In my experience, content marketers seem to focus primarily on new lead acquisition, but they don’t spend enough time helping Sales close deals, retain customers, and expand accounts. Last week, I wrote about how content marketing can help drive deals to closure. Today, I’ll focus on supporting account retention and expansion.
You can interview customers to uncover their need
Once again, the best way to start is with client interviews. Find out what they would like to find on your site related to implementation, support, and other post-sale issues. Ask them to describe helpful content they’ve found on other vendor sites and get samples where possible. This can be a very helpful tool. We find that many clients want a road map of development plans. Work with product management to provide clients with insights that will aid their planning.
Work with implementation and customer support teams
Often, customers have common questions and support needs. Providing content on your website to address common concerns can go a long way to both reducing support needs and keeping customers satisfied. This content can be in the form of implementation guides, deployment instructions, support FAQ, and other content that is commonly used by the support teams.
Create targeted account expansion strategies
With large accounts, sales may have a “land and expand” strategy. Essentially, this means that they do a small deal with a large enterprise account as a way to get their foot in the door, and then they look for ways to expand the deal into other departments and geographic territories. But this can be quite challenging. Often, customers are reluctant to introduce sales into other departments or groups – either because they don’t know the right people or because they’re uncomfortable turning a sales person loose on their colleagues.
We’ve found that marketing can help a great deal in this area. Work directly with the account managers to develop account expansion strategies. Build email campaigns and offers that are specific to that account and seek buy-in from the account manager’s client contacts by letting them review and edit the campaign content. Acquire targeted contact lists and review these with the client in advance of sending the campaign. We even review voicemail scripts with clients. We find that clients are MUCH more willing to support your account expansion if they understand the plan. This also gives the account manager a cohesive strategy for penetrating the account.
Support cross-selling and up-selling
If your company sells multiple products, then cross-selling is an important part of the overall sales process. Focus in on product groups and provide content that helps explain to customers how their existing purchase is complemented by an add-on or another product in your arsenal.
Create targeted campaigns for clients who bought Product #1 that specifically spell out the benefits of using Product #2 in conjunction with Product #1. The more specific and relevant your campaign, the more effective it will be.
Work with Sales to determine the ideal timing for sending these campaigns. Generally, it’s best to wait a while after deployment before beginning the cross-selling process.
Being a revenue marketer doesn’t start and end with new sales. Work with your account teams to come up with creative ways to help increase customer satisfaction and expand accounts. You might be surprised to find out how much Marketing can help. And if you’re worried about sales and marketing alignment, this might just be the solution.
Warm regards,
Candyce
– Phil]
The marketing experts continually exhort marketing teams to provide remarkable content for our audiences. What better way than to actually get four of those experts on a panel to speak on an evocative topic? During “The Great Marketing Conversation,” Robert Rose, Mike Volpe, Ardath Albee and Marcus Sheridan discussed today’s marketing practices – content marketing and inbound marketing in particular – in a pragmatic way aimed at helping marketers make a business case to their organizations. Great conversation. Great content. The response from the audience was, “Do more of these!”
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