Episode Transcript
Will: Patrick, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
Patrick: Thank you so much, Will. Long-time listener, first-time caller.
Will: I'm really excited to get the show going. Before we dive in, could you give our audience who don't know Swoogo a quick background on what you do there?
Patrick: Swoogo is an event management platform that really stresses flexibility. Rather than just being a form you fill out, you have the ability to create your own completely customized website. You don't see our branding anywhere. It's flexible in that you can integrate with hundreds of different platforms. We see everyone from Fortune 500s to one-person agencies come to Swoogo to make the most of their events.
Will: What's your role at Swoogo, and how did you get there? I'm always interested in customer marketing journeys.
Patrick: I joined Swoogo about a year ago. I actually got my start in customer marketing as an account manager at a startup. A few months in, I started realizing there were a lot of tech touch initiatives we should be doing - webinars we should be running, ways to optimize our emails. I started taking on these new customer marketing tasks, and after about a year, it evolved into a formal customer marketing role.
When the pandemic hit, our company relied heavily on in-person meetings. As an account manager, I was doing trainings in people's offices, and suddenly that wasn't possible. Tech touch became absolutely essential. That's how I really developed my expertise in customer marketing, which led me to Maven Clinic and now Swoogo, where I manage marketing for existing customers through events, case studies, NPS, and enablement programs.
Will: For listeners who aren't familiar, could you explain what you mean by tech touch?
Patrick: Tech touch refers to automated interactions with customers through technology. While a CSM might personally email a customer, tech touch is triggered based on behavior. For example, if somebody takes a specific action in your product, it automatically triggers an email. Instead of having a human initiate the communication, it's handled by technology.
Will: What do you enjoy most about customer marketing as a field?
Patrick: Two main things: First, you're marketing to people who are already literally bought in. They own your product and are familiar with you, so you're building on existing relationships established by account managers and salespeople. You get to be the purest form of the brand and have some fun with it.
Second, I get to touch every piece of the marketing organization - customer experience, copywriting, events, demand generation for expansion opportunities. As someone early in my career, being able to take on all these different tasks within customer marketing really accelerates my professional growth.
Will: Customer marketing, we're seeing the title more and more, but honestly, it's still a pretty new field and a title that we don't see at every company. What are you seeing as the changes that are coming and maybe the trends that are kind of dominating the space right now?
Patrick: When I first started, it was about how we do customer success at scale. Four years ago in customer marketing, I'd go to meetups and when I said I did customer marketing, people would say "I have no idea what that means. Can you explain it?" And over the past four years, my answer has changed every time. Before, it was all about scaling the customer success program to create delight and brand engagement at scale. Now it's more complicated.
I join meetups with other customer marketers weekly, and recently I was talking with five others in the room - every single one of us had completely different roles and responsibilities. Some folks only did references and referrals, others only wrote case studies. The concept of customer marketing has blown up because it's kind of vague, like if there was a new role called "prospect marketing" - that could mean a thousand different things. We're just talking about how to market towards an existing group of people.
Will: You know, it's interesting you talk about that. I find that with a lot of different marketing disciplines that are emerging, especially with technology around them, there's a title but it's not always clear what that title does. I'm going to put you on the spot here - if you had a chance to say "this is what customer marketing should have purview of," what do you think that should be? Where do you think customer marketing should start and stop inside of an organization?
Patrick: That's tough. I'm going to give such a dumb default answer of "it depends on the organization." But whenever I explain what customer marketing is, I say it is marketing to and with customers. So I am doing all of the marketing, anything that's one-to-many to existing customers. And how can I do co-marketing with those existing customers to get their stories out into the market?
So anything that touches that I see as core customer marketing - things like customer enablement when it comes to scale programs. How do we do these onboarding email drip campaigns? How do we do these how-to webinars? And then how do we do some expansion programs along with that? But also how do I take those stories of those customers and put them into the market?
I think customer marketers are in such a cool position to do that because we've developed the relationship with the customer throughout this whole program. They've seen emails from me, clicked on the emails, joined my webinars and roundtables, we've met at events, swapped memes together - now we have that relationship built out. So when I go to the rest of the market and say "hey, check out this customer story," we're buddy-buddy, we know each other really well.
