Live Courses and Learning Paths — News You Can Use #2 (Newsletter)

It’s been two weeks since The CLG Campus opened its doors and we continue to add new resource:

Recent Additions To The Campus Activities

• We just launched short How-to’s to help Customer Marketers get started in certain key areas such as attribution, video testimonials, etc. There are only a handful of these now, but we will be adding more shortly.
• We are developing Learning Paths, curated content from and links to different parts of the Campus and the Internet. For example, here’s our Customer Marketing Learning Path
• What is Customer Marketing? (Presentation)
• Foundations of Customer Marketing (Course)
• Streamlining your Customer Marketing Journey and Programs (Webinar)
• Learn how Customer Marketing can make an impact (Webinar)
• Join the Customer Marketing discussion
• ……..For more learning paths, including Customer Led Growth, Advocacy, and Customer Advisory Boards, click here.
• We introduced new several Customer-Led Groove podcasts featuring 1) Kalina Bryant who discusses  integrating CABs, Advocacy and Community into your CLG Strategy, 2) Heather Pritchett who highlights how to  get your organization aligned behind your advocacy program, and Alison Bukowski who shares her thoughts on where should advocacy sit in your company

New Courses Launching in the next 30 days

• First Live Cohort Class. Professor BT is giving a two part (101 and 201) live course on Creating Your Own Customer Awards Program, starting on November 30th. It will be our first cohort of students going through a live program together. Exciting stuff, eh? Unfortunately,  the course is full now– it filled up in the first 36 hours of being promoted, but if you are interested in taking the same course in January, let me know at wilder@base.ai.
• Managing a one person Customer Marketing Department taught by Kristine Kukich
• Building and maintaining an effective Super User Program taught by Larry Imgrund 
• How to present to the C-suite: Peter Mahoney, the author of The Next CMO

Key Marketing Tips of the Week

1. The Sales Process is Changing – So consider leveraging mobile more: We have all heard how the buyer does 70% of their research before talking to a Sales Rep. What is not often talked about is how your sales team needs to engage with younger prospects. Email is not the best vehicle to communicate with this audience.  Younger generations prefer text or voice messages. Make sure to personalize your communications, though. In a recent Forrester survey of more than 200 business-to-business directors with purchasing power – 49% of whom were millennials – at least half said they typically researched the supplier’s business and client reviews before ever accepting a meeting with them.
2. Focus on Activation vs. Engagement: This week, I posted on LinkedIn about the importance of Activation vs. Engagement. When working in a customer facing role, we tend to think of adoption or activation as the initial end-user experience. Instead, consider it to be more like an ongoing activity. For example, when I use Intuit’s Turbo Tax:

• I am guided through the process, via helpful hints along the way – tips and tricks on how to use the product, or examples of how a certain feature can be used.
• I am alerted to new industry information – such as changes in tax laws or new deductions, which for us non-accountants to keep track of.
• I am reminded about existing (and new) features that I am not using.

Maybe this is all part of the Customer Life Cycle Marketing. 😀

The key takeaway is to consider adoption and activation an ongoing process. With this sort of mindset, you can increase activation rates, which have a direct correlation to ongoing engagement.

News You Can Use

My old manager at Udacity always used to say “Hey Wilder, here’s some news you can use…” So below are some items that caught my eye (and my ear, since I use Alexa) this past week:

• ChiefMarketer.com gave out their 2022 Pro Awards. There is a category for B2B, so check it out.
• Creator Economy: HubSpot came out with a nice article and some good stats about the Creator Economy – an important and emerging marketing segment. Read it here. Some stats that jumped out at me: Full time creators leverage 2.7 income streams on average. (ConvertKit)  and 59% of beginning creators haven’t monetized their content yet (Linktree)
• Customer Data: A new and slightly academic book written by Michael Ross, chief scientist at EDITED, to co-author The Customer-Base Audit. This book goes deep into the data side of B2C metrics.
• Referral Programs: The article “Do Referral Programs Increase Profits?” provides concrete data about the benefits of these programs. According to the authors, referred customers are, on average, 4.5 cents per day more profitable than other customers. There’s some other good data in this article.
• B2C news: Nike launches another B2C Community focused on Web3. In the last 10 years, Nike has tried several types of communities.  Here’s their newest – the .Swoosh Community. By the way – @jeremiah Owyang will be doing a podcast about Web3 soon. Be on the lookout for it on The Campus, Apple, Google, Spotify or Alexa.
• Tracking Holiday Sales Adobe has created a cool website to track holiday sales. Below is an example of the data, but go check  out the website since it is updating in near-real time.
• There are others, but these caught my eye recently.  This field, which had only a handful of companies in it two or three years ago, has exploded to more than 180 startups at present, according to data gathered by entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Some good articles on AI-Created Content

For several years now, I have been interested in how AI can be used in marketing. During the Thanksgiving vacation, I read about AI-Created Content. More and more sites are using AI created content. How does this impact SEO? Google has stated that they will not penalize you for having AI created content if in fact the content is on-topic and doesn’t seem like it is overtly trying to goose the SEO machine. Recently, I have experimented with a few of these AI-Content platforms. Here are a few to check out:

• Jasper.ai: Plug in a few words and it writes a blog or a review for you. Decent results.
• ContentGroove:  Auto-generate engaging video clips using AI. This was created by some folks I used to work with at Apple and eWorld. However, I see a great deal of potential with this tool.

Well, that’s it for now.

Have a good week and see you on Campus!