Driving Value Across Every Customer Touchpoint

To be impactful, marketing should stretch far beyond awareness and lead generation into every customer touchpoint. By becoming an internal enabler and expanding marketing’s effectiveness across the entire customer journey, you'll transform from a cost center to a strategic growth engine for your entire business.

What is the risk of neglecting the full customer journey as a marketer?

Simply, it’s reducing the ability for marketing to drive commercial value for the business.?

For marketing to truly drive business outcomes, its strategic focus must extend beyond the traditional responsibilities of building awareness and generating opportunities.?

While these front-end activities are essential, they represent only a fraction of marketing's potential impact. In today's business environment - where customer retention, repeat business, and advocacy directly impact profitability - marketing leaders must take ownership of how they can enhance the entire customer journey to deliver their full value to the organisation.

But what does this expanded ownership look like in practice? And how can marketing leaders effectively extend their influence beyond lead generation without hitting barriers and blocks from the rest of the business??

The answer lies, as always, with the customer.

The Customer Journey as Marketing's Strategic Framework

Customers don't experience your business in departmental silos - they experience a continuous journey from first awareness through to long-term partnership. At each stage, their perception of your organisation is shaped by every interaction, communication, and experience.?

Marketing's unique advantage is its customer-centric perspective and communication expertise that can strengthen these experiences at every step. When marketing extends its strategic influence across the entire customer lifecycle, it transforms from a cost center focused on acquisition to a value driver optimising the complete customer relationship.

Marketing's unique advantage is its customer-centric perspective and communication expertise that can strengthen these experiences at every step.

Done well and the impact can be found in commercial metrics such as customer lifetime value, retention rates and customer growth, and in insight metrics such as customer feedback.?

This journey-wide perspective also reveals untapped market opportunities and product-market fit gaps that siloed departments might miss - turning marketing into a source of strategic growth insights beyond campaign execution.

Every Interaction Counts

Because every interaction with your business contributes to a customer's perception (see my earlier article on experience), marketing has an outcomes-based role to play at each stage of the customer journey.?

As a marketing leader, it's our job to ensure that these conversations move beyond templates, visual identity, and email communications to deliver measurable commercial impact - whether that's increased conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction scores, improved retention, or greater share of wallet from existing customers.

First, understanding the specific role marketing plays at each stage is crucial to success.

And that role evolves significantly throughout the journey.

Marketing’s Role in the 5 Stages of a Customer Journey?

Mapping how marketing can support all stages of the customer journey is key to adding impact. Here are the five main stages and where marketing can play a role:

1. Your Out-of-Market Audience

Let’s start here with people that don’t know you and don’t want to buy what you sell. This is estimated to be 95% of your total addressable market - a big audience that can’t be ignored. Marketing’s remit here is to build awareness and trust so that when buyers do come into market they’ll think of you and trust you to deliver what they need.?

Your internal allies here are across the entire business - the experts you can work with to build engagement that's of value to your audience. Capturing their insights and value in ways that engages your audience is key to building trust. Think about customer support teams who understand common pain points, and product specialists who can articulate your unique value proposition in meaningful ways to specific segments.

2. Your In-Market Audience

The most obvious aspect of marketing’s remit and the easiest element to measure -? getting people through the door.?Finding buyers, getting their attention, engaging with them, nurturing them and supporting their buying journey.

It’s not linear, so understanding and serving what the buyer needs is key to success. Sales is naturally the area of alignment needed here - SDR teams, field sales, product specialists. Marketing must drive the experience for buyers however they decide to discover what you sell. And the results show in opportunities, sales velocity, closure rates and revenue, not just marketing pipeline and engagement with campaigns.??

3. Your New Customers

That transition from the highs of the purchase to the depths of buyers’ remorse is a critical time for a customer.? Marketing can support this introduction to the next phase for the customer by doubling down on experience and comms. For example, making onboarding information accessible, clear and helpful such as a customer microsite or email series could enhance this stage and the work the individuals involved are doing. Working with sales and whoever looks after them next (such as customer success teams or projects teams) is crucial.?

Capturing feedback at this stage on their buying experience is crucial to improve the buying stage so create structured feedback loops through surveys, welcome calls, or onboarding check-ins to gather these insights.

4. Your Existing Customers

Whether your business works on a subscription basis or relies on repeat business, marketing’s remit at this stage is critical to renewal or return. Working closely with the teams looking after the customer like account managers and customer success managers is essential to you adding value and creating commercial opportunities for upsell and cross-sell.?

You are there to create opportunities for them that will deepen relationships, add value, restate the value, and showcase ways the customer can solve their problems by leaning into the relationship they have. Listening - to both internal stakeholders and customers - is critical to understanding what the challenges are so you can support better customer and commercial outcomes.?

5. Your Champions

Every business needs a set of champions that advocate for them, refer others in their direction and shout about their experience. For marketing to effectively identify and capture their stories to help other buyers and customers, marketing needs to play a role in the management of this segment of customers. Work with the teams that can identify and introduce marketing to champions including those delivering services, looking after the relationship and leaders getting involved in events or other relationship building activity. Understand and own the relationship of the champions so that you can add additional value and make them feel valued.?

From Strategy to Implementation

So how do we impact each stage effectively? And how can we implement a strategic marketing approach to every stage?

