execution of the content. Because people are so anxious to see the final product, they might want to start talking about word choice or layout. Delivering a starkly internal document keeps the discussion on the messages. It also prevents people from taking slides or pages and plunking them directly into other documents, before the messaging is fully baked.

Once you have the review process, your task is to incorporate the comments and get sign-off on the messaging promptly before continuing with content development.

Respect the resistance
As my friend Claire Wagner pointed out, messaging can be a hard sell. There may be political reasons for avoiding the messaging process. Perhaps there’s an unresolved conflict within the organization on how to position something. And sometimes people simply don’t feel that there’s time.

Whatever approach you take, you should respect and understand the source of any resistance. But if you need to clarify messaging to proceed, then it’s fair to insist on at least a limited messaging review.