Will: Do you think there are any misconceptions out there where people think customer marketing does something that they don't? Or do you think most people kind of maybe not know the exact details but have a broad idea of where customer marketing is living inside of the organization today?
Patrick: Yeah, one of the big misconceptions is that a customer marketer only means advocacy - that they only mean references, only mean getting case studies and referrals and stuff like that. But really when we're thinking about customer marketing, you can't get the advocacy, you can't get those referrals and case studies without doing the work ahead of time with the enablement work. It's like the whole idea of debit and credit - you get the credit from them doing these referrals, but first you have to put some money in the bank and run these enablement programs.
Will: Yeah, I always think of customer advocacy as a journey, not a point. And you've got to develop them from the very beginning to become an advocate of your brand. Like you said, enablement's a huge part of that. Now one thing you were saying at the beginning of the show here is that you used to do a lot of work in person with these clients at the previous company and then Covid happened. With your visibility into Swoogo, what are you seeing from a customer marketing perspective around physical events and people interacting in the world now?
Patrick: I promise I'm going to answer the question, but first I have to tell a story. I came to Swoogo primarily because I was lonely. During the pandemic friends moved away, didn't get a chance to see people, no longer at the office anymore. Heck, even when I go to the grocery store I use the self-checkout and don't actually see people. As marketers we're marketing towards people, not entities. And I know I wasn't the only lonely person in the world. We've seen studies that loneliness has absolutely shot up over the past few years, which I think has enabled such a great opportunity for these kinds of events.
Your bang for your buck with in-person events is way higher because I'll tell you - we went to our user summit, and I went in feeling a little down and lonely. When I got there I kept seeing all these people I'd emailed with back and forth, and it started off with big hugs and laughs - it was like going to a family reunion. I just felt so fulfilled by going there and having these in-person interactions.
When we see that all these folks are lonely in their day-to-day lives and you as a marketer have the chance to bring people together, to facilitate that connection and to be that person that gives them the hug when they arrive - it's just so much stronger to build those relationships and to gather that social proof.
The other thing is once you gather people together, it's so much easier to gather social proof. If you're delighting them at this event, having a side room where you can knock out some videos with folks, having those really great conversations, having really high production quality videos there is incredible. Think about it - if you have an event, you'll probably have at least 10 customer speakers. So suddenly in one day you have 10 new customer stories to reutilize that content. You can have a side room with video interviews and get another 10 stories. You're able to gather all this material en masse at this event. That's where we've seen a lot of folks take these in-person events and why in-person events is one of the missing keys that customer marketers are missing right now.
Will: Yeah, I mean I think like you said, your customer marketing journey started like many people's where it starts with tech touches - how do we automate, how do we do things in this digital scaled capacity. But events feel sometimes like they're just not scalable or they feel too constrained. But already those stories sound like a great idea. Are there other techniques that you think people can really use at events or really get that customer marketing bang for their buck from those events?
Patrick: Yeah, totally. As a customer marketer, your primary goals are around retention, expansion and advocacy for the most part. Those are the big things. With expansion, having the chance to introduce them to different products and things during the event - making sure you're having those conversations with them ahead of time, saying "hey, we're doing this conversation about XYZ product, I would really love if you were there to learn more."
With retention - the first user summit I ran, there were about 100 people there. Not a single account churned for the next two years. It was just by developing that relationship with them there and really having that strong core to go back to. Also when you're going to an event, your customer is not just meeting their account manager who they previously had a relationship with. Now their relationship map or family tree with your product includes the CEO they met, the head of product, the 10 other users who all talked about how much they love the product together, who they swapped phone numbers or LinkedIn information with. Their family tree is now 10 times larger after attending this event.
Will: So it's interesting. That family tree seems like from the event side, you could very easily - not very easily, but you could turn that into digital communities and use that to reinforce your other engagement channels. What kind of activities do you find post-event are really good from a customer marketing perspective? You've expanded that family tree, you've got those customer stories. But how do you look at a post-event situation then?
