Customer Marketing Strategies Guaranteed to Grow Your Business with Bitly CMO Tara Robertson

Well, thank you so much for coming today. My name is Tara Robertson. I'm the CMO at Bitly. Been at Bitly for 2 weeks, so anything I talk about with Bitly I can't take credit for. But prior to Bitly, I was the CMO over at Teamwork, which is project management software, and before that I led customer marketing at Sprout Social. So I'm here today to talk about the 5 customer marketing strategies guaranteed to grow your business. And let's dive right in. And so to kick us off, I wanna tell a little bit of story. Has anyone ever heard of Alex Honnold or the documentary Free Solo? Show of hands. A few of you. A bunch of you. Awesome. So if you haven't heard of Alex, part of his story is that he is this incredible rock climber that went on the climb of his life and wrote a doc— or had a documentary about it and how he trained to climb El Camino, which is one of the hardest mountains that there is over there in Yosemite right near to us. Now, why I want to talk about that is in a lot of ways I liken that to what it's like to be a customer marketer. Mind you, we're not climbing mountains to our inevitable potential death, but at the same time, we're often on the climb of our lives. We're falling down, we're getting back up, we're dodging boulders, but really what we're trying to do is scale to get to the top of the mountain. But the problem is we're often doing that alone. Who in this room is in customer marketing? Show your hands. Just a few of you. Keep your hand up if you're the only person in customer marketing. Most of you. That's absolutely typical. And there was an article recently that Jason M. Lemkin put out that said, how much do you talk about customer marketing? Be honest. It's the number one thing that SaaS companies know that they need to do, but they actually do the least of. And the reason is, is that there actually is no playbook. There's not a lot of information out there on what is customer marketing? How do you work on that? How do you create the right KPIs? What should your team look like? Like. If you look at marketing in general and you go and Google demand gen, you will find all the articles, all the books, all of the information on how to do it. But if you look up customer marketing, there really isn't a lot of information out there. And I think that this article or this quote puts it really well. Many organizations still clearly haven't defined that. Influitive, which is the business that put this out, is a customer advocacy platform, and they do some education on customer marketing, which is really helpful, but it's still not enough. And so I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about what that journey looked like when we were building it over at Sprout Social and how I brought that to some of the other businesses that I've worked on to hopefully fast-track some of your success in building out your own customer marketing and retention programs. I wanna start with this. A lot of marketers and a lot of people in business believe that marketing equals generating demand. And I am a CMO and I might get called out for this one, but I actually don't believe that. Marketing is about generating value. And that's the same whether that's from an acquisition program, whether that's from a customer marketing and retention program. It's really about creating value for the person on the other side of the funnel, the person that you're connecting with, because when you create value, that's when you create demand. And so we're gonna go through 5 strategies. I wanna warn everybody in advance, it is a lot of information in a very short amount of time. So I will be around afterwards to answer questions. You can also connect with me. My, my handle's on the bottom. It's the same for Twitter and LinkedIn. Jason M. Lemkin, happy to answer any questions with anyone that's here as we dig in. Each one of these sections is a session all on its own. So bear with me, we'll get through this together, and feel free to take out your phones, take pictures. You'll also have this content available afterwards. So let's start with number 1, know your customers. And so first and foremost, and I will say whether this is in customer marketing or whether it's in any kind of marketing, the most important thing that you should always start with and always do is customer research. Why is that? If you look at the impact of customer research, you can see 10x of an increase year over year. Sorry if that's not showing up appropriately there. That is a 10x, not an I. Um, an increase in customer satisfaction or NPS, a 20% increase in upsell and cross-sell rates across your business. And so these numbers are huge, and I think that second one is somewhere around 26%, um, but we'll get that number for you afterwards. But the problem is, is that when you look at these incredible numbers and you think, gosh, I should be doing customer research. Why don't we do it? 65% of marketers admit to not actually conducting customer research on an ongoing basis. And that's really truly because it is cumbersome, it is hard, and it's also something that people don't necessarily see as important as it is executing. But I'm here to tell you that if you are not creating customer research and spending time talking to the people that you're trying to market to, you are missing out on that 10x opportunity. So always start here. If you're looking at where to start, a great hashtag to follow is #researchops. There's a lot of really good information in customer research in general