Welcome to the Deeto Hub
A resource and community space for modern marketers, sellers, and builders using customer voice to grow — together.
A resource and community space for modern marketers, sellers, and builders using customer voice to grow — together.
This hub is built for anyone who wants to do more with the voices of their customers. Whether you're scaling advocacy, building trust with proof, or rethinking how to go to market — you're in the right place.
How-to guides and playbooks for building with customer voice
Campaign-ready templates and swipe files
Benchmark reports and reference best practices
Event recordings, expert sessions, and community spotlights
Ask questions. Share ideas. Trade wins. This is your space.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. The Deeto community connects you with other leaders using customer voice to build better GTM motions, faster-growing brands, and smarter strategies. If you are interested in joining when it launches, sign up below.
Automate advocacy management workflows
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Discover practical guides, templates, and tools to help your team close more deals, faster.
In B2B, your long-term success depends on how well you build and maintain trust with your customers. You aren’t just making one-off sales. That means keeping communication open, adding value at every stage, and showing up when it counts.
This is where customer relationship marketing comes in. It’s not just about marketing to people, it’s about marketing with them in mind, long after the initial sale.
In this guide, I’ll give you my seven best marketing strategies to strengthen customer relationships and keep them engaged for the long haul.
A customer relationship strategy is essentially your game plan for building long-term, loyal connections with your customers. It focuses on how you’ll nurture relationships during and after the sale through communication, support, education, and added value.
The goals: retention, trust, and brand advocacy.
In B2B especially, where deals are high-stakes and long-lasting, relationship marketing helps you stay top of mind, reduce churn, and turn satisfied customers into repeat buyers or even champions of your brand.
Think of it as shifting from “How do I sell to them?” to “How do I support them so well they never want to leave?”
Customer expectations have evolved. They want more than just a product, they want a partner. A strong customer relationship strategy helps you deliver on that expectation and unlock real business value in return.
It costs 5-7x less less to keep a customer than to win a new one. A solid relationship strategy helps you stay engaged, proactive, and relevant. That leads customers to stick around longer.
When you consistently deliver value, your customers are more likely to upgrade, expand, or renew. That means more revenue per account without increasing your sales effort.
Happy, loyal customers reduce your need for aggressive acquisition spend. You’ll spend less time filling the funnel and more time growing the value of the base you already have. You’ll also have better reviews and more referrals, both of which reduce your average acquisiion cost.
Great relationships turn customers into champions. Whether it’s referrals, reviews, testimonials, or even customer references, your best marketing comes from the people you’ve already helped succeed.
In most SaaS categories, switching costs are only getting lower and features are only becoming more commoditized. One thing your competitors can’t replicate, though, is the one-to-one relationship you’ve built with a customer. Relationship marketing gives you staying power.
The relationships you have with your customers evolve as your product, market, and user base mature. And while growth introduces complexity, it also opens the door to deeper, more strategic engagement.
If you’re selling or rolling out AI, you're not just offering a tool. What you’re really doing is asking customers to trust an opaque system to make decisions for them. The opportunity: turn that fear of adoption into confidence through transparency.
Show your work. Offer “explainability” features, share real-world use cases, and give your customer success team the ammo they need to educate, not just support. The best companies turn AI from a black box into a competitive differentiator by bringing customers into the loop, not keeping them out of it.
In a subscription model, the sale is never really over. Every billing cycle is a new opportunity to prove your worth.
Automate the boring stuff — billing reminders, usage summaries, renewal notices — but don’t automate away the relationship. Use product usage data to trigger human check-ins. If someone’s slowly using your platform less and less or hitting their limit, that’s your cue to step in with tailored guidance or an upsell offer that actually makes sense.
You’re already sitting on a goldmine of customer data. Usage patterns, support tickets, and feedback loops are all at your disposal. Most companies leave it untouched (or at least don’t do as much as they could with it).
The smart ones connect the dots. If a customer hasn’t touched a new feature, queue up a guided tour. If they’ve opened three support tickets this month, escalate their success plan. Proactive outreach rooted in behavior is what turns your relationship from reactive to irreplaceable.
The bigger you get, the easier it is to treat people like numbers. That’s where you lose them.
But scale doesn’t have to mean impersonal. Build segmentation that goes beyond industry and job title; group users by goals, engagement level, or specific feature adoption. Then serve each cohort with relevant content, personalized onboarding, and targeted success playbooks.
You can also use AI to facilitate personalization at scale. Create triggers for when customers view certain content, use certain aspects of your product, and respond to certain campaigns. And use an AI-powered platform like Deeto to collect and analyze UGC and customer insights.
Every strong customer relationship strategy is built on three key pillars:
You can’t build a relationship with someone you don’t understand. And in B2B, where buyer journeys are long, layered, and involve an average of 13 different decision-makers, “understanding” goes way beyond name, job title, and industry.
You need profiles rooted in real behavior, including why they buy, how they buy, and what success looks like for them after they buy. You’ll have to interview customers, analyze journey data, and loop in your sales and success teams to capture additional insights. Consider decision influence, internal politics, procurement blockers, and what drives urgency on their end.
Your CRM, product analytics, customer support logs, and VoC data are all pieces of the puzzle. When you connect them, patterns emerge: what successful customers do early on, where drop-offs happen, and how different segments behave over time. Use that to tailor onboarding, predict churn risk, personalize communication, and even inform future product development.
Deeto helps turn this segmentation into action. By identifying your best-fit customers and surfacing their success stories in real time, Deeto enables peer-driven content, referrals, and insights you can’t get from analytics alone. It bridges the gap between knowing who your customers are and activating them as part of your growth strategy.
Strong relationships are built through ongoing, meaningful communication. Your messaging needs to be intentional, personalized, and delivered in the right context, at the right time.
Start by developing a multi-channel communication strategy. Customer relationship marketing is all about meeting your customers where they are and creating a seamless experience across all your digital touchpoints:
And message personalization is no longer optional. A generic blast might get you an open, but it won’t build trust. Use your purchase history, feature usage, and industry trends data to tailor your messaging. Even small personalization tweaks (like referencing recent activity or highlighting a relevant use case) make a huge difference in perceived value.
Content marketing plays a key role here. But instead of writing about your product, show customers how to be more successful with it. Share playbooks, customer success stories, and best practices rooted in your expertise.
This is where Deeto shines because it turns your most successful customers into credible voices who can tell your story more persuasively than any sales deck (and gives you the tools to reupurpose their feedback for marketing). When prospects and customers hear from real users solving real problems, they’re more likely to stay engaged.
What sets you apart in this category is proactive support. That could mean flagging an issue before the customer notices, offering solutions based on their specific setup, or looping in the right expert before escalation is needed.
Self-service also matters. A well-organized knowledge base, video walkthroughs, and AI-driven chat give customers the resources to solve problems on their own. But don’t hide behind automation; real humans should still be easy to reach when it counts. Self-service just acts as a filter for the basic stuff.
In my experience, the best support teams always partner with success teams. They learn from issues instead of just solving them. Trends in support tickets can inform product improvements, trigger customer education efforts, or spark outreach from your account managers.
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Once you’ve built the foundation by understanding your customers, communicating consistently, and supporting them well, you can finally amplify those efforts. These seven relationship marketing strategies help you deepen loyalty, drive repeat business, and turn satisfied customers into your strongest growth engine.
I’ve already touched on this one a bit, but let’s dive a little deeper. True personalization is about delivering the right message, experience, or resource to the right customer at exactly the right time, and AI is what makes that scale possible.
Use a tool like Mixpanel, or your own product analytics to capture behavioral data from logins, feature usage, support tickets, webinar attendance, and NPS scores. AI can process these signals to update customer profiles in real time.
From there, you can trigger precise messaging:
And the beauty of AI is it learns. Feed it outcome data like who churned, who expanded, and who referred, then let it refine your targeting logic over time.
A feedback loop closes the gap between what your customers say, what you do about it, and how you communicate that back to them. To build one, embed feedback opportunities throughout the customer journey:
You can use Deeto to make feedback collection feel natural and timely.
Route all feedback to a single source of truth — your CRM, product board, or customer engagement platform (like Deeto, using our new Imported Contributions feature). Tag it by category (e.g., feature requests, UX issues, support gaps) so you can spot patterns fast.
Act on what you learn, then close the loop with communication back to them (“We heard you. Here’s what we improved.”). That’s where it becomes a relationship marketing strategy.
You don’t just get loyalty, you earn and reinforce it. And customer activation is the first step in that process.
Now… you can’t expect loyalty from a customer who’s barely touched your product. Activation means helping them reach their first “win” quickly. To show users the right market content, you first have to identify when customers are stuck or disengaged, then intervene by surfacing help content, triggering a check-in from CS, or guiding them toward unused features.
