Partnering with your customers can be the answer to boosting your marketing impact – B2B Marketing Online

PVD Products Inc. is a leading manufacturer of custom thin-film deposition systems capable of depositing a variety of materials as small as fractions of a nanometer onto various objects. This exacting process plays a critical role in many products and technologies from medical devices and semiconductors to military radar systems and alternative energy.
After more than 20 years in business, PVD Products had a superb reputation and a loyal base of customers ranging from high-profile universities, small tech startups and Fortune 500 companies. PVD Products knew the market would soon grow quickly and knew they’d have to step up their marketing efforts to capitalize on this growth.
With the help of the consultant Baron Strategic Partners, PVD Products interviewed customers, analyzed sales data, and identified several customers (world-leading academic institutions) willing to openly discuss their use of PVD systems. 
PVD invited one of these high-profile customers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to collaborate on a joint webinar. MIT accepted. PVD hosted and managed the effort and MIT provided their excellent speakers.
PVD Products brought in MarketReach to plan, execute, and manage a pilot webinar and gauge its marketing effectiveness. Leveraging PVD Products’ excellent reputation and the MIT brand, MarketReach publicized the webinar and drew attendees through an integrated email campaign. In terms of numbers, the campaign was a great success:
Encouraged by the pilot results, PVD Products worked with MarketReach to quickly plan a second webinar in partnership with Ohio State University. Implementing a similar outbound program, PVD Products and MarketReach once again received great results, including:
Today, partnering with customers is a standard element of PVD Products marketing initiatives, with four such webinars held yearly. By holding these joint webinars, PVD Products has significantly improved their sales pipeline. 
“These webinars have provided vastly better results than all our social media marketing efforts of the past two years combined,” said Jim Greer, president of PVD Products. “With MarketReach’s help, we have also implemented a follow-up lead-generation effort to the webinar registrants. These marketing initiatives from the past year have more than doubled the size of our prospect contact list.”
Here are a few factors that can impact your success in partnering with customers on marketing efforts: 
For PVD Products, it all started with listening intently to their customers. 
Listening to your customers and gaining an understanding of the true perceived customer value of your offerings is often not as easy as it appears. Many companies begin this effort thinking they know why customers value their offerings and then find they were wrong.
Proper customer listening will also help you to identify: 
To enlist a customer in marketing efforts, you need to understand that customer’s goals. You get only so many chances to ask a customer to be a marketing partner, so do your homework. Make sure the partnership will be a true win-win.
In PVD’s case, they recognized that their customers were academic researchers who need publicity and industry recognition to attract both research grants and top student candidates. This opened the door to a discussion of the joint webinar concept.
You need to identify the marketing effort that will yield the greatest impact. While testimonials and success stories can yield benefits, there are other productive ways to partner with your customers, including:
When you’re a successful business leader, it’s easy to assume you know your customers well and know how to reach them. But knowing your market and customers well does not always mean knowing how to:
If you have any question about your expertise in these areas, turn to an experienced, reputable consultant or agency for support.
Partnering with your customers is just one way to revitalize marketing effectiveness. Indicators of your customer-partnering success may include: 
For more information on how PVD Products partnered with its customers to boost marketing impact, read the following article by two of the MarketReach’s own executives.
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