on how you can dig in, but I'll give you some tips on how we do this. And so first and foremost, what you're looking to do is gather a bunch of information and start to talk to your customers, collate that feedback, and parse through it to build a customer journey. Now in acquisition marketing, when you think about a customer journey, it's very linear and it's very easy to see. You bring somebody into the funnel, whether that's through a lead or a different channel, that lead either gets passed to sales or it gets passed into your product, depending if you're product-led or sales-led. It converts, turns into pipeline, and hopefully turns into a sale. Unfortunately, it is not that easy on the customer side. Your customer journey looks a lot more like what we're looking at the screen here. It's cluttered, it's all over the place. People are moving in one direction, they're moving in another. You're not quite sure what's the right thing to upsell or cross-sell. And so the first thing to do is to go from something like this, which is truly what most of our customer journeys look like, to something like this. And now what I'm showing on the screen, which is kind of hard to see right now, but this is a customer journey map. Big fan of emotion maps where you talk about understanding from your customers, what are they thinking, what are they feeling, and what are they doing at each stage of the funnel? And based on that, what you're looking to really try to do is understand what are the opportunities that are coming up to the front that are starting to show to you? And so are there 3 to 5 different low-hanging fruit or opportunities that you can prioritize in your campaigns based on how they're feeling at each stage of their journey? And then that's where you start when it comes to prioritizing your roadmap. And so I've got this arrow here to really point to the customer journey is really your first starting point, and you should consistently do this research on and on to get these questions to prioritize the things that you wanna be working on. And this is how you know that those different campaigns, the content, is all working towards driving results at the end of the day. So how do you get there? There's a lot of different ways to bring qualitative insights. And so a lot of us work much more on the quantitative side. We're in Google Analytics. We're looking at all of our data. And we're looking at what our customers are doing. And so the point of this customer research is we're looking to connect that what with the why. Show of hands, how many people here are startup? Don't really have a lot of customers. You're still kind of getting off the ground. That's about probably half of us. So the good news is I hear this a lot. People say, well, gosh, I can't do customer research. I don't have customers, or I don't have enough customers. And that's where I would point more towards the bottom half of this, which is you can go into mining data, go to review sites such as G2, TrustRadius, and start to understand your competitors or where your customers are going and how they're talking about information. I one time ran a test with a friend where we tried to mine a lot of data and then at the same time ran a deep in-depth customer survey. Customer survey was a 9-month project. In 1 day of mining data, we got to 70% of the same amount of information that was accurate just by going in and understanding from review sites how people were responding and interacting. You can also look at social listening. And so going into your social results and understanding competitor insights, sentiment, looking at key terms or phrases that people are looking for, and really start to understand how people are interacting. If you do have more customers, then that's where I would say interviews and surveys are great. And so usually I'll send a larger survey out and then get a good sample size of that survey of multitudes of different people to then go in and go deeper with your customer interviews. So those are a few different ways. There's a lot of other ways you can get qualitative insights, but you might be wondering, okay, well, what do I then ask? So here's a few of my favorite voice of customer survey questions. These are some of the starting questions that will get into how to build one of those customer journey maps and start to get the thinking, feeling, and doing. Doing information. A few things I would call out, always open-end. You don't want to give people answers, you want them to give you the answers. And so there's a process, and I've linked to it below with a Bitly link, that you can go to where it's a good understanding on how to actually go and read and parse through that to get statistical information out of those survey responses that you're asking. And so absolutely, this is where I would start if you have a big enough customer base. If not, that's when I would point you to mining data or starting to really get into social. And so following up on the end of this section, great customer knowledge is just as important as great product knowledge. We do so much research for our product. We need to do the same amount of research for our customers. And that's absolutely the number one thing that you have to do in building a proper customer marketing strategy or even marketing strategy that will help grow your business and get results. So number 2, scaling intentionally and making trade-offs. One of the number 1 things that people ask me when it comes to building a customer marketing team is, "What am I looking for? Who am I hiring? What does this team