Once you’ve activated your base, loyalty and activation programs help lock in value and use your customers for organic growth. But you have to engage them.
You can reward repeat behavior (renewals, feature usage, or referral marketing) with exclusive perks like priority support, early access, discounts, and invites to beta groups. But the best loyalty strategies aren’t always transactional. They’re about recognition. A customer who feels appreciated is far more likely to stay and advocate for you.
Your customers don’t automatically realize the full value of your product just because they’ve signed a contract. Marketing has a critical role to play in making that value obvious, visible, and repeatable.
That’s why every company needs to create success-driven content. Your product team builds features, but your marketing team translates those into real-world outcomes. Use customer stories, tactical how-to content, and value-focused playbooks to show how others are winning, and make it easy for customers to replicate that success.
Think:
Then, use segmentation and automation to deliver the right content at the right time. If a customer just activated a feature, queue up a short tutorial. If they’ve been quiet for weeks, send a case study to reignite interest.
You’ll help your success team market internally, but this kind of behavior-based marketing supports them and keeps the product’s value front and center without needing a CSM on every account.
AI can analyze behavior patterns like declining usage, slow response to outreach, and drop-offs in engagement, then flag customers who are likely to churn before they actually do it. But here’s where marketing steps in:
It also surfaces accounts that are ready to expand based on signals like feature usage, team growth, and product limitations they’re reaching. Rather than hand that list straight to CS or account managers, smart customer relationship marketers run nurturing plays:
Omnichannel engagement means orchestrating touchpoints across the platforms your customers already use, in ways that feel coordinated and relevant. It’s the most critical strategy in your entire relationship marketing playbook because if you’re not showing up where your customers actually are, you’re not building a relationship.
Most B2B customers expect email as the baseline. That’s your foundation for updates, onboarding, and routine engagement. But you’ve also got to consider…
Pro tip: Your customer marketing and advocacy efforts should be just as personalized. Not every customer wants to participate in a case study or get on a reference call. Use Deeto to match contribution to comfort across your entire customer base.
If there’s any one thing you should be getting from this article, it’s that content isn’t just for lead gen. For customer relationship marketing content, the key is to stop thinking about it as a traffic play, and start thinking of it as a trust-building strategy.
Create resources that help them do their job better, get more out of your product, and look good to their boss.
And remember that consistency is what builds trust. A single killer ebook won’t drive long-term engagement. A steady cadence of relevant content delivered via email, shared on social, and embedded in your product is what keeps the relationship active and value-focused.
Tracking the right KPIs helps you understand not just how satisfied your customers are, but how engaged, loyal, and valuable they are over time.
Here are the key metrics to keep an eye on:
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Deeto helps you capitalize on loyalty by making it easy for happy customers to leave reviews, refer peers, and share their success stories exactly how they want to. That’s why it’s the clear-cut winner for customer advocacy.
Ready to see it in action? Request a demo and discover how Deeto turns customer love into growth.
Explore 7 effective customer relationship marketing strategies to boost loyalty, engagement, and long-term growth.
Today is a milestone moment for Deeto. We’re thrilled to announce our $12.5 million Series A, led by Jump Capital with participation from UpWest, TAL Ventures, Mertor, TAU Ventures and a group of forward-thinking partners who share our belief: that the most powerful growth engine isn’t your product, pitch, or pipeline — it’s your customer.
At Deeto, we’re on a mission to turn authentic customer voice into structured, scalable, and revenue-driving insights. And now, with fresh capital and expanding momentum, we’re doubling down on building the future of how businesses earn trust, convert buyers, and inform innovation.
Why Now: Why Authentic Truth Has Become the New GTM Currency
Buyers have changed. They don’t want vendor-sourced promises. They want voices they can trust. They want to learn from people who’ve done it before them — on their own terms, in their own time.
But while buyer behavior has evolved, most go-to-market systems and processes haven’t. Static case studies, manual reference processes, siloed single point-in-time NPS scores, and customer stories buried in decks just aren’t enough anymore.
What today’s buyers need is the real truth, delivered in real time.
That’s why Deeto exists. We’ve built the only AI-native platform that helps companies activate the voice of their customers across every stage of the buyer and customer journey. And we’re only getting started.
What We Do: Turn Customer Voice into a Growth Engine
Deeto transforms how businesses collect, manage, and activate customer voice. Using our platform, companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, Klaviyo, Bloomreach, and 6Sense are able to:
The result?
What's Next: A Sneak Peak at Deeto 2.0
With our Series A, we’re accelerating into our next chapter: Deeto 2.0.
Deeto 2.0 isn’t just a new version of our platform — it’s a reimagined foundation for how companies scale trust, truth, and relationships in a post-AI, post-hype world. We’re moving from proof points to customer intelligence infrastructure.
To support this evolution, we’re introducing a new layer to our platform: Deeto AI Agents — purpose-built intelligence that helps teams go from insight to action without adding headcount.
These agents aren’t just automation for automation’s sake. They’re about scaling what’s real — the voices, insights, and stories that actually influence how businesses grow.
In a world where AI-generated content is flooding every channel, the only voice that cuts through is the one that’s real. The lived experience of your customers isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s your most defensible advantage.
With this funding and momentum, Deeto is here to make that advantage accessible, scalable, and felt — everywhere it matters.
Stay tuned for more on the Deeto 2.0 front.
To our customers, partners, and new believers: thank you for trusting us to build something bold. If you’re ready to turn your customer voice into a competitive edge, reach out or follow us as we shape what’s next.
The future is customer-led. Powered by Deeto.
We're building the infrastructure to turn customer voice into a dynamic engine for trust, growth, and innovation.
Your customers receive hundreds of marketing messages every day. Most of them get ignored, deleted, or forgotten within seconds.
But some messages break through the noise. They spark conversations, build relationships, and turn prospects into loyal advocates.
The difference? Customer engagement marketing.
Instead of broadcasting one-way messages, engagement marketing creates two-way conversations. It focuses on building meaningful connections that keep your audience coming back for more.
Customer engagement marketing is an approach that focuses on creating meaningful interactions between your brand and your customers. Instead of pushing generic messages, you invite customers to participate in conversations, experiences, and relationships.
You build these connections through interactive content, personalized communications, and community-building initiatives. This turns marketing from a one-time transaction into an ongoing relationship.
Winning a customer is just the beginning. The real growth happens after the sale, when you turn customers into loyal users, advocates, and repeat buyers.
That’s the role of customer engagement marketing. It’s how you nurture relationships, deliver ongoing value, and deepen trust after someone’s already using your product.
There are a few reasons to invest in engagement-first customer marketing, specifically:
Engagement marketing transforms customers from passive recipients into active brand advocates. When you consistently provide value and foster genuine connections, customers develop emotional attachments to your brand.
These relationships run deeper than transactional exchanges. Engaged customers become invested in your success because they see you as a partner, not just a vendor.
They're more likely to recommend your services, defend your brand against competitors, and give you the benefit of the doubt when challenges arise.
Customer marketing is one of the best levers for new customer acquisition. In fact, more than 90% of today’s B2B buyers trust peers in their industry, while fewer than 1 in 3 trust company sales reps.
The faster you can activate more of your customer base, the more deals you’ll close, which is why a personalized, engagement-first approach is so critical here.
At the same time, engagement marketing is a solid retention lever because buyers have more options, shorter attention spans, and higher expectations than ever before. In most categories, product features are somewhat to entirely commoditized, so your main differentiators are (a) the customer experience you deliver and (b) your direct relationship with each customer.
Acquisition costs continue to rise across industries (2-12% in 2024 alone). Keeping existing customers costs several times less than finding new ones.
Engagement marketing strengthens the bonds between you and your current customers. You stay top of mind when they face new challenges. You position yourself as their go-to resource for solutions. And they don’t even think about exploring alternatives.
When customers are loyal, they’re more likely to upgrade services, purchase additional products, and renew contracts. Not to mention, they’re 31% more likely to pay a higher price.
When customers feel valued and understood, they view your products as investments rather than expenses and see the long-term benefits of maintaining the relationship. Meanwhile, you generate more revenue from each customer relationship while reducing the pressure to constantly onboard new accounts.
Although Google keeps pushing the timeline back, third-party cookies are definitely disappearing. Privacy regulations are tightening. Traditional tracking methods are becoming obsolete. Those trends aren’t going to revert.
Engagement marketing is the alternative path forward. Instead of relying on external data, you build direct relationships with customers who willingly share information. Customers engaging with your content and communities give you first-party data, which is more accurate, relevant, and actionable than cookie-based insights.
Traditional marketing follows a broadcast model. You create messages and push them out to large audiences through channels like email blasts, display ads, and cold outreach.
