WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER MARKETING MANAGER DO?
Published: September 11, 2024 – The Customer Marketing Manager creates engaging customer experiences by driving advocacy through case studies, reviews, and customer community content. This role involves working with product and customer success teams to execute targeted campaigns that increase feature adoption, secure renewals, and expand accounts. The manager also develops strategies to promote webinars, elevate online reputation, and optimize marketing budgets across digital and traditional channels for maximum ROI.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Customer Marketing Manager
1. Customer Marketing Manager Duties
- Automated Campaigns Leadership: Lead the portfolio of automated campaigns that support and engage customers at every stage of the product lifecycle, including onboarding, billing, and feedback.
- Product Launch Partnership: Partner with Product Marketing and Product Managers to launch new features to existing customers.
- Ad-hoc Campaign Development: Develop ad-hoc education and engagement campaigns that meet the needs of SMEs and achieve uplift across key support, product, and advocacy metrics.
- Advocacy and Retention Collaboration: Collaborate with Operations to innovate and investigate advocacy and retention initiatives.
- Business Strategy Testing: Test theories, and if they work, make them a permanent part of business strategy.
- Direct Report Support: Support direct report (Marketing Communications Executive), providing structure, feedback, and professional development.
- Crisis Communication: Provide communications counsel during service disruptions and participate in an out-of-hours incident management rota.
- Campaign Effectiveness Analysis: Analyse campaign effectiveness, deliver reports to internal stakeholders, and manage a repository of learnings from each campaign to drive continuous improvement.
- Creative Content Collaboration: Work closely with the in-house creative team to produce content that exemplifies the brand across a variety of channels, including email, mobile, web, video, social, and print.
- Customer Advocate Management: Maintain a steady supply of vocal customer advocates to meet the demands of sales reference requests, case study needs, PR/speaking engagements, and reviews on 3rd party sites.
- Customer Education: Educate the client's customer community on the broad array of company products and services.
- Demand Creation: Ensure customers understand their value and create associated demand for them, measured in terms of qualified sales opportunities.
2. Customer Marketing Manager Details
- Marketing Campaigns: Developing marketing campaigns focused on improving product adoption, customer retention, and expansion.
- Customer Feedback Program: Developing a customer feedback program to help improve the product.
- Customer Advocacy Program: Creating a customer advocacy program to engage the best customers.
- Community Building: Playing a lead role in building community for clients and prospects.
- Customer Stories Library: Building a library of compelling customer stories, testimonials, and references.
- Review Site Management: Growing presence on review sites, managing customer review program, and ensuring continuous positive feedback.
- Event Leadership: Leading monthly webinars, live/virtual events.
- Product Launch Coordination: Leading product launches and coordinating across Sales, Product, and Client Success.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnering with Product, Sales, and Client Success.
- Customer Insights Liaison: Serving as a liaison to other functions requiring customer insights.
- Journey Mapping Support: Supporting the development of customer journey mapping, buying roles, and personas.
- Sales Tool Creation: Partnering with product marketing to create sales tools for the customer audience.
- Program/Event Assistance: Assisting with other customer marketing programs and events in support of the Customer Marketing team charter.
3. Customer Marketing Manager Responsibilities
- Marketing Strategy: Design and execute full-funnel multi-channel marketing programs to increase product adoption, as well as lifetime value via new revenue streams, recurring revenue, and subscription upgrades.
- Customer Advocacy: Grow customer advocacy by eliciting, analyzing, and packaging user feedback for internal teams to consume.
- Product Marketing Collaboration: Work closely with product marketing to ensure sustained adoption of new features.
- Process Optimization: Use scalable, repeatable processes and techniques.
- Integrated Channel Tactics: Ensure channel tactics are used in an integrated manner to create an awesome, integrated experience for customers.
- Customer Segmentation: Obtain a deep understanding of customer segmentation to engage the right people in the best possible way to achieve results.
- Stakeholder Representation: Represent customer marketing plans to a wide range of stakeholders, including sales teams and executives.
- Stakeholder Input: Actively solicit inputs from key stakeholders regarding customer marketing campaign plan requirements.
- Account Penetration: Develop strategies and tactical execution to increase penetration within the customer base and the number of products successfully deployed within each account—helping to unseat competitor products along the way.
- Event Coordination: Work alongside other teams to drive attendance at online and regional events, as well as the company's annual customer and partner conference.
4. Customer Marketing Manager Job Summary
- Campaign Management: Create and execute customer-centric campaigns that represent each stage of the customer journey (post-sale) from implementation to maturity.
- Customer Strategy: Develop strategies and programs for key customer segments that inform, educate, and delight most valuable customers - and drive adoption, retention, and loyalty.
- Relationship Building: Establish strong relationships with account teams and customers to understand local needs.