Patrick: Yeah, for existing attendees, you hit the nail on the head there. These virtual communities go really far. The ability to follow up those conversations there. The other things I've seen is taking these in-person events and turning them into digital events afterwards. One thing we did is we used our own product to run the platform, and right afterwards we did a webinar about "here's how we used our product in unique ways to make the most of the platform."
The other tip that I heard that blew my mind was that when you create these events, you're creating so much FOMO for the folks who can't attend - they just feel awful that they weren't able to make it. And so using that FOMO from that event to run your road shows afterwards. We did our event on the west coast, now we're looking at doing some meetups on the east coast because all those folks were saying "oh, I can't travel all the way out to Portland for this." Your event is essentially not just great for accelerating revenue and getting retention and advocacy, but it's also just a really big brand splash that elevates the rest of your content because you have so much mind share from everybody who attended and everybody who's sad they couldn't attend.
Will: I like that. I mean, I know events have been going on for a long time, but it almost feels new again. Where do you see the future of customer marketing and events going? Do you see this kind of being increased again or where do you just kind of see that future going?
Patrick: Yeah, it's really fun because the event industry was reinvented in 2020 and is now being reinvented or going back to things we did before with this new virtual angle too. Some of the big things we're seeing is scaled up events for customer marketing. Our larger clients are cloning events to run one on the east coast, one on the west coast, or doing these virtual events. Rather than doing one massive conference, they're running four smaller conferences in different areas and leaning really heavily into roundtable conversations or digital one-off events.
There was one customer we work with that did about 800 events in a year. That's what we're seeing a lot with customer marketing. As a customer marketer, I want to be able to run these roundtables and webinars all the time to push folks through the funnel or educate them on certain parts of the product or introduce them to new cool people. Having all these smaller events is really big for customer marketing.
Will: So there's something that's kind of not sitting right in my brain here. We're seeing an increase in the value of customer marketing and events, but at the same time we seem to be seeing an industry trend that includes the horrible L word of layoffs, where we're seeing marketing teams and other resources maybe getting laid off in organizations. What do you make of that kind of dichotomy there?
Patrick: Yeah, I used to think - and I used to give the worst career advice in the world apparently - which is if you add so much psychic value to your company through helping out other team members or through doing projects that might not necessarily have an impact on revenue, but make people feel good about the company, that you'll be unfireable and unlayoffable. I don't know if that's a word.
Will: But that's a word. We're going to call it. We're calling it a word now.
Patrick: Yeah. Well, I was wrong. I was so incredibly wrong. The advice that I got is layoffs aren't about people, they're about org charts. You can be the best employee in the world, but if it doesn't necessarily line up perfectly on the org chart, then you're at risk. Customer marketing is new, and oftentimes new is what's cut first.
But also because it's new, all those good metrics were already kind of taken. We can say that we have a big impact on retention, but there's also a massive 30-person team called the customer success team that was there first and they have a pretty big impact on retention as well. So when it comes down to who are you going to cut - the head of CS or the head of customer marketing? It's a pretty obvious choice.
Patrick: I was in a conversation with a bunch of customer marketers and somebody brought up the question of what are your key metrics. Every single person had a different metric or some kind of weird workaround to say that if they went to this community then that would show they had XYZ impact on revenue. It often seems really tenuous how you're drawing that direct line to revenue. One of the big pieces of advice I got was get as close to revenue as humanly possible. For some folks that would be referrals or webinars. If you're running a lot of webinars, digital events and ways that you can engage with folks at scale and you can be the one person who's really good at that one thing, then you'll be a little bit safer there.
Will: Yeah, and that's interesting. I like that - trying to get close to revenue. Now we're all trying to prove our value absolutely every day. It's what we're all trying to do. And in a digital world where you have 15 people touching the same customer, maybe even in the same week or month, that can be kind of challenging. Do you find though that that attempt to get really close to revenue might be kind of hurting or helping long term value that you could add?