Engagement marketing flips this dynamic by creating opportunities for two-way conversations. Customers become active participants who shape the experience.
With traditional marketing tactics, you’re treating customers as passive recipients. You talk at them, hoping something sticks. Success gets measured by impressions, clicks, and immediate conversions.
Instead of interrupting people with your message, engagement marketing is about providing value that draws them in. You focus on building relationships that generate long-term results rather than quick wins.
When you implement engagement marketing effectively, you create a win-win scenario. Your business achieves better results while your customers receive superior experiences.
The benefits compound over time. Each positive interaction builds on the last, creating momentum that drives sustainable growth.
Engaged customers convert at higher rates and spend more per transaction. They trust your recommendations because you've consistently provided value. When they're ready to buy, you're their first choice.
Satisfied customers become vocal advocates. They share positive experiences with peers, leave favorable reviews, and refer new prospects. Organic word-of-mouth marketing is more credible and cost-effective than traditional advertising.
Active engagement generates rich behavioral and Voice of the Customer (VoC) data. You learn what content resonates, which channels work best, and what product-related challenges your audience faces. These insights inform product development, marketing strategies, sales workflows, and business decisions.
While competitors focus on features and pricing, you differentiate through relationships. Engaged customers are less likely to switch providers because they value the connection beyond your core product or service.
Customers receive content, recommendations, and communications tailored to their specific needs and interests. This relevance saves them time and helps them make better decisions.
Regular engagement demonstrates that you care about their success, not just their wallet. This emotional connection builds trust and loyalty that transcends business transactions.
Engagement marketing creates cohesive experiences across all touchpoints. Customers can easily find information, get support, and take action without friction or confusion.
Building a successful engagement marketing strategy requires you to focus on several core elements at once. These four pillars work together to create meaningful connections that drive results.
Master these fundamentals, and you'll have the foundation for sustainable customer relationships that fuel long-term growth.
Personalization transforms generic experiences into tailored journeys that feel crafted specifically for each individual. Your existing customers have already shown trust in your brand, now you need to honor that trust with relevant, meaningful interactions.
You can start by:
Pro tip: Use a platform like Deeto to personalize your customer advocacy experience as well. Customers onboard themselves, choose their communication and contribution preferences (e.g., testimonial vs. case study vs. reference calls), then the platform connects them with advocacy opportunities that align with those preferences.
Customers want real, consistent communication from a brand they trust. The way you communicate through content, campaigns, and conversations should reflect your company’s values and your commitment to your customers’ success.
You can master authenticity by…
Feedback loops are the “engagement” half of customer engagement marketing. This is how you create an open dialogue with your customers, then implement the marketing and product changes they’re looking for. If you want users to actively participate in your brand, you need to participate with them.
To intentionally create opportunities for dialogue:
You can also repurpose customer feedback into additional marketing content, like social proof for your website or UGC for your socials.
“Continuous value delivery” means using what you learn from your customers to keep helping them succeed long after the initial sale. If they’re hitting adoption roadblocks, you address them. If they’re asking for more advanced use cases, you show them the way. It’s an ongoing cycle of listening, improving, and delivering more value over time.
To them, this solidifies that your product and your team will keep growing with them, which turns them into long-term advocates and partners.
The pillars we’ve just covered give you the foundation. Now, it’s time to bring your engagement marketing to life through the tactics you use every day.
The goal is simple: keep delivering value, deepen relationships, and create moments that make your customers want to stay connected with your brand.
Here are some of the most effective customer engagement marketing strategies to help you do just that:
Your customers interact with your brand across email, in-app, social, events, and tons of others. They expect a seamless experience, no matter where they engage.
An omnichannel strategy ensures your messaging, tone, and value delivery stay consistent everywhere. This builds trust and makes it easier for customers to stay connected with you on their terms.
Pro tip: Map your customer touchpoints and identify gaps or inconsistencies. Then unify your messaging and personalization across channels.
Static content only goes so far. If you want to boost engagement, make your content interactive.
Think interactive product tours, quizzes, assessments, calculators, and clickable onboarding guides. These experiences pull customers in, encourage exploration, and drive stronger adoption and retention.
You can even use interactive content to guide customers toward the next step in their journey, whether that’s discovering a new feature or realizing the ROI of what they already use.
Communities (online forums, Slack groups, in-person events) give your customers a space to connect with each other, share ideas, and build loyalty to your brand, not just your product.
To win in the “community” category, facilitate peer-to-peer connections on your website, highlight top contributors, and stay active in the conversation to show you’re invested in the community’s success.
Your customers are your best marketers. Encourage them to share their stories, use cases, or creative ways they leverage your product. Then amplify that content across your marketing channels. It builds trust and inspires other customers to engage more deeply.
Find out how Deeto makes UGC easy to create, submit, and distribute.
Referral programs turn your happiest customers into advocates, while loyalty programs incentivize continued engagement and repeat purchases. Design a simple, clear program with rewards your customers actually want, and use a customer engagement platform (like Deeto) to make it easy for them to participate.
We touched on this earlier, but it’s worth reinforcing here. Beyond one-off surveys, create a consistent system for capturing customer input, sharing what you learned, and visibly acting on it. This shows customers that their voice matters and builds deeper trust.
To maximize the impact of customer engagement, close the loop publicly when you implement customer-driven changes. This way, feedback turns into a visible, positive story.
Real-time chat (live chat, in-app messaging) and AI-powered assistants help you meet customers where they are. It’s useful for answering FAQs, guiding them through onboarding, and suggesting next steps. Use it proactively to support feature adoption and reduce friction points in addition to reactive support.
Gamification taps into basic human motivators: progress, achievement, and competition. Adding game-like elements to your product experience (badges, progress tracking, leaderboards, milestones) encourages them to keep advocating and deepen their product usage.
Deeto helps companies turn their happy customers into advocates who can influence prospects through trusted peer recommendations.
The core idea is to embed customer voices into your marketing and sales processes, making it easier for new prospects to trust and convert while simultaneously deepening your relationship with existing customers.
This covers all four engagement marketing pillars flawlessly:
Engagement marketing looks different in B2B and B2C because the customer journey, expectations, and relationship dynamics are fundamentally different. But the core goal is the same: build deeper, lasting relationships with your existing customers.
Longer relationships, deeper trust required.
B2B buying cycles are a lot longer (several months), and products normally require ongoing customer success. Engagement marketing in B2B focuses on turning customers into long-term partners and advocates.
Common strategies include:
The main priority is to increase trust, reduce churn, and turn customers into high-value advocates who influence new buyers.
Faster cycles, emotional loyalty wins.
B2C brands generally have larger customer bases with lower CLV and shorter buying cycles. Engagement marketing here focuses more on emotional loyalty, lifestyle alignment, and repeat purchases.
Common strategies include:
The goal is to keep customers coming back and to amplify word of mouth through shareable experiences.
Now… great marketing of any kind is about execution. And to execute well, you need the right tools.
The right platforms can help you personalize interactions, automate engagement at scale, and turn your customers into advocates. They also give you the data and feedback loops you need to keep improving.
These are the four essential categories of tools to support your engagement marketing efforts:
Customer engagement platforms give you a centralized way to manage interactions across the entire customer lifecycle. They help you track product usage, trigger personalized messaging based on behavior, and orchestrate campaigns that drive retention and expansion.
Look for one that integrates tightly with your CRM and product data, so you can act on real-time customer signals.
Modern CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive allow you to track customer interactions post-sale, segment your customer base, and coordinate personalized outreach across teams (marketing, success, support).
Your CRM should integrate with practically every other touchpoint, so you can build a holistic profile of each customer. Enrich your CRM with product usage and support data to drive more relevant engagement at every stage.
Automation is what makes engagement marketing scalable.
With tools like marketing automation platforms (Marketo, HubSpot, Customer.io), you can create personalized journeys based on customer behavior — onboarding flows, feature adoption nudges, win-back campaigns, and dozens of others.
Of course, you have to balance automation with authenticity. The goal is to scale relevant, helpful engagement, not generic messages.
Your customers’ voices carry more weight than your marketing ever will. That’s why social proof and referral platforms are so powerful.
Deeto helps you operationalize advocacy. It turns customer reviews, testimonials, referrals, and success stories into usable sales and marketing assets that drive further engagement and growth, both for program participants and the prospects in your pipeline.
To get the most out of these tools, don’t just collect social proof. Make sure to weave it into your marketing, onboarding, and sales processes to continuously reinforce trust and drive product value.
Deeto helps you turn your best customers into your most powerful marketing engine, all while deepening engagement and loyalty among your existing customer base.
By making it easy to capture authentic customer stories, drive referrals, and embed social proof across your entire customer journey, Deeto keeps your brand human and your customers actively involved.