actually need to look like?" And so the first thing I would say is, well, walk you through kind of what that looked like as we built that out at Sprout and the way that I've looked at this as I've continued to build customer marketing teams. And also it's gonna be dependent on what you need and what your results are, so we'll talk a bit about that. And then once you have that team in place, It's about figuring out focus and making sure that you understand what the trade-offs are that you need to make in order to prioritize your team to work on the most important things. Otherwise, often your customer marketing team will get seen as the swag management department, which is not what you want. When I talk about focus, the other thing I would say is there are a million things that you can do, but if you chase two rabbits, they will eventually both escape. So it's really about picking that one thing. Okay, so we're starting with our head of customer marketing. When we first started building this out at Sprout and went through a lot of our customer research and a lot of our insights, what we were actually able to find is the number one area that we saw the most drop-off happening in the funnel was in the early stage of onboarding. That's how we decided who to hire first, is where is the biggest drop-off, what are the things that we need to tackle, and then what are the KPIs that will help drive us better success? And so we hired an onboarding manager, not a B-A-N-A-M-P-V-T. So this is an onboarding manager that came in and worked a lot more on adoption, activation, We'll talk about KPIs in a couple slides on how we knew that they were successful. And then as we started to see results coming from some of our onboarding programs, we then looked to bring in an experience manager as well as a growth manager, not a 3DHB, F you. So our experience manager was focused a lot more on customer education, focused a lot more on customer experience, and that started to grow. Our growth manager was focused a lot more on campaigns and actually driving expansion revenue and pipeline, so think a demand generation manager. But for your install base. As that grew out further, this is what that team actually started to look like. And so on the onboarding team, they were more like a lifecycle team focused on onboarding, activation, retention, and a lot of programmatic campaigns, which we have got some examples in a few slides. Our experience team was focused more on customer education, community, and then research was the other one that we had there. And then on the growth side, we had somebody focused on campaigns as well as somebody focused on advocacy. So it was much more aligned to experience, growth, and scaling. How we measured their success, which is really, really important, and this is what I bring to most customer teams. So first and foremost, you want to think about what is your company KPI? And so our success team, which is a huge partner to our customer marketing team, was focused on net dollar retention. So naturally, we are focused on net dollar retention. That is our north star. That's what we look at every step of the way. But then each individual team needed to then have their KPIs that they were driving. So on the onboarding side, it's about daily active users, weekly active users, product adoption, stickiness, all of the things that get to logo retention. Experience, none of those, but it was actually focused on customer satisfaction, NPS, content consumption. So everything that drove towards how they were growing and sticking with the customers, and what was their experience like? Were they happy? And then on the growth side, it was a lot more lead gen focused. So hand raisers, We had them as PQLs, which was more on the customer side at one company, PQAs when I was at another company. So really dependent on what your metric is, it's about pipeline, expansion revenue, and renewals. The next thing we introduced, and I talked about focus and catching your rabbits, is always bringing to your roadmap something called the rule of 3. Productivity is only productivity when you're focused on the right things, not when you're focused on everything. And so as we dug into the KPIs with each of the individual teams that we worked on, We then broke it down to, okay, what are the most important things we need to work on right now? If it was community, we had the whole team working on what that community program was. If it was onboarding, similar, we had the whole team working on onboarding. So our programmatic team might have been doing the emails, might have been doing in-app messages to drive them to adoption. Experience might have been helping with things like welcome kits or something that really helped create some customer happiness. And so that rule of 3 really helped ground us in how we built the right focus for for the team. If you're working on determining your roadmap and setting your foundation, I can't necessarily tell you what it is that you need to do. That's what your customer research will have to do. But I will say some of these are the most foundational things that you need. A lot of businesses will come in and a customer marketer and say, we need advocacy, we need a community, we need X, Y, and Z. You need great onboarding, you need great content that educates your customers, and you need to think about campaigns in the same way that you do with demand gen. I would start there as a foundation, and then, then you can start to build on what are some of the other cool things that you can roll out. So finally in this section, invest in