Customer Marketing
Start with a strong understanding of your audience
Customer marketing emphasizes elevating, leveraging, and engaging your most strategic customer relationships to drive growth and foster long-term partnerships. Successful customer marketing relies on understanding and segmenting your audience and creating experiences to support their needs and turn them into brand advocates.
Strong customer relationships can be harnessed to create impactful success stories and testimonials, which can be featured in press releases, investor presentations, blogs, and speaking opportunities at industry conferences and events. These initiatives not only amplify the brand but also provide valuable resources for equipping sales teams to engage prospects more effectively. Moreover, strategic partnerships can drive product development and shape business priorities through initiatives like Customer Advisory Boards, fostering collaboration and alignment with customer needs and market trends.
Large Enterprise Buyer Persona Profiles
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of a company's ideal customer, based on market research and real data about existing customers. At PayPal under my leadership, our marketing strategy team created Enterprise Buyer Personas for company-wide alignment around our customers and enable marketing, sales, and enablement to:
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Better understand our unique targets: Business Leaders, and Growth, Technical, and Financial Buyers
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Speak to our audience in their language with relevant messaging
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Understand the behaviors, needs, and and challenges of our targets
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Target and personalize our marketing efforts
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Create more effective marketing campaigns
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Develop sales tools positioning PayPal products as solutions
Our Persona document was a 60 page confidential report that enabled our internal audiences to:
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Learn about the buyers
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Understand how to communicate with each
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Breakthrough with relevant terminology and interests
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Know where and how to find them in the industry
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Speak consistently with key messaging
This is a snapshot of the high-level summaries of our four key targets in 2023:
Global Thought Leadership Invitation-Only Executive Events
The programs also prominently feature panel discussions, during which executives hear from peers who openly share success stories and strategies for overcoming challenges.
PayPal hosts annual executive thought leadership events designed for its most strategic customers, bringing together leading minds in technology and commerce to Shape the Future. As a key member of the core program team, we ensured the event offered abundant opportunities for networking, learning, and professional growth, complemented by a dynamic agenda of sessions and activities.
In the past, executive (C-Suite) attendees were inspired by keynote speakers such as Scott Galloway and James Clear, captivated by fireside chats featuring celebrities like Trevor Noah, Susie Wolff, and Magic Johnson, and informed about cutting-edge innovations in commerce through presentations by PayPal’s executive leadership team including CEO, Alex Chriss, President, Global Markets, Suzan Kererre, and EVP, General Manager, Frank Keller.
Structured and informal networking opportunities allowed participants to connect with peers and industry leaders, fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange.
A customer panel discussion at our C360 Berlin event in the Fall of 2023.
I was directly accountable for identifying, recruiting, and engaging customers to participate in our panel discussions at each regional event. This process involved close collaboration and alignment with the sales organization, including sales leaders, account executives, and customer success managers. With the addition of a partner showcases in 2024, this effort expanded to include coordination with the partner management team. It also required partnerships with PR & Comms and our executive moderators to ensure seamless integration and representation across all participants.
Topics explored by our executive customer panels at the 2024 C360 US event included:
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Driving Increased Sales & Loyalty Through Frictionless Experiences
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Leveraging AI & Data to Transform Digital Ad Spend
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Creating Value Beyond Payments
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Innovating and Emerging Trends in eCommerce Platforms
Careful consideration was given to ensuring diversity across industries, roles, and panelists, fostering the most insightful, informative, and dynamic discussions on stage. This balance was crucial for delivering a breadth of perspectives and creating engaging conversations that resonated with a wide audience.
When it all comes together, it is magical!
Customer Holiday Good Campaign
An important aspect of our customer contact strategy at PayPal was our annual Good Campaign. And it was my favorite program of the year.
In place of year-end holiday gifts, we sent customers, partners and select vendors "Good Cards" to show our appreciation for their business.
Recipients were able to donate the card amount to their favorite charity, allowing us to support causes important to them.
In 2014, we mailed over 1,600 cards and donated over $60,000. The heartfelt thank you notes we received, along with the personal stories shared with us, were incredibly powerful and deeply inspirational.
That’s doing good together.
For sales tools & resources, please visit Sales Enablement
For customer success stories, please visit Case Studies
Designing a Customer Reference Program - Coming Soon