It’s a simple way to amplify the impact of everything you do in engagement marketing.
Want to see Deeto in action? Request a demo today.
Discover what customer engagement marketing is, why it matters, and explore strategies with practical use cases.
Your customers are saying incredible things about you on G2.
Now, you can turn that praise into pipeline – automatically.
We're excited to announce a powerful new integration between Deeto and G2, launching as part of G2’s June 2025 Innovation Release. This partnership allows mutual customers to seamlessly bring their G2 reviews into Deeto, connect them to reference profiles, and publish them across marketing, sales, and customer advocacy channels – with full control.
Deeto helps turn customer voices into a strategic growth engine – by unifying reviews, references, testimonials, and customer stories in one platform. Now, with this new G2 integration, your best G2 reviews can automatically fuel every stage of the buyer journey – from discovery to deal close.
The Deeto + G2 integration makes it easy to:
It’s advocacy, made scalable – and deeply personal.
In today’s B2B landscape, buyers trust customers more than brands.
Yet most teams still struggle to bridge the gap between G2 reviews and their GTM strategy.
This integration solves that.
You’ve worked hard to build a strong presence on G2. This integration helps ensure those great reviews reach their full potential across the entire buyer journey. Here’s why this matters — for every part of your GTM team:
Customer Marketing
You already know the power of advocacy — but it’s time to scale it.
With this integration, you can easily turn G2 reviews into dynamic content across your programs: nurture streams, community content, reference hubs, and more — without manual work or copy/paste hacks.
Product Marketing
G2 reviews are packed with customer language and proof points.
Now, you can seamlessly bring them into your product marketing narratives: reinforce positioning, enrich launches, support competitive plays, and arm sellers with proof that resonates.
Sales Enablement
Buyers trust peers — but sellers often struggle to bring authentic customer voice into live deals.
This integration lets you surface the right G2 reviews at the right moment — personalized for deal stage, industry, or persona — to drive conversion and speed sales cycles.
CMO
You’ve invested in building customer trust — it’s time to turn that trust into pipeline and revenue.
This is an easy lever to expand your advocacy strategy, improve content ROI, and align marketing and sales around real customer proof — activated everywhere buyers engage.
You already earned your customer’s love.
Now, Deeto + G2 lets you fully leverage it.
All while keeping full control over what goes live and where.
This integration is available to mutual G2 and Deeto customers starting June 2025.
If you’re already a Deeto customer: Reach out to your CSM to activate — it’s quick and easy to enable. Available to G2 customers on Review Growth+Core, Growth+Core+BI, Growth+Core+Content, or those licensing G2 Content via Extra Impact. If you're unsure about your eligibility, we're happy to check with G2 on your behalf.
If you’re new to Deeto: Let us show you how Deeto + G2 can turn customer voice into your most powerful revenue driver. Book a demo here.
Your customers have already spoken on G2.
Together, we’ll help you make sure their voices are heard — and drive your next wave of growth.
Your customers are saying incredible things about you on G2. Now, you can turn that praise into pipeline– automatically.
The B2B buyer’s journey isn’t a straight line. It’s a complex, multi-stage process that involves research, collaboration, risk assessment, and (often) a long list of decision-makers.
Unlike in B2C, where a single person can make a spontaneous purchase, B2B buyers move through stages with intent, deliberation, and internal consensus. They’re not just buying a product but investing in a solution that impacts their team, budget, and business outcomes.
If you want to sell to other businesses effectively, you need to understand how your buyers think, what they need at each step, and who’s influencing their decisions behind the scenes.
In today’s guide, we’ll go over all of that and more.
The B2B buyer journey is the path your B2B customers take from the moment they realize they have a problem to the point where they choose a solution (ideally, yours). It encompasses multiple stages and touchpoints across several decision-makers, and it takes weeks or even months.
Compared to B2C, B2B buying is:
For businesses, purchase decisions are about solving a business challenge, reducing risk, and aligning with internal stakeholders. As a vendor or seller, your job is to understand it well enough to support your buyers every step of the way.
The B2B buyer journey in 2025 looks nothing like it did ten years ago. Today’s buyers are independent, digital-first, and harder to reach through traditional channels.
Buyers don’t wait for a sales call to get answers, they go get them themselves.
From start to finish, data from Gartner shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase journey talking to sales reps. That’s split between all vendors, so your company’s individual impact is actually less than 5%.
According to 6sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report, the typical buyer is ~70% through the decision-making process by the time they reach out, and 8 in 10 buyers initiate contact with a vendor, not the other way around.
Buying committees are also bigger and more cross-functional. A marketing director might start the search, a procurement officer joins halfway through, and a C-level exec signs off at the end. 6sense’s report revealed that the average buying group now has 11 people.
Not every step leaves a data trail. Buyers now rely on what we call “shadow channels” — places like Slack groups, LinkedIn DMs, Reddit threads, private WhatsApp chats, and niche professional communities.
You won’t see these interactions in your CRM or website analytics. But they’re powerful.
A buyer may ask for honest feedback about your product in a RevOps Slack community. That word-of-mouth matters more than your website or ad copy, and you’ll never know it happened unless someone tells you.
AI helps buyers move faster, analyze more options, and customize their research. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and buyer-focused comparison engines let users summarize pages of research in minutes.
At the same time, growing privacy regulations and tools like email blockers or cookie restrictions mean less visibility for you, the vendor. Anyone can now research anonymously, and you may not even realize they’ve engaged with you until they’re ready to talk.
For instance, a VP of Sales could generate a vendor comparison table with ChatGPT, read anonymized G2 reviews, and only reach out once they’ve narrowed their list to two options, without ever downloading a whitepaper or filling out a lead form.
To understand how to sell better, you need to think like your buyer. Every B2B purchase follows a general path from first recognizing their problem to becoming a loyal advocate. Each represents real shifts in mindset, behavior, and internal discussions happening behind the scenes.
The Awareness stage begins when something triggers your buyer to recognize a problem or opportunity.
Maybe their team is wasting hours on manual reporting. Maybe their old vendor just raised prices. Maybe they read about a competitor adopting new tech. Whatever it is, it sparks curiosity, and then research.
Buyers start Googling, reading blog posts, asking peers, and exploring industry forums. They're not looking for you yet, but they are looking to define the problem and understand what’s possible.
At the Consideration stage, the buyer knows what kind of solution they need. They’ve named the problem and are narrowing their options.
This is when they compare categories (e.g., custom development vs. no-code tools), gather peer input, and begin to understand how different vendors solve their problem in different ways.
This stage is all about education and validation. Buyers here will…
A RevOps leader evaluating CPQ tools might compare DealHub, Salesforce CPQ, and PandaDoc based on features, usability, integrations, and customer support.
By the time a B2B buyer reaches the Decision stage, they’ve made a shortlist. Internal alignment becomes the priority.
This is where trust, clarity, and support matter most. Buyers will…
Even if the primary buyer loves your product, they still need buy-in from finance, IT, legal, and sometimes the C-suite. Expect pricing conversations, security reviews, reference calls, and a lot of back-and-forth.
Successful sales reps use a methodology like MEDDIC to adapt to each buyer’s needs here.
The journey doesn’t end when the contract is signed. Your buyer now becomes a user, and your job is to help them succeed. Onboarding, product adoption, and ongoing support determine whether they’ll renew, upgrade, or churn.
This stage is your best chance to turn customers into long-term advocates. They’re going to measure the product’s impact against expectations. If the value is there, you can get them to recommend your product to others.
You can’t improve the buyer journey if you don’t understand it.
Mapping the B2B buyer journey means breaking down how prospects actually experience your brand, from the first moment of awareness to becoming a customer (and beyond). It’s the foundation of effective marketing, better sales alignment, and a smoother customer experience.
Here’s exactly how to do it, step by step:
Start by talking to real buyers. You need their perspective, not just your assumptions.
Set up structured interviews with recent customers, lost deals, and long-term users. Focus on uncovering their actual thought process. What triggered their search? What confused them? What built trust (or broke it)?
Ask open-ended questions like:
Track product adoption as well, and survey/interview your customers after they’ve been using your product for about three months. That’ll reveal the real value your product delivers (which is often different from what you market) and what onboarding friction they experienced.
Pro tip: Review transcripts with an AI tool like Grain, Gong, or Fireflies.ai to surface patterns in objections, language, and turning points. You’ll uncover what humans miss, like emotional cues or timing gaps.
Now, trace every single interaction a buyer has, all the way from when thye’re doing anonymous research to when they sign the deal.
Look at both digital and human touchpoints. Track website visits, ad clicks, downloads, webinar attendance, emails opened, and chatbot conversations, as well as sales calls, Slack intros, LinkedIn DMs, and in-person meetings if there are any.
