Customer marketing has long been an untapped spring for marketers to focus on--especially with sales so focused on new customer acquisition, it's not a surprise that as you think about how your marketing budget is divided up, with the exception of "case studies and references," often times little money or resources are devoted to what happens after the sale is complete.
But with marketing's mandate today being to find revenue across the board, if you haven't yet broached the subject, have a chat with your customer success counterpart. Increasingly as companies scale it's inevitable that growth in the front of the house will slow down (few businesses compound their growth forever, the customer base just gets too big to keep doing it), and the CEO and CFO are going to be on the hunt for new revenue sources.
In many places (in tech companies and outside) the extent of the customer marketing function is some newsletters and the success team outreach. But if the CMO and their team is going to be responsible for the end-to-end customer engagement strategy, then the marketing team can't stop at waters-edge i.e. the sale--it has to keep going. After all, in a SaaS or leasing model especially, the customer is only renting your product, not buying it.
Additionally, more and more CS teams are starting to pick up quotas for their account managers to upset and cross-sell new features from the product and engineering teams into the customer base. And guess what that means--they need your help! Beyond a newsletter, beyond a semi-regular account review, you need to start engaging with these customers directly--from implementation right up until renewal. This is where brand comes in, this is where your content strategy comes in, this is where your campaigns come in--they all have to be adopted in voice, tone, and focus to your customer base.
Often times companies will try to accomplish this with the team doing the customer acquisition--but often times it's a bridge too far. Their focus is on volume, on getting new names into the database, in the direct mail/ABM campaign. Not on how to translate all these activities into working with your customer base.
Hiring my first customer marketing manager was one of the smartest moves I ever made (it didn't hurt that she was awesome and made me look good at several jobs!). Making that investment in marketing to your customer further cements the value proposition that marketing can deliver to the organization, can energize and wake-up an under-developed source of revenue, and can create loyal fans and advocates that won't hesitate to re-up with your product or solution once their lease ends.
So if you're not sure if it's worth it or if you need it, trust me, you do. Invest here see the results!