- Use Case Expertise: Cultivate a deep understanding of use cases among accounts.
- Messaging Development: Work closely with product marketing and Comms to develop campaign messaging that resonates with the C-Level.
- Community Growth: Grow the customer community through on and offline engagements and identify advocates within accounts.
- Executive Engagement: Be the lead for planning and execution of all executive engagement programs across the region.
- Facilitation: Help facilitate relationships between C-level customers and executives within Adobe.
- Stakeholder Communication: Ensure appropriate communication and collaboration with key stakeholders from planning through to results across all customer programs.
- Performance Evaluation: Evaluate, measure, and report on strategic effectiveness and ROI of all customer marketing activities.
5. Customer Marketing Manager Accountabilities
- Brand Marketing Management: Manage the brand marketing activities at a local level to reach the annual brand objectives.
- Market Data Analysis: Analyze consumer research market data, draw conclusions, and indicate actions accordingly, for specific activities.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with Marketing and Sales to generate broad-scale support and knowledge for category activities.
- Event Planning and Execution: Generate and implement shopper-dedicated events for top customers, in line with the long-term communication objectives.
- Budget Management: Take responsibility for budget management for specific activities.
- Shopper Research Analysis: Propose and analyze relevant shopper research studies to better understand shopper behavior.
- Customer Insights Development: Develop customer/category insights and provide relevant insights to the Sales team to drive customer relationships, tailored business planning, and competitive advantage, demonstrating tangible opportunities to bring sustainable customer/category growth.
- 4P Strategy Definition: Define custom 4P strategy by customer/channel and specific tactics for each chain in line with the In-Store Picture of Success.
- Assortment and Shelf Management: Contribute to customer/category growth based on analyzing and defining the right assortment and the right shelf presence and recommending any valid amendments to the contracts.
- Category Analysis and Strategic Framework: Provide customer and category analysis and strategic framework to define the categories that the key customer teams should focus on.
6. Customer Marketing Manager Functions
- Sales Planning: Leading the sales planning process to co-develop the Annual Operating Plan (AOP).
- Budget Development: Develop sales/trade budgets, customer-aligned strategies, and shopper marketing.
- Integration: Integrating key learnings, category and customer insights, marketing direction, and budget considerations in the delivery of the AOP.
- Trade Marketing: Leading the ongoing trade marketing function including building and execution of approved sales plans.
- Consulting Partnership: Overseeing the partnership with Omnium Consulting to guide distribution/promotion/pricing planning and execution.
- Trade Promotion Management: Responsible for the trade promotion management system (BluePlanner), ensuring all field sales personnel are proficient, plans are effectively entered, and broker sales agency is engaged.
- Category Management: Leading the customer category management process for Lundberg Family Farms.
- Thought Leadership: Providing thought leadership in telling the Lundberg story to customers.
- Sales Tools Creation: Work with the marketing team to create concise selling tools and sales materials that showcase the Lundberg advantages.
- Data Assimilation: Assimilating syndicated data to build compelling, fact-based customer presentations.
- Forecast Collaboration: Collaborating with operations and finance teams on new item forecasting to ensure proper inventory levels and production forecast accuracy.
7. Customer Marketing Manager Job Description
- Strategy and Execution: Work closely with the VP of Marketing and the Genesys Global Customer Advocacy and Engagement (GCAE) team on strategy, execution, and program management of User Groups, Customer Roundtables, and Executive Advisory Boards.
- Community Building: Build expanded customer engagement communities for market segments, field segments, and persona segments in need of engagement.
- Point of Contact: Act as the point of contact for community members to address questions and gather insights and topics of interest.
- Feedback Management: Develop and track a closed feedback loop for internal stakeholders to ensure information and insights from community engagement are shared strategically across Genesys.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Regularly engage with cross-functional teams to ensure updated content and opportunities are presented to customers.
- Program Optimization: Maintain, measure, analyze, and optimize all programs to drive business results and exceed KPIs.
- Reporting: Provide weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting on the status of campaigns by tactics and campaign sources.
- Marketing Planning: Create and present customer marketing plans to other teams and leadership.
- Content Strategy: Contribute to content decisions and map content requirements to buyer lifecycle and desired program outcomes.
- Insight Translation: Translate insights into customer and high-priority differentiators to actionable feedback for the content development team to boost account engagement in owned campaigns and beyond.
- Collaboration with Stakeholders: Work closely with account executives and customer success managers as well as other marketing functions (content developers, digital channel owners, operations, etc.).
- Best Practices Research: Lean on best practices research regarding B2B consumer buying behavior to inform programs.
8. Customer Marketing Manager Overview
- Program Management: Plan, develop, and manage an integrated and global customer loyalty program and strategy.
