Why companies fail at marketing to their best customers

Whether you are a small business with a few customers or a large corporation with millions of customers, I far too often see companies fail at marketing to their best customers.

In our experience of working for a wide range of marketing teams across multiple industries, we are often tasked with two primary goals to grow our business:

1. Attract new customers

2. Retain existing customers

To meet these goals, we always look at more specific metrics. What is our cost per acquisition? Our conversion rate? Our email open rate? Our retention rate?

These metrics can be specialized individually for different businesses in different markets, but most businesses follow the same basic principles. You build your acquisition funnels, test media channels, and automate retention logic.

These are the basics every marketing department must focus on, but even the best marketing departments are neglecting a key customer segment: their best customers.

Here are some key questions your marketing team can ask to see if you are either marketing to these customers successfully or neglecting them:

• Define: Who are your best customers? How are they defined?

• Quantify: How large is your "best customer" segment? What percentage of your business is driven by this group?

• Process: How does one become a "best customer"? How do they stay in that group or get removed?

• Understand: Why are they your best customer? What do they love about your brand or product? Can these insights be used to target other customers?

• Voice: How can you amplify the voice of your best customers? Can they provide validation to other customer segments? Should they lead in product or service development?

• Appreciate: Do these customers know they are valued? Do you have any customer appreciation programs, communications, or events?

• Value: What are the benefits to being your best customer? Do you provide exclusive opportunities, discounts, rewards, or SWAG?

• Community: Are there opportunities for these customers to connect, get to know each other, and share their passion or affinity to your brand?

Our assumption is that your company, like most companies, will struggle to answer a lot of the above questions. (Honestly, let us know if you think you're doing it right, and we'd love to highlight your team as an example!)

The truth is, even the largest companies with the biggest budgets fail to market to their best customers, so it's okay if you feel like your team is behind. That's where we come in!

There are many wide-ranging benefits to building a fanbase and launching a community of your best customers, including:

• Higher retention across all customer segments

• Higher revenue per customer

• More engaged customers

• Greater word of mouth/higher referrals

• Improved Marketing ROI across most channels

• Customer validation

• Business resiliency and growing revenues

If you'd like to start a conversation about how we can help you build your fanbase, get in touch with us and let's get started!