Plot this out chronologically using a tool like Lucidchart or Miro to visualize the flow.
Make note of:
Certain aspects still might not be clear, so it’s a good idea to reverse-engineer closed-won deals in your CRM. Identify which paths are most common for high-LTV and high-CVR customers. You may find your best buyers never click ads, but often attend events or come via referrals.
This is where most companies fall flat. They have great content, but it's not aligned with where the buyer is mentally.
Each stage of the journey demands different types of messaging:
Since you probably already have existing content, audit it and tag each asset to a journey stage. You’ll likely find gaps (e.g., lots of top-of-funnel blog posts but no decision-stage material). Fill them strategically with the format and channel your buyers prefer.
Forrester data reveals something we’ve known for what feels like forever: most B2B buyers (90%+) trust peers in their industry, while almost none (29%) trust vendor sales reps.
That’s why customer advocacy software is such a game-changer. Deeto lets you bring the Voice of the Customer into the buyer journey earlier through embedded customer stories, testimonial carousels, and even on-demand reference calls.
Use it to:
On top of that, Deeto’s AI-powered smart-matching and dynamic display algorithms allow you to dynamically serve social proof by industry, company size, or buyer role. This makes every interaction feel personalized, even before sales gets involved.
Even if you understand the buyer journey inside and out, executing against it is a different story. Modern B2B buyers are unpredictable, independent, and skeptical, so some businesses struggle to keep up.
Here are four of the most common challenges we see even experienced teams get tripped up by:
Your CRM might tell you a lead came from a demo request. But the buyer? They first heard about you in a Slack group, Googled you a week later, lurked on your founder’s LinkedIn posts for a month, clicked a retargeting ad, and then filled out the form.
Linear attribution models (like first-touch or last-touch) miss this completely.
Solution: Shift your mindset from precision to pattern recognition. Use blended attribution models and supplement with qualitative inputs.
Your buyer is on one journey. But too often, your teams act like they’re on three different ones.
Marketing optimizes for leads, sales pushes for pipeline, and CS handles the post-sale. A disconnect leads to drop-offs, mixed messages, and frustrated customers.
Solution: Build your buyer journey together, and operate around shared goals.
Today’s buyers expect tailored experiences, with 86% showing preference for 1:1 marketing. But lots B2B interactions still feel generic: same emails, same decks, same pitch.
That’s a trust killer.
If a FinTech CMO sees the same pitch as a Head of Ops at a logistics startup, they’ll both tune out.
Solution: Inject personalization and proof at every stage.
If every helpful resource is locked behind a form, you're slowing down the journey.
Modern buyers don’t want to talk to sales before they’re ready, and they’re skeptical of anything that looks like a trap (like requiring an email just to read a pricing doc). So, if all your content is gated, you’ll all but guarantee it won’t get read.
Solution: Collect emails for high-intent bottom-of-funnel content (e.g., a “free site audit” offer). Un-gate the rest.
One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make in B2B sales and marketing is treating the buyer journey as though it only concerns that specific team.
In reality, the buyer journey touches every team: marketing, sales, customer success, product, even finance and support. If each department is using its own version of the journey, the buyer ends up experiencing a fragmented, confusing process.
To fix that, you need tight alignment. That starts with shared visibility and continuous feedback.
Don’t build five versions of the journey. Build one.
Your single journey map should outline:
This map becomes your company’s shared source of truth. Everyone—from your SDRs to your onboarding specialists—knows where they fit and how their actions impact the buyer experience.
Alignment doesn’t happen through documentation alone. It’s built through ongoing, structured communication around what’s happening with buyers.
Broadly speaking, this is what strong feedback loops look like:
Trust is the biggest barrier in B2B sales, and customer advocacy helps you break through it.
When a buyer comes through a cold channel, they need to verify everything. Is this the right kind of tool? Will it integrate with our stack? Do others like us use it? Can we trust this company to follow through?
But when a prospect enters your funnel via a referral or peer recommendation, they already have those answers. They've skipped the doubt. They've skipped the skepticism. And often, they've skipped the first few micro-stages of the buyer journey altogether.
They already know:
That means you can bypass early education and move straight to relevance. You can tailor your content and conversations toward ROI, implementation, and decision-making, because the "should we trust this brand?" conversation is already handled.
Instead of hoping someone mentions you in a Slack group or refers you over coffee, Deeto turns social proof into a proactive part of your go-to-market strategy.
It helps you:
Want to see it in action? Request a demo and we’ll show you how it fits into your buyer’s journey.
Explore the 2025 B2B buyer journey, key stages, mapping steps, and trends to align your GTM teams and boost conversion.
“Content is king.” And in 2025, it’s the entire front half of your sales engine.
Last year, 6sense studied B2B buying behavior and released their 2024 Buyer Experience Report. In it, they revealed that buyers increasingly value autonomy in their purchasing process.
So, in most cases, the entire first half of the sales cycle happens before your sales reps can get a word in. Outbound alone won’t work. You need web content.
In today’s article, I’ll break down exactly which types of marketing collateral every B2B company needs to stay ahead this year.
Marketing collateral is any branded asset, digital or printed, that you use to promote your products or services and move prospects through your funnel. Examples include web content, social media posts, e-books, case studies, and demo videos.
There are a four main reasons to create and distribute marketing collateral:
Now, this isn’t just about making case studies and writing blog posts based off of a keyword list. It’s dynamic, digital, and strategically aligned with your customer journey. Every asset should serve a clear purpose: to move prospects closer to a “Yes.”
In B2B, single-person deals hardly exist. The average buying group includes 10 people, each of whom has their own priorities and pull in the decision-making process.
But, like I’ve already pointed out, most of their decision-making happens without you. Your sales rep won’t be in the room when they’re Googling solutions, comparing vendors, or presenting your pricing to the CFO.
That’s why your marketing collateral isn’t just support, it’s strategy.
B2B sales cycles can stretch from a month or two (for simple SaaS products) to 12+ months (for enterprise deals). That means you need a library of collateral that works at every stage of the funnel and speaks to every type of buyer.
Marketing today is zero-sum. When a buyer searches, only one brand gets clicked. If your content doesn’t rank, isn’t visible, or fails to answer their question, guess what? Your competitor’s does.
So your job is twofold:
We’ve made it clear: your buyers are doing the research with or without you. That means every piece of content you put out needs to work hard, speak clearly, and support different decision-makers across the funnel.
Strategically distribute enough of these seven kinds of collateral, and you’ll have a never-ending stream of MQLs that actually align with your ICP:
Before you impress anyone with your pitch deck or case study, your brand needs to look and feel consistent everywhere. That’s where your logos and brand guidelines come in. This is what guides everything from your sales PDFs to your LinkedIn graphics.
When done right, they:
Good news is, you don’t have to overcomplicate this. Even a basic brand kit (logo files, color codes, typography, and tone-of-voice guide) goes a long way.
Sales enablement collateral is the content your team uses to move prospects from "interested" to "ready to buy.”
These are the materials your reps share with prospects to help them make the right purchase decision.
But they’re not just for your sales reps. They’re for your buyers as well. They’re the ones forwarding your deck to their boss. They’re the ones pulling up your case study in a budget meeting. They’re the ones pitching your product for you.
You need to give champions inside your prospect’s company the tools to sell on your behalf. That means collateral that’s simple, skimmable, and laser-focused on value.
Digital marketing collateral is any visual or written content you use to promote your brand online and drive inbound traffic. It’s what fuels your demand gen engine and captures attention across social media, email, and paid ads.
Social media graphics stop the scroll and reinforce your brand on LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram (yes, even for B2B). They reinforce your social proof and marketing content through short-form posts. Your employees should also use it on their profiles.
Email campaign templates are layouts you can use across newsletters, product updates, and nurture sequences. They should be mobile-friendly, skimmable, and designed to convert clicks.
Digital ads like banner ads, retargeting visuals, and paid search graphics are similar to social media graphics, and they need to be tightly aligned with your landing pages to drive conversions.
For instance, this ad I just got for a new Qualtrics X Forrester report…
…matches Qualtrics’ website aesthetics perfectly.
Even in a digital-first world, print still plays a role. You’re still showing up at events and in-person meetings, and print collateral is perfect for when you want to leave something behind that doesn’t get lost in someone’s inbox.
Today, though, most of your information is online. So it’s less about bulk brochures and more about high-impact, well-designed assets that feel intentional.
Keep these things short and visual, and include a QR code where your prospects can learn more.
This is the part of your marketing that people are actually reading. The things prospects find on Google or ChatGPT, bookmark, forward to colleagues, and use to justify buying your product. In fact, you’re reading ours right now.