- Impact Measurement: Measure the impact of customer marketing activities on customer growth, retention, and financial outcomes, and communicate these impacts to the rest of the organization.
- Customer Interaction Management: Leverage knowledge of customer segments to manage customer interactions including online/offline communities, events, customer advocacy boards, user groups, and executive roundtables.
- Process Coordination: Coordinate customer contact processes and cadence to ensure appropriately sequenced requests and appropriate frequency.
- Reference Development: Develop, qualify, and build a customer reference repository and ensure customer reference processes are accessible and communicated through the Sales function.
- Communication Management: Manage customer communications including customer feedback, email, direct mail, and events that align with the customer marketing strategy.
- Campaign Leadership: Lead and coordinate loyalty campaigns to drive and track referrals, references, testimonials, reviews, surveys, product feedback, and social shares that align with customer marketing plans and goals.
- Account Management: Orchestrate and lead ongoing account check-ins with account executives to ensure goals stay on track, and discuss upcoming account requirements and modifications.
- Opportunity Identification: Partner with professional services, marketing, support, and sales to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities within the customer base.
- Process Documentation: Provide documented processes and education to customer success management teams on the role of customer marketing within the existing customer base.
- External Coordination: Coordinate and connect loyalty programs and activities with external partners that influence the existing customer base.
- Resource Management: Identify internal and external resources for use in customer marketing execution, and manage agencies, vendors, and internal teams to deliver against plans, budgets, and timelines.
- Database Ownership: Own elements of the database of existing customer accounts and the accuracy of data within them.
9. Customer Marketing Manager Tasks
- Client Relationship Development: Develop non-transactional experiences that cement clients’ relationships with Definitive Orchestrate and enable thought leadership, client newsletters, social engagement, and peer-to-peer sharing.
- Marketing Program Management: Define and drive marketing-led customer upsell and cross-sell programs.
- Campaign Creation: Build compelling, audience-focused campaign products and value propositions.
- Customer Experience Integration: Weave the voice of the customer into client experiences by leveraging client stories, use cases, testimonials, excerpts from case studies, and more.
- Campaign Development: Build campaign, campaign sequencing, and campaign products including message platforms, campaign strategies, content, sales presentations and collateral, call scripts, email scripts, and presentations.
- Upsell Pipeline Management: Build a qualified upsell pipeline.
- Product and Account Analysis: Lead analysis of product usage, logical product pairings, and account profiles and segments to inform and develop programs that enable actionable account outreach.
- Cross-Channel Campaign Management: Plan, execute, and measure cross-channel customer campaigns that build pipelines and mature existing opportunities.
- Opportunity Conversion: Create and manage campaigns that convert viable upsell opportunities to business pipelines.
- Micro-Segment Customization: Tailor and customize campaign-specific micro-segments to persuade and influence specific clusters of prospects.
- Behavior Reinforcement: Collaborate with peers and contribute to programs that reinforce behaviors that correlate with renewals, including encouraging certification, in-product support, phone or email-based support, training attendance, and product adoption.
- Campaign Metrics Measurement: Measure campaigns based on established metrics.
- Objective Alignment: Outline campaign objectives and gain buy-in with account owners, customer success managers, and other stakeholders.
- Campaign Results Management: Take responsibility for visibility into campaign results and close the loop to ensure ongoing lessons learned are leveraged.
10. Customer Marketing Manager Details and Accountabilities
- Customer Experience Creation: Create experiences along the customer journey to build advocacy within the customer base and elevate their voice in the form of case studies, reviews, engagement in an online customer community, customer advisory board support, and overall content to support the community (blog, webinar, etc.).
- Engagement Optimization: Find ways to increase engagement by working with the product team to develop and execute targeted campaigns and content to increase usage of features, including the adoption of new capabilities.
- Campaign Collaboration: Collaborate with the customer success team to develop and execute campaigns to secure renewals and expand existing accounts through upsell and cross-sell.
- Community Facilitation: Determine how best to facilitate community interactions with customers and others in the target market.
- Demand Generation: Work closely with demand generation to promote webinars, increase online reputation via reviews, and create an amazing customer experience and customer journey.
- Content Creation: Bring customer stories to life through content that will resonate with the target audience.
- Community Building: Build an engaged community/following to establish the company as a thought leader and influencer in quality management for life sciences.
- Activity Ownership: End-to-end activity ownership, AandP, timeline, and quality management.
- Post-Activity Review: Full post-activity review and evaluation to enable learning and continuous improvement.
- Visibility Strategy Development: Develop the visibility strategy for customers in line with the strategy.
- Budget Optimization: Optimize the in-life acquisition marketing budget across digital and traditional channels (e.g., email, social media, events) to give the best ROI.