Think beyond brand and demand generation

To be effective at every stage you need to think beyond the early stages. These two areas of marketing execution are essential to marketing having commercial impact but it isn’t the full picture. If you are driving the front end of the engine and it’s leaking at the other, you’ll be working twice as hard to deliver growth. Understanding more than the ‘revenue in’ element is crucial to marketing success.?

Be the internal eyes of the customer?

You are in a neutral position in marketing to map the experience for the customer at every stage of their relationship with your business.

• Follow the customer through your organisation.
• Understand their experience at each stage through feedback and conversations.
• See where their experience changes from the value proposition set out in their buying journey.
• Identify how marketing can help and support overcoming those challenges.

You have skills and tech that other areas don’t have access to that will enhance the experience for the customer no end.?

Work with the leaders across the entire customer journey

Sales and marketing alignment has always been considered the holy grail for commercial outcomes, however, a marketers alignment has to reach way beyond the sales team. The relationship with services teams, products teams, customers success teams, renewal teams, and everyone in between is crucial to marketing success. Understanding their measures of success, their drivers, their relationship with the customer and what they need support with. This insight will help you to build a picture of the customer’s relationship with them and how marketing can support that journey.

Support the business outcomes at every stage?

Build a marketing strategy that serves the customer and the commercial outcomes the business is striving towards. Align the marketing strategy with the company strategy at every stage of the customer journey. You’ve built a picture of the challenges at every stage and how marketing can support and enhance each stage. Build strategies to do so.?

Become the strategic partner to your colleagues

To execute a marketing strategy that serves every stage of the customer journey you need input and buy-in from your boardroom colleagues on the strategy and tactical approach. Discuss the challenges, share how you feel marketing can support their goals, agree the measures of success beyond typical marketing metrics. Report against these measures and communicate impact and outcomes, not outputs.?

Connect customer data across touchpoints?

While not every business has a unified customer data platform, even basic data integration between marketing automation, CRM, and customer success tools can provide the foundation for journey-based insights that drive more effective engagement.

Measuring Marketing's Full-Journey Impact

To demonstrate marketing's value across the full customer journey, measurement must evolve beyond traditional metrics like MQLs, pipeline contribution, and campaign performance.?

Consider these stage-appropriate metrics:

• Your Out-of-Market Audience: Brand awareness lift, share of voice, engagement with thought leadership.
• Your In-Market Audience: Conversion rates, sales cycle velocity, revenue contribution.
• Your New Customers: Onboarding completion rates, time-to-first-value, NPS at 30/60/90 days.
• Your Existing Customers: Retention rates, expansion revenue, product adoption metrics, customer health scores.
• Your Champions: Referral volume, case study participation, community engagement.

Creating a comprehensive dashboard that demonstrates marketing's contribution to these metrics will mean you can review it regularly with leadership colleagues to reinforce marketing's role as a driver of business outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle.

When presenting these metrics to leadership, frame them in financial impact terms - showing how improved retention directly reduces customer aquisition cost (CAC) to customer life time value (CLTV) ratios or how champion-driven referrals lower acquisition costs compared to traditional channels.

Overcoming Resistance to Marketing Getting Involved

Expanding marketing's effectiveness across the customer journey won't happen overnight. You may face resistance from teams who view customer relationships as ‘their territory’ or who don't understand marketing's potential contribution beyond acquisition.

• Begin by seeking to understand each team's goals and challenges, then identify specific ways marketing can help them to achieve success.?
• Start with small wins - perhaps improving onboarding materials or creating customer success stories - demonstrate value before proposing larger initiatives.
• Build cross-functional working groups with representatives from customer-facing teams to collaborate on journey mapping and experience improvements.?
• Position marketing as an enabler of their success rather than a department seeking to take control.

Most importantly, document and communicate successes in business outcome terms that resonate with leadership, not marketing jargon.

The Business Outcome Focused Marketing Leader

When marketing extends its strategic value and execution capabilities across the entire customer journey, it transforms from a departmental function to a business-critical engine for growth.?

By aligning marketing activities with customer needs at each stage and partnering effectively with cross-functional teams, we can drive substantial improvements in retention, expansion, and advocacy - metrics that directly impact the bottom line and demonstrate marketing's value to the business.

The future of marketing belongs to marketing leaders who think beyond campaigns and leads to become architects of the complete customer experience.

Key Takeaways

? Beyond acquisition: Marketing creates the most value when it extends beyond awareness and lead generation to impact the entire customer journey.

? Stage-specific strategies: Each stage of the customer journey (out-of-market, in-market, new customers, existing customers, champions) requires different marketing approaches and distinct cross-functional partnerships.

? The customer champion: Position marketing as the internal voice of the customer by mapping experiences, gathering feedback, and identifying gaps between promises and delivery.

? Incremental approach: Start with small, high-impact wins to demonstrate value before proposing larger initiatives when facing resistance from other departments.

? Measure what matters: Move beyond traditional marketing KPIs to include journey-appropriate measurements like retention rates, expansion revenue, referral volume, and customer lifetime value.

? Enablement mindset: Frame marketing's role as enabling other teams' success rather than attempting to control customer relationships.

Thanks for reading Make Marketing Matter.

I'm Emma, an in-house tech marketing leader passionate about elevating B2B marketing to deliver commercial impact and business outcomes.

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