your team and prioritize ruthlessly. That is a critical step to getting the headcount that you want and that you need in order to build out customer marketing. You guys can come in too if you can't hear, feel free. Okay, so let's dig into number 3, building strong segmentation. So first I wanna point this out with, Our expectations as consumers has changed even more so over the course of these last years. When you think about your experience with any SaaS organization, and really truly any organization as that stands, the amount of emails, the amount of information that we get on a day-to-day basis is insane. This is an example of probably any business and what the customer is experiencing from each of our departments, right? Marketing sending out campaigns, product might be sending out usage emails, Sales might be reaching out to try to buy a new product. Security is sending some stuff out, or engineering is sending around security. Finance is trying to bill you. And these things are constantly coming. And every business I've ever talked to, from a consulting perspective too, is always saying, how do you handle this? How do you manage the amount of communications that are constantly coming in? And it's not ever to come back and say, well, only one person or one team can send communications. It's about mapping out and understanding where they're coming from, how they're coming from, and to audit the amount of times that you're contacting your customers, and then to think through why are you sending your customers the communications that you are. And so it's a lot of different ways that you can segment. These are 3 of the most popular ways that companies will look to segment out their businesses or their customers. On the jobs to be done side, it's generally a more product-led approach, and that whole idea on jobs to be done is that people don't just buy your product, they hire you to solve a very specific problem. Problem. A persona is much more marketing-led and focused on what are the unique attributes of a certain person that will make them want to buy. And then finally, your ideal customer profile tends to be a segmentation approach used more for account-based marketing, less about the person and more about the company attributes. None of them are wrong. In fact, at some companies, we've had all three of these approaches being used at the same time for different reasons, but it's really about understanding how are you going in and building that research and segmenting your customers and what are the things that you can bring to the rest of your company to talk about, "This is who we are, and this is why we're doing this." From there, you want to start to think about the different customer stages. So we looked at a customer journey map a little while ago. This is an example of a customer journey map that gets into actually stages and what the customer's experience is, is in each parts of those stages. The most important thing for segmentation is to actually make sure that as you're sending out different communications, you know where your customer is and what their level of happiness is. If someone's in onboarding and activation and they're doing well and they're logging in, that's great. Get them to keep logging in and adopting more of your product. But if they're onboarding and they're starting to drop off and they're showing signs of churn or they're showing signs of not doing what you want, the last thing you wanna do is send them an email to buy the next product or to use a more complex part of your product. You just wanna get them to do the simple stuff. And so then you're really repeating that over and over and over again until they hit those sticky aha moments. And so understand your different points, and these are some typical ones that you see in most businesses. And then from there, you can start to segment out what are the types of comms that you wanna send and manage the influx of the amount of comms constantly going. So I have a few examples to show with you, 'cause people love examples, and different tactics that I've run at different businesses. So this is an example at Sprout where we started to see some substantial customer drop-off in the early days of onboarding. A lot of people talk about running re-engagement campaigns. This kind of fit in that. It was one email. It took probably a couple hours to get it written, get it launched, and get it moving. And this one email saw 62% of users that were dropping off logging back into the app and becoming sticky again. And the reason we did that is we used a lot of our customer research and a lot of the data to use the language that our customers were using. In the copy that we were writing and started to see some really great results coming from that re-engagement. At Teamwork, what we saw is that Teamwork is a productivity software, project management software, and having more than one user was critical to the success of the product. And so we knew that bringing in a user was one step, but what we also found is that when we actually gave the reins to the main user that was happy to start helping their next users to come in, that it also created better usage. And so this is an example of a communication that we rolled out where we said, "Help your customer or your user get started." And from there, we saw 25% new user adoption from the early stages. And then at Bitly, again, can't take credit for this one, but really excited to see how these are going to run. In fact, Sarah, who's standing up right there, can. So thank you, Sarah. Bitly is working right now on rolling