Prioritizing Customer Retention as a Marketing Team

The #1 focus for most B2B marketing teams has been to get more new people in the door.

New MQLs, new opportunities, and new customers.

That worked just fine during the growth at all costs era. But that era is over. Keeping your existing customers is more important than ever before.

On DGU this week, get an inside look at how we’re prioritizing customer retention as a marketing team.

Three top takeaways: 

Takeaway 1: Marketing doesn’t stop when you’ve acquired a customer

If new customers don’t know how to get value out of your product, don’t be surprised when they churn.

This has been a huge lesson for our Marketing team (aka we messed up and learned it the hard way).

We’ve focused more on the core use cases our product solves for and doing everything we can to educate our customers.

We started by publishing tactical playbooks to share how customers are using and getting value out of Metadata. Each playbook turns into a webinar in our community where the playbook author gets to show off their work and results.

Whether it’s in our community, content, or events, our customers do a much better job of marketing Metadata than we’ll ever be able to do. It makes it that much more believable, too.

Takeaway 2: Do things that don’t scale to support your renewals

We have a standing offer with our Customer Success team: we’ll do whatever it takes to sign renewals.

Customer Success Managers will look at customer health index, ICP fit, and deal size (in dollars) for each upcoming renewal. 

This turns into a list of handpicked accounts where they think they can use our help. 

Help can come in many different forms too. 1:1 coaching sessions, working sessions on a specific topic, or attending quarterly account reviews. 

Sometimes, we even help teams with something that doesn’t even touch our own product. Things like standing up a podcast, explaining our content creation process, or sharing how we’ve turned our employees into an extension of our Marketing team on LinkedIn.

The key here is playing the long game and making your customers more successful.

Takeaway 3: Create content that helps Customer Success overcome objections

So much of our content strategy has focused on helping Sales overcome common objections. 

But over the last few quarters come renewal time, we heard new (and different) objections from our Customer Success Managers.

We shut down new requests at first because they started with the medium, not the objection. After talking with Customer Success to get to the root of the objection, we then made recommendations on the best medium. 

Sometimes a landing page might make the most sense. Sometimes it’s a blog post. Or maybe it’s‌ a webinar at the end of the day.

Saying yes to new requests without thinking of the best medium can turn into a big time suck, especially for small marketing teams trying to do more with less.