these are our products and services – these are the people who use our product and how they use it, here is how your life gets better when you apply this to your business / process / etc., and last – by the way – this is us – and we’re humans like you – not a marketing or sales machine. We are here for you – with you -and this is the stuff we stand for. Need some help? We got you. No problem. We get it… You are welcome to test the water and talk about it with experts, peers, and other browsers – “come on in… the water is fine.” 

To put it another way, you are putting up a flag on a little island in the middle of the market and letting the right audience find you. This is not just a customer or client portal. It is a “swing for the fences”, “go for broke”, “pull out all the stops”, and whatever other “even if it’s risky – you should do it and hope for the best” analogy that makes sense in this moment. Pretty scary, huh? Well – we all know that “hope is not a strategy.” And likewise curating customers is not a completely passive, wait-and-see strategy either. It should not be the sole way you create your audience base. But, when executed correctly as a part of your broader customer acquisition strategy, it can accelerate your pipeline. It’s an approach that recognizes the power of relational communities of individuals in influencing broader purchasing behavior. This is greater than just a marketing or growth activity. It is a strategy that can change minds about your brand, and turn browsers to believers to buyers to advocates to evangelists.

Inside your organization, it also requires belief and adoption from the top down. Historically, marketing has focused on creating a Top of Funnel (ToFU) – Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – or pipeline of prospects onto which they could then push their ideas, products, or services. We shout out our message at the big group, and it slowly falls away, culling the audience into a more finite group. We continue to barrage them with messages, but now sales gets into the act too – adding to communication and content until another culling occurs and the remaining prospects sit in the Middle of Funnel (MoFU) or Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) stage. At this point, and even with a fairly concise customer journey, content and engagement, and/or value creation strategy, marketing and sales tend to shout and spin and wave our hands, jump up and down and generally play the Great and Powerful OZ, winning the war of attrition with a select few as they convert from Bottom of Funnel (BoFU) to Closed:Won or Lost. It’s not an easy journey for you or your pipeline. Even on your best day.

Similarly, product teams have focused on creating products that differentiate – or ones that level the playing field with your competitors in order to attract prospects. However, this approach is also losing effectiveness in today’s market of rapid feature and function commoditization, where consumers are better educated, have higher expectations, and are empow-ered by the ease of eCommerce Digital Experience (DX) and transactions to expect simple, intuitive processes. They are inundated with paid media and skeptical of everything because of the likelihood they have been burned at least once by the over promise – under deliver of a buyer’s journey, or a failure to find value post-signing. Because of this, today’s consumers are more and more wary of the most well-intentioned marketing and advertising channels, choose how and where they acquire information, and are more likely to trust their peers than company “paid” marketing messages. There needs to be a better way to leverage those peers, right?

Over the last decade, largely driven by the rise of intent data, personalization technology, advancements in marketing automation, and the need to move beyond traditional lead-based customer acquisition strategies, I see that many B2B marketing organizations have adopted Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies to target individuals within an organization. The thought here being that when you solve problems and answer “why” for each stakeholder along a decision-making chain – before you actively engage the broader organization, your buyers are more likely to be further along their decision-making process, and less likely to have objections that slow or roadblock the sales process.

By reaching out to more targeted stakeholders with a per-sonalized message, you create the impression you care about the outcome for each while reinforcing your brand promise and demonstrating your compassion and understanding. This marketing strategy is now a valuable approach to brand aware-ness and audience creation. Though early adoption of ABM was slowed by technology limitations, misalignment between expectations of sales and marketing, a lack of scalable data-driven personalization, and because it was largely unproven when the strategy was first released into the wild – it has steadily gained traction, and in most mature marketing strategies it is considered to be table stakes. The curated customer strategy takes the ABM strategy one step further, casting a more inclusive net out to engage everyone from an organiza-tion who might be interested to come and learn more.

Unlike other B2B push-marketing “interruptive” concepts, the curated customer approach expands on the human-to-human (H2H) engagement philosophy, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and inclusivity as a brand. (I’ll take you on a deeper dive of H2H in a little bit.) Taking H2H a step further, the curated customer approach focuses on creating an authentic space to listen, build relationships with customers on a personal level, and allow a broader audience of consumers and prospects to converge into a community where they can collaborate, learn, grow, and celebrate shared successes with your technology or service.

Instead of targeting specific personas or a spread within an organization like an ABM campaign, companies that adopt a curated customer approach drive a second line of focus into market by speaking broadly and aspirationally to the individual stakeholders and personas across the entire ecosystem – and then curating groups of hand-raisers into like-minded communities of consumers with similar interests and values. By curating these seemingly disparate individuals into a community of “possibility”, companies provide a unique and engaging experience that resonates and solves problems across a target audience that has asked to have their problems solved.

By speaking to individuals as individuals, instead of throwing ideas out en masse, a company can, and will be perceived as putting the needs of the customer before itself.

The curated customer approach directly responds to the needs and trends of today’s consumers because it emphasizes the power of a community to drive the marketing process. Instead of just relying on traditional marketing channels, companies that adopt a curated customer approach add hyper-personalized streams and rely on word-of-mouth and social proof to promote their products and services. It takes a leap of faith on the company’s part – you’ll have to trust in the power of community and believe in your brand and product value so much that you are willing to let your audience come to you as best-in-class or best-in-breed thought leaders. This capitalizes on the philosophy that the customers make the brand – not the other way around.

The future of customer engagement is not in casting wider nets – it’s in curating tighter circles. By curating groups of like-minded individuals and providing them with an engaging and personalized community experience, companies can curate an audience that evolves into a loyal customer base that is more likely to become brand evangelists and spread the word about the products or services they use in an unpressured environment. The curated customer approach is a powerful way to drive sales and promote brand loyalty in today’s market. It removes the company/client barrier and establishes a dialogue between the community and the solution.

It’s time to stop shouting – and start listening.