Content marketing sits at the core of your demand gen, lead gen, and conversion strategies. Some of it’s TOFU. Some of it’s BOFU.
A healthy mix of each will help you pique interest at the top of the funnel and nurture high-value leads up until they’re ready to book a call.
Event and trade show collateral is the physical and digital material you use to attract attention, communicate your value fast, and leave prospects with something they’ll actually keep.
It includes:
Just like with digital collateral, brands that blend bold visuals with clear messaging win.
Internal marketing collateral is the behind-the-scenes material that ensures your team knows how to talk about your product, share your message, and deliver a consistent experience, whether they’re in sales, support, or engineering.
A few of the things you’ll develop:
This kind of content helps you train, align, and activate your entire org so everyone’s pulling in the same direction.
Most marketing teams crank out assets just to “check the box.” They know they need it, so they post a few below-average blog posts, put up a few testimonials, and call it a day. Then they wonder why they don’t rank or convert.
If you want collateral that drives pipeline, closes deals, and makes competitors irrelevant, here are our six best tips:
Don’t just talk about features, reverse-engineer your content from the actual buying journey.
Ask: What’s happening in the buyer’s head at this exact moment?
Use real call transcripts, objection logs, and buyer enablement data to craft collateral that answers their internal questions within your content.
Smart marketers don’t make 100 new things. They make one killer asset and spin it 12 different ways.
Let’s say you write a whitepaper. From that, you can extract:
You can also repurpose customer feedback for marketing content. Using a platform like Deeto, you can collect input from your customers in the form of testimonials, product feedback, and results (e.g., ROI or a % increase in sales).
From there, our generative AI builds full case studies and clips use cases and testimonials you can distribute across your website and socials.
Too many marketers create for vanity. Real growth comes when every asset ties to one of three things:
Before you make anything, ask what metric it’ll move, then track it. If your new case study didn’t get shared by reps or downloaded by buyers, figure out why that type of content isn’t making a difference and what might be more effective.
You don’t need to personalize everything, but you should absolutely personalize the stuff that touches money.
Buyers will always respond better to something that feels like it was made for them.
No one is reading your 20-page PDF cover-to-cover. Design for skimming.
That means:
Remember: formatting is part of storytelling. Bad design makes good content invisible.
Great collateral evolves. A few simple habits, like setting quarterly reviews for core sales materials and centralizing everything in one source of truth (Deeto does this) makes all the difference.
It’s one thing to create great collateral. It’s a whole other to actually use it consistently, correctly, and across teams that rarely sync. Deeto simplifies that. It’s the platform you’ll use to activate your customer base, and it gives your entire team a single, organized place to store, manage, and share customer marketing content.
You can upload any type of file - PDFs, decks, videos, UGC, case studies, and tag it by persona, industry, or funnel stage. Built-in search and version control mean sales reps aren’t sharing outdated content, and marketing isn’t chasing down files before a launch.
It also makes collaboration easier. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams access the same library, and role-based permissions keep the system clean, and updates happen in real-time.
And with built-in AI tools, you can repurpose, distribute, and personalize marketing assets across your whole funnel without starting from scratch every time.
Want to see it in action? Request a demo today.
Discover must-have marketing collateral types and how Deeto helps store, organize & manage all assets in one smart place
Your content shouldn’t be stuck in silos—it should be working for you. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Imported Contributions, a new feature that allows you to seamlessly bring external content into Deeto and share it effortlessly using our website widget, microsites, and more.
With Imported Contributions, you can import testimonials, case studies, customer reviews, and other valuable materials—regardless of where they were originally created. Once inside Deeto, your content is instantly organized and ready to be shared across:
No more scattered assets. No more wasted content. Just a central hub where everything is easily accessible and shareable.
Get up and running in minutes—import content and start sharing instantly.
Your repository is never empty. Every imported asset becomes a source of multiple shareable pieces.
Repurposing content manually takes time. Let AI do the heavy lifting by pulling out key insights and turning them into ready-to-use assets.
Make sure your best content is working for you. Seamlessly share it across G2, microsites, and personalized reference experiences.
This feature is perfect for teams looking to maximize their existing content:
Bringing content into Deeto is just the beginning. Our AI Agent goes a step further by automatically analyzing your imported materials and extracting key insights. This means:
Setting up your Deeto repository is quick and simple:
What is this feature, and why was it developed? Imported Contributions turns Deeto into a single source of truth for content collection, management, and distribution. It simplifies onboarding and drastically reduces the time to value.
Imported Contributions is now live. Log into Deeto, start importing your content, and transform your assets into powerful, shareable materials.
If you have any questions, we’re here to help.
Bring All Your Content into One Place
Marketing usually focuses on getting new customers through the door. But what happens after they buy?
That's the part that gets overlooked.
Yet your existing customers are your most valuable asset. They’ve already said yes. They know your product. And if you do it right, they’ll buy again, refer others, and become your loudest supporters.
Customer marketing is the way to nurture those relationships.
In today's guide, we'll break down what customer marketing is and how you can use it to grow faster, retain more customers, and turn your brand into a movement.
First, a quick definition:
Customer marketing is the practice of marketing to or with your existing customers, not just to sell more, but to build loyalty, increase retention, and turn happy customers into brand advocates.
It’s different from traditional marketing, which focuses on acquiring new leads and closing sales. Customer marketing is about deepening relationships with people who already use your product or service.
It includes things like:
It's powerful because it taps into trust. Your customers already know you deliver. That makes it easier to cross-sell, upsell, or invite them to share their experience with others.
Buying decisions are long, complicated, and full of noise. Prospects are bombarded with ads, sales pitches, and cold emails all day, every day.
But a warm referral or glowing testimonial? That cuts through.
According to data from Forrester, more than 90% of today's buyers trust their industry peers. The least trusted group? Salespeople. Less than one-third of study participants said they trusted sales reps at all.
Social proof is something you can use to drive more web conversions with your marketing content, and it's something your sales reps can use to become more credible.
On top of that, most B2Bs are retention-focused, either because they're a SaaS company with a recurring revenue model or another type of company with high-value, multi-year contracts.
Customer marketing provides a clear pathway for both customer-retaining engagement and customer-getting social proof, at scale.
Here’s the short answer: Customer marketing should be owned by marketing, but powered by everyone.
Let’s break that down.
Customer marketing is still marketing. It requires messaging, segmentation, campaigns, and content. That means it should live under the marketing team’s umbrella, with a clear owner responsible for execution.
They’re the ones best equipped to turn customer stories into case studies, build email nurture flows, launch referral programs, and manage brand experience post-sale.
Sales teams have direct lines into what prospects care about and what wins deals. That insight is gold for shaping customer marketing content.
Customer marketers can use that intel to craft high-impact campaigns that speak to future buyers using the voice of current customers.
CS is on the front lines. They know which accounts are thriving, who’s ready for a case study, and where upsell opportunities exist. They’re also the bridge to turning satisfied users into advocates, community members, and referral partners.
If they’re looped into customer marketing efforts, they can flag champions before anyone even raises their hand.
Customer marketing isn’t just about sending a few newsletters or posting a case study. It's a start, but the real focus is on how you can turn your existing customers into long-term growth drivers.
Keeping customers happy keeps revenue stable. And customer marketing reinforces the value of your product long after the sale. It helps you stay top of mind, share helpful resources, and build stronger relationships through personalization.
This is also a way to bring acquisition costs down. Retention is, on average, up to five times more cost-effective compared to acquisition.
Customers who feel connected to a brand are worth 306% more over their lifetime. And loyal customers are 5x more likely to make repeat purchases and 4x more likely to refer your brand to others.
In SaaS, the longer someone stays subscribed, the more they're worth by default.
By consistently engaging users and educating them on new features and use cases, you prevent churn, which, by extension, makes every customer worth several times more.
Customer marketing gives you a way to generate those referrals at scale. When a happy client shares their story on LinkedIn or brings you up in a Slack group, it carries real weight. No ad can compete with that.
When a customer already trusts you, it's easier to expand that relationship. Customer marketing helps your CS team highlight new offerings and additional features that align with what they’re already using.
You can’t rely on 1:1 relationships forever. Customer marketing gives you the systems to engage hundreds (or thousands) of customers with the same level of care. Whether it’s through automation, content, community, or all of the above, the right strategy lets you scale without sacrificing quality.
In general, a customer-led growth strategy yields growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability in a way other strategies cannot. Because your customer is at the center of both your marketing and your overall experience, you can innovate for them faster and differentiate yourself from the pack.
Customer-led marketing tactics are a critical aspect of this because (a) they engage your existing customers through personalization while (b) getting them more involved with your brand via advocacy and (c) making it easier to bring in and close new business.
