{"id":12790,"date":"2017-01-13T04:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T10:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rocksdigital.com\/?p=12790"},"modified":"2025-07-29T12:56:46","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T17:56:46","slug":"customers-marketing-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocksdigital.com\/customers-marketing-team\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Include Customers as Part of Your Marketing Team"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Customers<\/a>
Image Credit \u2013 Black Salmon\/shutterstock.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What if your customers ran your company or were a part of your marketing team<\/a>? Or, were in charge of your customer service, ran your product team, or managed your branding? Guess what \u2013 they already do. Word-of-mouth has always placed control of your marketing into the hands of consumers, and social media sites like Facebook have only intensified this.<\/p>\n

Including Customers on Your Marketing Team<\/h2>\n

The “upside-down funnel<\/a>” (read this if you haven’t already) \u2013 also called the hourglass model or bowtie \u2013 is old-fashioned word-of-mouth. But now it’s measurable and able to be amplified through social media sites like Facebook. However, most of us don’t see the impact, because we’re only looking at Google Analytics.<\/p>\n

Our world has changed from being just about websites because most of your reach and engagement is not on a website you control \u2013 it is in social media.<\/p>\n

Make the Customer-Based Marketing Team Your Content Production Machine<\/h3>\n

Some traditional marketers think they can control their customers like in the old days of TV and print. Back then, media distribution ran through a constrained bottleneck of a handful of media properties. Now that bottleneck is busted wide open, as anyone can amplify their voice to be heard. For example, Dennis Yu once shared how Hotwire\u00a0gave him the wrong room<\/a>\u00a0and initially failed to correct the mistake. He ran Facebook ads at a dollar a day, targeting people who work at Hotwire, and he got it resolved\u00a0within 2 days\u2014with a full refund.<\/p>\n

Now, and in the future, the customer is your marketing team \u2013\u00a0their combined voices far outweigh the company’s voice. And they have a lot more credibility\u00a0since people trust their friends.\u00a0They are wary of brands and are allergic to advertising. This is especially true of video, which has nearly 5 billion video views on Facebook each day. Add in YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat and there are over 15 billion video views per day.<\/p>\n

Marketers always need a bigger budget and a bigger staff so, what if you turned your customers into your content production machine? And what if you could get them to do it for free?<\/p>\n

Understand Tracking and Measuring Social Media ROI <\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is, customers have always been handling a large part of any business\u2019s marketing and they have been doing it for free by word-of-mouth, which can now be done on a grander scale through Facebook and other social media sites. The reason businesses may not see the effect is because they have not had the ability to measure it.<\/p>\n

When we speak at conferences, the #1 question we get is “How do we measure social media ROI<\/a>?” Or something along those lines, because marketers and businesses want to know why Facebook conversion numbers don’t jive with Google Analytics. They wonder if perhaps Facebook is inflating their numbers, double-counting conversions, or otherwise measuring “wrong.”<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s Impact is Undercounted Due To:<\/span><\/p>\n