Patrick: Yeah, of course getting close to short term goals might hurt your long term goals. I think as a customer marketer and coming in as a new position, I want to introduce these programs that will have a lot of payoff in two, three, four years - like building out this beautiful community or building out this great advocacy program that will probably take a while to show results. Also in customer marketing land, because we're looking at pre-sales revenue, we're tied to retention which oftentimes doesn't come up for another year or two years. It's just a really lagging indicator. So it's really hard to show that the thing that you did is having a lot of help there.
The one piece of advice that I would give organizations who are thinking about introducing customer marketing is to have those tasks outlined and the specific company goals that you have outlined and how they're going to help that goal. Having buy-in from the very beginning that says customer marketing does this thing, helps this specific goal and then getting as close to that goal as humanly possible is I think key for customer marketers.
Will: If I was a cash conscious CEO of a small company and was looking at introducing customer marketing, what would be some of the early indicators that I might look for? We've got those tasks, we know what we want to achieve, we've got that two year kind of mission. But I'm a little skittish or nervous and I want to see something in the first six to 12 months. What do you think are the early indicators that customer marketing and maybe specifically customer marketing, not that CS team or other teams are starting to have an impact?
Patrick: Yeah, for sure. There's a bunch of things around tech touch. Bringing in a marketing professional is going to enhance a lot of your customer marketing. For example, when I first started at this company, our onboarding emails were kind of tough. Bringing in somebody who does marketing was able to enhance those - we're able to see things like open rates jump up. If you're thinking about marketing campaigns, the first indicators are often email efficacy with open rates, click-through rates. Being able to show that okay, a professional came in and helped out these specific things. Also things like number of case studies would be beneficial, number of these digital events would be really helpful.
If I were a cash conscious CEO before I hired a customer marketer, I would have my head of CX, my head of marketing, my head of product come together in a room and decide what those specific things should be. I've talked to one person recently who said that before they were hired in their role as customer marketer, the only person that knew that the role was available was the head of marketing. Customer marketing is such a cross functional role - can you imagine the head of sales not knowing that there's new customer marketing coming in? Making sure those specific tasks and having those things outlined from the very beginning makes a lot of sense.
One thing that I've heard though is that sometimes customer marketers, the first thing they'll go to is add more case studies. It's like the easiest thing that you can put a number to - okay, before we had 20 case studies and now we have 30 case studies. Look at all these cool case studies I'm doing. I saw this poll on LinkedIn recently that was like, "how often do you read through case studies?" And only 20% said yes, I read through all the case studies. And they're nerds! But yeah, things like that - it's really hard to prove that actually has value, but you can put a number to it. Did you actually really add value there? I don't know, maybe, maybe not.
Will: And I think that's like a challenge we see in digital marketing - it started under the great myth that we could make everything attributable. And we told everyone that so much that people started believing it. And then we realized actually that maybe it's attributable maybe, but it might be attributable to nine different things and we don't quite know the percentage split and we don't quite know if one of those wasn't there would it still have continued and all those kind of challenges. But what I do like that you were just saying there a lot is really reminding us of the cross functionality of this role and that it is essential that you work with those bigger organizations and don't get siloed down as like six levels deep in marketing where you can't actually affect those pieces. I think that's some great advice for any company that's starting out in customer marketing or honestly probably some companies that are deep down the customer marketing path being reminded about that. Any other pitfalls that you're seeing, whether it's new or existing customer marketing roles, that you just think like, "oh, it's that mistake again"?
Patrick: Yeah, the mistake I've seen folks immediately go to is "how do I immediately institute my advocacy program right away?" Like, we see some really good advocacy programs - something like Sendoso's, right? Those things that immediately have a brand name in and of themselves. And saying "alright, time for us to copy paste that." But not necessarily knowing okay, what do we actually want the advocacy program to do? What are the key results we're looking for? Is it that we're really looking for more case studies? Because we're already swimming with case studies and I don't need to know the same story over and over again.