There are several benefits to this:
Customer marketing also gives you a competitive moat. Anyone can copy features or undercut you on price. Nobody can (easily) replicate a loyal customer base that’s actively talking about how much they love your product.
If you want results, you need structure. These five pillars are the operational backbone of high-performing customer marketing strategies:
Don’t treat your entire customer base the same. Build segments based on behavior, product usage, lifecycle stage, industry, or account value. Then map specific marketing actions to each.
Use tools like your CRM, product analytics, and NPS responses to continuously refine your segments. Segmentation is useless if it doesn’t drive specific action.
Use the data you have (purchase history, usage patterns, support tickets, product interest) to deliver 1:1-feeling messages at scale.
Examples:
Personalization is timing, relevance, and context. Creating triggers based on these kinds of identifiers makes your communication feel natural, even though it's going out to thousands at once.
Customer marketing listens as much as it speaks. Build feedback loops into your strategy:
Then act on the data.
Communities build trust and stickiness. Set up forums, user groups, or a Slack/Discord channel where your customers can connect with each other and your team.
To make it work:
Notion is a great example of a company that does this better than its competitors. Their ambassador program, local meetups, online forums (Notion Communities), and content hubs increase product stickiness, generate organic UGC, and drive serious word-of-mouth.
Bonus: Customers will often answer each other’s questions faster than your support team can. That’s scalable support and marketing in one.
More education = more value = less churn. Don’t assume customers know how to use everything they’ve paid for. Create a structured path to mastery.
Build content based on real usage patterns and friction points:
Tie every piece of education to business outcomes, and connect the how to the why.
Tactical execution across the right channels is how you win the customer marketing game. The best programs use a mix of personalized communication, educational content, and community to engage users and drive long-term value.
It should feel like a conversation, not a campaign. That means personalization at every level, especially when it comes to email and CRM.
Email remains one of the highest-leverage channels for customer engagement. But blasting everyone with the same newsletter won’t move the needle. Instead, build sequences around key customer moments like onboarding, product milestones, inactivity triggers, or renewal windows.
For instance, Intercom sends emails like these to make sure ever user finishes onboarding:
Your CRM already holds the insights you need: feature usage, support tickets, expansion readiness, satisfaction scores. Use that data to create meaningful interactions.
For example, if a customer is close to hitting their usage limit, trigger an upsell campaign before the friction. If someone gave you a 9/10 NPS score, invite them to join a referral or advocacy program right away (you can set this up with Deeto).
Most customers only use a fraction of your product. Close the gap with deep-dive guides and advanced strategies tied to real business problems.
For instance, a database/PM tool like Airtable might send vertical-specific playbooks that show exactly how to use it in marketing ops, product launches, or inventory tracking, depending on the user profile attached to the email.
Product update announcements are another big one. Every month, Slack sends out an admin update talking about new features. For big changes, they send a notification out immediately.
And remember that your customers often create better content than you do. UGC is one of the most effective ways to drive deal closure, so you need to make it easy for them to share how they use your product.
The more you can get people talking about your product and using it in front of others, the better.
Online communities give users a place to ask questions, get feedback, and share ideas.
Webflow’s community forum integrates docs, discussions, and a wishlist voting board to make customers feel heard and involved.
Adobe’s Creative Cloud hub mixes tutorials, peer content, and design showcases to inspire and educate.
Live events are another great idea, whether in-person or virtual. They create powerful loyalty loops because you're giving your customers a stage, not just a seat.
Gong hosts customer-led roundtables where revenue leaders share real-world tactics. And Atlassian goes even further: their “ACE” (Atlassian Community Events) program lets customers run events in their own cities, with Atlassian supporting behind the scenes.
That’s community-led scale.
Maybe it goes without saying, but you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tracking the right metrics guarantees your efforts are driving real value across retention, revenue, and advocacy.
NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend your product to others. It's a direct indicator of satisfaction and loyalty and a strong predictor of organic growth.
A rising NPS usually means your customer marketing is resonating. A declining one signals gaps in value delivery or communication.
Retention is the backbone of customer marketing. It tells you how many customers are sticking around over a given period and how well your efforts are reinforcing product value.
Tie retention changes to marketing campaigns. Did a recent onboarding series reduce early churn or increase product adoption?
Then, break it down by segment to see where you're winning or losing.
This is the inverse of retention, and it's just as important to monitor. High churn often points to gaps in education, onboarding, or ongoing engagement.
If churn is creeping up, your customer marketing efforts aren't focused where they should be.
CLV tells you how much revenue the average customer generates over the course of their relationship with your business. Customer marketing is all about retaining users longer, increasing upsells, and keeping them engaged enough to stay and grow with you. All these things increase CLV.
Start by segmenting CLV by customer type to identify your most valuable personas. Then, use that insight to tailor content, rewards, and outreach where you see the biggest opportunities and which will have the biggest overall impact (e.g., "Basic" users upgrading to your "Pro" tier that's 2x the cost).
Your customers should be your best sales channel. These two metrics help you track how often that’s actually happening.
With a platform like Deeto, it's easy to track your referral program's performance. Who’s sending leads? What’s the conversion rate? It'll tell you everything you need to optimize your referral strategy.
You should also measure how many customers are taking advocacy actions after key milestones (e.g., feature adoption or positive NPS).
In product-led growth, your product is the main driver of acquisition, activation, and expansion. But even the best product can’t speak for itself; your customers have to.
In PLG, your most valuable growth asset is a happy, active user. Customer marketing helps identify those users and turn them into loud supporters through case studies, testimonials, reviews, social proof, and, most importantly, user-generated content.
Example: Figma’s superusers are creators inside the Figma Community and on their own respective social media profiles, They share templates and show off designs that inspire others to sign up.
PLG relies on virality: one user gets value and brings in others. But this doesn’t happen automatically.
Customer marketing accelerates word-of-mouth with:
Example: Notion turns everyday users into ambassadors by showcasing their workspace setups, templates, and productivity tips across YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter. They're even allowed to monetize their expertise by selling Notion templates on its marketplace.
Go-to-market is like any other sales strategy in the sense that advocates who've already proven your product's value are a critical driver across sales, onboarding, and expansion. In fact, with new products that haven't hit the market, even more so.
Customer marketing provides Sales with:
Example: Deeto's users use Deeto's AI-powered widgets and smart-matching algorithms to present prospects and sales reps with the most relevant references and social proof content at any point in the sales cycle.
Of all the things you can't miss, technology has to be the most critical. Manually managing these things will all but guarantee you stay disorganized and fail to execute consistently across hundreds (or thousands) of users.
These are your backbone. They hold all your customer data and communication workflows. You'll use them to centralize customer profiles and activity, trigger personalized campaigns based on behavior, and align Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales around a single source of truth.
Tools worth checking out: HubSpot, Salesforce, Customer.io
These are the platforms you'll need in order to track NPS, CSAT, and feature adoption. They're also how you'll identify promoters and churn risks and collect insights that shape campaigns and content.
Tools worth checking out: Pendo, Hotjar, Delighted, Mixpanel
You need consistent, personalized communication to stay top of mind and drive value post-sale. An email software will automate the process of sending lifecycle emails, feature tips, and upsell offers. You can create journeys based on user behavior, and even blend email, in-app messaging, and SMS if you need to (with the right platform).
Tools worth checking out: Klaviyo, Iterable, Customer.io
Advocacy is where customer marketing compounds. These tools help you turn satisfied users into active promoters.
Deeto is unique in this category because it helps you scale word-of-mouth by turning customers into on-demand advocates. You can invite users to share feedback, join reference programs, refer new leads, and take part in case studies, all from one dashboard.
That same platform presents segment-specific content to your marketing and CS teams and prospect-specific references to your sales team. And generative AI allows you to repurpose and share content across your entire ecosystem almost instantly.
Want to see it in action? Request a demo and we'll show you how it works.
Learn what customer marketing is, why it matters, and how to build strategies that drive retention, loyalty, and growth.
People don’t trust brand-generated content the way they used to. You can say “we’re the best” a hundred times, but it won’t carry the same weight as a real user saying it.
B2B buyers are doing more research, reading more reviews, and relying more on recommendations from peers. They want to hear from people who’ve actually used your product, not a sales team with a script.
That’s why referral marketing is one of the most powerful growth levers in B2B. When done right, it brings in leads that close faster, stick around longer, and convert at higher rates.
Let’s break down how you can build a referral program that works.
B2B buyers are overwhelmed. Their inboxes are packed with cold pitches, retargeting ads, and 30 different vendors who all claim to be “innovative” or “disruptive.”
Referrals cut through that noise. When a user from the same customer segment can speak to your product's value, it bypasses the skepticism, the endless comparison-shopping, and the over-polished sales decks.