out new products. We just acquired a QR code generator earlier this year. And so we're working on actually rolling out product knowledge. To a lot of our customers. So this is an example where we're starting to nudge customers into the idea of, we've expanded, check out these new parts of the product. And this is starting to drive better product adoption. It's a test right in flight right now. So excited to see how those results will come. So finally, from a segmentation perspective, segmentation is critical when it comes to building communications that convert. Don't just send any email to any person, and don't let your company send any email to any person. Really take the step to understand the list, the segment to get something launched and live. All right, so those first 3 were a lot. We're gonna go through some more customer experience and customer happiness over the next 2. So step number 4 is education. 61%, this is a hard number. So who here gets extremely frustrated when somebody churns from your product because they think your product can't do something that it actually can? Most of us, right? If you didn't raise your hand, someday we probably will. This is a very common thing. On average, 61% of your product is actually used across all of technology. And so in general, when it comes to education, it is a huge step that we need to take. Now, I wanted to bring up this slide because when I talk about customer education to a lot of people, most of what I often hear is, "That is a lot of work. Really want to build an academy," or, "We really want to build a learning center." And you're right, that is a lot of work. A lot of work, but you can get scrappy. That's the way that I've done this at every company I've ever worked for. Our first customer education program at Sprout, which has now turned into a whole learning portal and this great program, started with a webinar put on a landing page, sent out through an email. And what we actually saw with that small step, which was really comparable to what we saw when we built it at Teamwork, is that people started to become stickier. Now, you can't necessarily say, well, that's causation, these people were starting learn, but it is correlation. And we knew that anytime somebody went through any of these webinars that we rolled out or engaged with our landing pages and started to engage with our educational content, they started to get to a stronger health metric. And so from there, you can start to think about different ways that you can educate your customers. So there's 4 different education paths that I would, I would recommend. The first is live training. Webinars is probably one of the easiest things that you can spin up. From a marketing perspective. And I would say usually our webinars have always been a marketer plus a customer success rep. You've got a marketer running it. Maybe you've got someone in CS actually doing the webinar with you, but you also want someone there answering questions while you're in the webinar. Some of the most rich information you can get and a really good place to also get customer research. This next one is, I'll come back to it so I can remember it. Oh, content, content. So content is another huge part when you think about what you're actually doing in building out your customer customer education, and it's often really like self-guided, customer-led, and you're focusing a lot on content consumption. Next is community. Community can be marketing and customer-led. Again, you can get scrappy if you don't want to build a huge community. Start with Facebook, start with Twitter, start with different ways you can start engaging. And finally, product tours. Partnering with your product team and starting to roll out different tours is a great way to get people start leveraging your product. Great education also equals exceptional growth. Thank you, Kamal, for this great quote too. So I wanted to share a couple examples of what this looks like when you create great education built on value. So the one with Oprah is probably one of my favorite marketing tweets of all time, saying, "Our agency workshop convinced me to upgrade to Advanced. So many valuable tools." As a marketer, that was just, "We did it!" So that's really great because not only is this something that we are trying to bring to our customers, Our customers are also responding in a really positive way because they are thankful for the content we're getting. And then at Bitly, a really great example of content and actually creating educational pieces is we saw a lot of our customers had no idea how to start leveraging QR codes. They're blowing up right now. They're everywhere. They're on our passes. They're all over the event. And a lot of marketers are still figuring out how to do this. And so we used a lot of our proprietary data to build the QR code index. And in less than a month, we saw over 60,000 downloads, and this just launched this summer. So it's a really great way of leveraging customer research and customer education to build content that you know is going to be valuable and convert for your customers. And so finally, just know your customers are not using your product to its full potential. You could have the best product in the world, it's still not being fully leveraged. It's our job as customer marketers to help them do so and to really help educate people in the basics of the product to the most advanced pieces All right, and I want to leave with our last one, which is treat every customer as a VIP. We have to remember that when we're marketing and when we're building these