While I do not need to tell the marketeers out here why customer advocacy needs to be part of your marketing strategy, I thought it is good to refresh our memories, why customer advocacy is so important. The below list you can use when talking with your sales colleagues, project managers, customer success managers, leadership team, you name it. While you are on a quest to discover new stories.
Investing in customer references can be a strategic and valuable decision for companies, they help across the entire customer journey, from building brand awareness to winning new business. Yes they do require time, effort and persistence, but the payoffs are well worth.
Below, the list I compiled with several reasons why customer references should be part of your marketing mix.
Reasons for customer reference marketing
- Enhance a positive brand image, building a favorable perception of your company
- Build awareness, trust and reputation with potential buyers
- Demonstrate organizational expertise, by addressing real challenges and illustrating how the product/service resolves them
- Showcase results that help winning new business being part of sales enablement toolkits
- Facilitate the decision-making process and influence purchase decisions
- Differentiate from competitors
- Turn customers into advocates and ambassadors
- Facilitate relationship building with your customers
- Strengthen the collaboration with sales and project manager internally, by acknowledging and celebrating their projects and successes externally.
Can you come up with more reasons? Did I forgot something?
If customer advocacy and partner programs are in your marketing plans just reach out to me. I would love to talk and see how I can help in defining your customer programs.
Let’s get in contact.