Also, customer marketing is tied so closely to tech touch and tech touch has absolutely blown up over the past few years, and now it's time to maybe zig while other folks are zagging and lean more into this in-person interaction or the one-to-one interaction. I've seen a bunch of folks say "hey, I've been trying to automate XYZ. Look, CSMs are spending 20% of their time doing XYZ. We can automate those emails instead." But really, is that what your brand's looking for - creating a computer out of your CSMs? Maybe, maybe not. So coming in and getting that immediate rejection right away can really hurt when it comes to "alright, cool, now we're creating this XYZ program" or "now we're going to automate all that work."
Will: Yeah, it's interesting. I think I've seen the same thing you've seen about advocacy programs where there's a little bit of a "build it and they will come." There's a little bit of "this is what I'm supposed to do." And I just go back to like the number of really amazing, really simple Slack communities or really simple just user panels where you're starting to warm that up and taking that time to really build the advocacy. I mean Marketo's advocacy program was very famous for a while and that didn't happen overnight.
Patrick: Oh no, yeah, that's a really good point. Some of these smaller programs can absolutely gauge what folks really want to do. One of the things that I learned - I started a big LinkedIn community at one of the companies I was at, and we had about 700-800 folks in that LinkedIn community, which is a really good number to me. It ends up being about 20% or so of your user base. And I thought I killed it - heck yeah, we got all these folks here, everybody's chomping at the bit to get there. Nobody posted. And I realized that okay, this kind of frequently posting online community isn't really what folks wanted, that's not really what the audience cared for.
But what they loved were all these roundtable conversations. I would put a quick feeler out there to 100 people, 40 people would register and 30 people would show up. And they really loved having those kinds of conversations. So I was thinking about all these different tech touch tools or online community tools that I could use that I could kind of set and forget a little bit, but nobody really wanted that. None of my users wanted that. I'm sure it's different at other companies, of course, but these roundtable conversations and stuff like that really caught on. Maybe I didn't need this big advocacy program - maybe I just needed to be frequent and purposeful about the topics I choose and the things I can put together.
Will: You know, I've talked about this many times on the show and many, many times in my working life, but it still baffles me how many people don't ask their customers what they want. Like to do that little bit of work, that survey even, or that quick phone call with 10 customers that will pick up whatever it is. It just baffles me continually how often people think they know better or they're excited by their own creativity and they just forget to ask. We'll be working with someone to build a referral program and we'll ask them, "what do your customers value the most as a reward?" And they don't know, they're guessing. And it's like, this is a pretty simple one to five question survey that we could probably get out there in 20 minutes. And other groups are just like, "well, it's been decided" and you're like, this is not the way to do this. Where was it decided? In a boardroom somewhere.
Patrick: Yeah. When I was at the previous company, I had what I called my cabinet. There was a group of 10 customers that I would go to that I had been at events with, and whenever I would send out a webinar - for example, I did one webinar that I thought was just gonna kick butt, right? Like, everybody's gonna love this thing. I got like half the registrants I usually get. And so I sent an email and cc'd them all and was like, "hey, what's going on here? Why didn't anybody register for this?" I said it in better words, I promise. But saying like, "hey, I'm curious. Did this resonate? Are y'all interested in seeing this?" And all of them came back and said, "no, not really. I already know how to do that."
And so having that group there to give that feedback was absolutely crucial. That's when I learned I really need to be tapping into our customers here. One of the things that I've heard and used before is at the end of a webinar or at the end of some kind of enablement thing, having a poll that says, "okay, what do you want next?" and having a few different ideas there that folks can choose from.
Also, I think people love to be heard. It's like one of the best feelings in the world. And so in every material that you put out, some kind of interactive thing, like with a poll or with a question like that, I think that goes a really long way.
Will: But I think that requires you to have a level of vulnerability and openness that can be intimidating to some people who are trying to add value in their organization, want to be seen as the experts. But I do see that asking the customer, most of the time, they'll tell you. And if they won't tell you, that's kind of telling you something.
You know, if you're a brand new customer marketer listening to this - you were talking about some great things - but maybe you're a brand new customer marketer, maybe you're actually joining a customer marketing team. Any kind of words of wisdom as you've gone through this industry here or this career path, any words of wisdom to share with the people who are just starting out or just trying to start out in this space?