programs, we are not marketing to a business. It is not a B2B or a B2C world. We are marketing to people. We are all people and we want to connect and we want to be connected with. So I want to start with this notion of one customer. What happened if all your customers went away and you only had one customer? How would you think about your product roadmap? How would you think about the marketing that you're rolling out? How would you think about the ways that you're interacting with those customers? And those are the things that you want to think about when it comes to scaling a one-to-many program. And I love this quote, so I always like to add this in this section of the session, which is, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, they forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel." So everyone take a moment and just think about what is the last great brand moment that you you had? Was there a business that connected with you in a way that sticks with you and resonates with you? And I asked my friends to do the same thing. So here's some examples on Twitter that came back. We heard things like, you know, my friend Meg, who got a cake because he paid off his student loans as a surprise and delight congratulations. Or Ryan, who was actually late to getting into his hotel room, but when he got there, there was a handwritten note and customized snacks. Or Jia, who got a surprise golden ticket of free food for a week. So the first thing is send food, 'cause everyone apparently loves food. But outside of sending food, it's really about creating these moments of surprise and delight that people just remember and they keep coming back to. We all have one of those moments, and those are things that your brand can do. Also, the power of the thank you note. So there's a couple statistics here that you can't see. One of them is 300%. You get a 300% better open rate to a thank you note or to a handwritten note than you actually do to something that isn't handwritten when you send something in the mail. And now, while people don't think this is scalable, it surprisingly is. I'm not saying that the people that raise their hand and they're one customer marketer needs to go and start writing a million notes. No, partner with your success team, partner with your sales team, put together a campaign and send some of these moments out. Here's an example of how Product Hunt did the same exact thing as a larger scalable program. Um, you can check out the link here where it goes more details, but they sent 1,000 thank you notes to some of their most strongest advocates, and then they got a bunch of really great, great tweets back saying, "I gotta say, I never received a personal card from a website before," and all it was was a note with some stickers. Super affordable, super scalable. But don't underestimate also the importance of a personalized response. So on every marketing team that I've ever been a part of and been honored enough to serve, often when we send our campaigns, we don't send it from a very basic marketing@ email, we send it from a person and we respond from a person. And that is so important. And people will often say, "Well, that takes too long. What if you get a million responses?" You don't get a million responses, as much as you want, but you do get some really memorable responses and you can connect those people with your sales team, with your success team, with your product team, collate that product feedback, get a lot of that research. And I love this example because this is exactly what we see in these responses. You know, "Thank you so much for getting back to me. I was absolutely floored when I got your email. I've always felt like a number. You made me feel important." And all we're doing here doesn't cost us anything is sending from a human and responding from a human. We're treating people like they are important because they are. We have to care about our customers. And so finally, for this section, I would leave you with we thrive on personal meaningful connections. We do that in the day-to-day. We also should be doing that in work. And when we think about experience, We want that same thing with the companies that we interact with and our products. All right, so wrapping up. These are the 5 steps we went over. I know they were a lot at once, but again, please feel free to find me afterwards, or let's reach out and connect. Knowing your customers, start with your research. They were intentionally built in a roadmap because this is the way I would start and start to drive it through. Scale intentionally. Make sure as you're building your team, you're not just building based off of gut. You're building based off of data, and you're proving your results based off of data, 'cause that gets you the buy-in. Segmentation is key. Make sure that your communications are very focused on the people you're reaching out to, and that they're aligned. If you need to start small, that is also important. You can't get all the segmentation right, right out from the get-go. So build one, then you can build two, and you can really start to iterate as you grow. Invest in your education. Make sure that you're educating customers, and that starts easily with one simple webinar. And remember that every customer, including yourselves, are very important people. So at the end, coming back to my, my example of Alex Honnold, I loved this quote, and this is a part of how I think about it from a marketing side too, is, "Once I was on the climb, it's just a matter of executing." So we just got to start executing. Thank you.