The first quarter of 2017 is already past, and it's brought with it continued evolution of the customer marketing process. For clarity, customer marketing refers to the set of activities that aims to drive retention, loyalty, advocacy, growth and community participation with your current customers. What sets it apart from general marketing is that the goal is to build a stronger relationship with existing clients, as opposed to targeting new ones.
In recent years, the importance of customer marketing has increased steadily - in fact, a report from Influitive and Konye Marketing, titled "The State of Customer Marketing 2017", revealed that 93% of B2B and hybrid B2B companies today are expecting that their customer marketing efforts will take on greater importance, with 62% planning to increase their staff and budgets this year.
Given that almost all companies are putting so much emphasis on this area, it's important that you understand what changes are expected to influence customer marketing this year 2017 and beyond.
To get a better perspective on this, check out the infographic below from Digital Marketing Philippines.
This post originally appeared on Irfan Ahmad's blog.