Patrick: Yeah, the best advice I got that I have continually thrown away, but the best advice that I got was when you start a new role, stop trying to impress people and just start trying to build relationships. Starting a new job, you want to sound super smart, you want everybody to be so impressed with you, right? Like, who's this new flashy kid that's coming in? But customer marketing is the most cross functional role that I can think of. You got to be tight with the sales team, with the rest of the marketing team, with the support team - I'm just going to list everything if you don't mind, this will be a 40 hour podcast - but you got to be tight with those folks.
So spending your time developing those relationships with people, like throwing on that 30 minute coffee and not talking about work when you start a new job. When I was an intern, I got the piece of advice which was have a notebook next to your desk and when folks tell you about their dog, write down their dog's name. You know, stuff like that, little things that you can then pull up later in conversations. What's really going to get you far in customer marketing isn't people thinking that you're really impressive, it's them really wanting to work with you and excited for their next meeting with you, developing that great relationship.
Will: That's some really good advice. I don't think we've heard that before, but especially in customer marketing, that just seems so logical. You need to build those relationships and that trust and that understanding across those departments. And I would imagine, maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, but I would imagine by having those relationships and that understanding, you almost accidentally see things that others don't. You kind of have those opportunities because you know what's going on in three other departments and you can kind of connect the dots and realize, hey, we're all struggling with the same problem and I have a means to help us all.
Patrick: Yeah, totally. I mean, if you're the connecting dot between the CX team and the product team, then you become super valuable at the organization. You're able to identify those trends. And also when you're having conversations in the marketing team about maybe a new demand generation campaign or different materials that are going to come out as part of product marketing, you have the knowledge in the back of your head of like, "oh, actually I know they were talking about this specific customer. You should go talk to them." So you can be the connecting dot across the team for everybody.
Will: What's the number one takeaway that, if there was only one piece of advice you could give to anyone in customer marketing, what do you think is that number one takeaway that someone needs to hear today?
Patrick: Customer marketing, you have the chance to do so many different things when it comes to demand generation or content development or creating relationships with customers and things like that. Like dip your toes in all these different pieces of the marketing funnel. Customer marketing is new and we don't know if customer marketing today is gonna look anything like it's gonna look like in five years from now. And so customer marketing is such an awesome developmental role to get to touch all these different aspects of marketing and other different aspects of what's going on at your organization.
So become super versatile and maybe launch into something else if you decide that customer marketing is maybe not the thing. Also just don't stop talking to your customers at all times. Go to industry events as often as you can, go to your own events as often as you can. Ask customers to do a quick coffee date, do the interviews yourself when you're doing these case study interviews, if they live near you, go and have the meeting in person. It's going to be those relationships with the customers and that deep empathy that you build for your customers that's going to make you really good at your job.
Will: I love that. I love that. You know, dip your fingers in every cup or every pot and don't stop talking to your customer. I mean, I think those are great pieces of advice for any company and really anyone on their own career path. So thank you very much for that. Before we let you go, where can someone find you if they want to connect with you or learn more about what you're talking about here today?
Patrick: Yeah, totally. So you can obviously find me on LinkedIn - Patrick Kaley on LinkedIn. You can also check out Swoogo by going to SWOOGO events, but I also run a monthly book club. It's a virtual book club where we read nonfiction books and then we join in a Google Meet and compete in trivia about the book. And so there's somebody who gets to win the book club every year. We have a cool group of little over 100 folks that join us. I would love for folks to join and then we get to chat every month.
Will: And where do we find the book club?
Patrick: Yeah, you can find the book club at DelightBookClub.com.
Will: Oh, I like that name. DelightBookClub.com thank you.
Patrick: Thank you.
Will: Wonderful.
Patrick: I was able to grab it. Yeah, Delight Club was taken, but there we go.
Will: Well, thank you very, very much for joining us here today, Patrick, and I'm really looking forward to hearing just how much our audience enjoys this episode.
Patrick: Thank you. Thank you, Will. Appreciate it.