And the numbers back it up:
Yet only 3 in 10 B2B companies in North America have a formal referral program in place.
That’s a huge opportunity. Especially considering the fact that referrals bring in high-quality leads that don’t need as much nurturing, already trust your brand, and are far more likely to convert.
Before you launch a B2B referral program, you need a solid foundation. That means aligning your team on what success looks like, who you’re targeting, and how you’ll measure impact. Without that clarity, even the most well-designed program will fall flat.
“Getting more referrals” sounds like a goal, but it’s really just an outcome. You need to define the specific business objective your referral program supports.
Start by asking: What larger initiative is this supporting? For example, if your Q3 OKRs include breaking into mid-market accounts, the referral program should be built to source leads from existing SMB clients who know contacts at larger companies.
Then, define what success looks like (with metrics). Are you aiming for 10 referred leads per month? A 20% referral-to-close conversion rate? An X% increase in deal velocity? Pick 1–2 primary KPIs and get buy-in from sales, marketing, and CS on what’s realistic.
Pro tip: A good referral rate generally falls between 2% and 5% of your total customer base, so you can start there.
Spoiler alert: it’s not always your best customers. Some love your product but don’t have a strong network. Others are well-connected but haven’t been nurtured enough to feel motivated to share.
Start with segmentation. Use your CRM or success platform to filter customers by Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT, length of time using your product, product usage patterns (especially power users), and industry influencers or highly networked roles (consultants, agency partners, VCs).
Then, look for referrer intent signals. If someone already referred you organically (check email intros or LinkedIn mentions), gave you a positive review or testimonial, or engages with your brand regularly (e.g., social shares, event attendance), they should be at the top of your list.
From there, you'll be able to build a referrer "persona" based on things like job title and industry, their network access (e.g., “sells to our ICP” or “works at adjacent orgs”), and their motivation (status, rewards, helping others succeed).
If you really want to be proactive, your next move is figuring out who these people know and how those connections line up with your target accounts. There are a few different ways to do this, but the easiest way to start is with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Search by current and former employees of your target accounts, and cross-reference those with your referrer list. You’ll often uncover hidden warm paths, like a power user who’s connected to 5 decision-makers at a dream logo. Message your advocate and suggest a friendly intro.
You should also train your CSMs and AEs to spot mapping opportunities by asking simple questions like:
When you have a strong pipeline of referral leads coming in, everybody wins. Your sales team spends less time convincing and more time closing. Your CS team gets higher-quality accounts. And you'll see a higher ROI on your marketing content.
Here’s what a well-run B2B referral program can do for your business:
Not to mention, every successful referral plants the seed for more. You’re not just acquiring a new customer, you’re potentially gaining another advocate. Over time, the program builds on itself, which further reduces your dependence on outbound or paid.
There are five main ways to get B2B referrals:
As you build your referral program, you may use some or all of them.
These are the most common (and easiest to implement) types of B2B referrals. User referrals focus on activating your existing customer base to bring in new business, usually through a one-to-one, personal introduction. These programs typically offer incentives for both parties (the referrer and the referee) and rely on the trust that comes from a direct, human connection.
They work best when:
Dropbox was one of the earliest companies to perfect user referrals at scale, even in the B2B space. And it netted them 3,900% user growth in its first 15 months.
Its business-tier users are encouraged to share their unique referral link with coworkers or other businesses, earning additional storage space or service credits in return. The offer is simple, the onboarding is seamless, and the value to both sides is immediate.
Affiliate referral programs reward third parties — creators, consultants, agencies, or influencers — for sending traffic or leads your way. Unlike user referrals, affiliate programs scale through content, SEO, and outreach. The incentive is usually monetary and tied to performance: clicks, sign-ups, or closed deals.
They work best when:
HubSpot offers affiliates generous commissions (up to $1,000 per product purchase) for promoting its suite of marketing, sales, and CRM tools. Their program includes a portal with tracked links, branded assets, and performance reporting. Through content creators, review sites, and consultants, HubSpot turns external audiences into a powerful top-of-funnel engine.
Influencer referral programs involve partnering with niche thought leaders, industry experts, or high-trust creators who have influence over your ideal buyers. These people are consultants, analysts, newsletter authors, or LinkedIn personalities whose audience listens when they recommend a tool or service.
These work best when:
Notion has quietly built a network of productivity influencers and creators, many of whom consult with teams on how to structure internal documentation and project management. Instead of just paying for shoutouts, Notion empowers these influencers (who are also their own power users) to teach others how to use the product, refer enterprise teams, and even sell their own templates.
Value-added referral programs tap into partners who already have trust-based relationships with your target customers—think resellers, service providers, consultants, system integrators, and tech partners. These partners refer your product because it makes theirs more complete.
These work best when:
Salesforce has a network of thousands of consulting firms and systems integrators who customize and implement Salesforce for specific industries. They've also built an entire ecosystem around value-added referrals through their AppExchange marketplace, which allows partners to list their Salesforce-friendly products in exchange for a small cut (similar to, say, the App Store).
CS-triggered referrals are timed around key success moments. The idea is simple: ask for a referral when the customer is happiest. That could be right after onboarding, a major win, a milestone reached, or a glowing NPS score. It’s proactive, contextual, and feels natural because it’s tied to real value delivered.
They work best when:
Gusto, the payroll and HR platform, triggers referral asks via email at specific customer milestones, like when someone runs their first successful payroll. These moments are high-trust and high-satisfaction, making the ask feel timely. Gusto offers $300 for each successful referral, but what makes it work is the when, not just the what.
The best B2B referral programs don’t just ask for referrals, they make people want to send them. And while cash is nice, it’s not always the most motivating incentive. What works better is rewards that feel aligned with your brand, your product, and your referrer’s goals.
When designing your referral incentive, you’ll need to decide: do you reward just the referrer, or both the referrer and the referee?
One-sided incentives reward only the person making the referral. They’re flexible, easy to implement and track, and work well in affiliate-style or performance-based programs. But, they can feel transactional.
Dual-sided incentives reward the referrer and the person being referred. The incentive for the referee might be a discount, onboarding perk, or exclusive access — something that makes accepting the intro feel like a win. They encourage referrals within close professional networks, but they're slightly harder to manage.
The bottom line: If you're focused on volume and reach, one-sided incentives can scale faster. But if you're focused on quality and relationship-based referrals, dual-sided incentives build more trust—and often result in higher conversion rates.
Just like with pricing, your referral incentives can be variable or fixed. The structure you choose signals how much you value a referral and determines how scalable (or risky) the program is as it grows.
The former scales with deal size, making it ultra-appealing for high-ticket B2B sales. It's the best way to reward partners, consultants, or affiliates who influence large deals. But it's too “salesy” in peer-to-peer or customer referral contexts.
Instead of a flat payout, our users see better results when they offer bigger rewards for higher-impact referrals.
This aligns your incentive spend with real business results and motivates referrers to send quality, not just quantity.
Pro tip: Add surprise bonuses for hitting milestones — e.g., “Refer 3 companies this quarter, and get a free ticket to our annual summit.”
Your goal here is simple: make it ridiculously easy for people to refer you, and equally easy for your team to track and reward them.
Here’s how to build a referral process that scales:
You need a system that tracks referrals from start to finish: who sent them, where they came from, what stage they’re in, and how much they’re worth. Deeto offers end-to-end referral management built for B2B. It automates everything from referral tracking to CRM sync and reward fulfillment.
You can use it to:
Pro tip: Deeto even lets you run multiple referral workflows simultaneously—ideal if you want to test user referrals and partner referrals side-by-side.
Referrals work best when they’re timely. With Deeto, you can trigger referral asks automatically based on customer behavior, like completing onboarding, hitting a usage milestone, or giving a high NPS score.
Examples:
Deeto lets you plug these touchpoints right into your product or email flows without manual setup.
If users and your internal teams can’t track what's happening, you won't be able to scale your program past a few people.
Deeto provides a clean, branded referral dashboard where:
This transparency builds momentum and reduces support tickets.
No matter how much you can do with software, you still need a person responsible for referral performance (either from sales or CS). That owner should monitor the pipeline, update campaigns, and coordinate with sales and CS.
Within your platform, make sure you track referral velocity and conversion and run reports for department leaders.
If you're stuck approving every single reward that goes out, you won't be able to handle the simple handoffs like a user sharing their link with a coworker.
Deeto automates payouts using the link for attribution, whether it’s:
You define the trigger — lead qualified, meeting booked, deal closed — and Deeto handles the rest.
Referrals touch every team, so make it easy for Sales and CS to participate. Reps from both departments should be able to submit referrals from directly inside their workflow, then get notified when a customer becomes eligible to refer.
They should also be able to view each referral's impact on closed-won revenue, and each referrer's net impact on revenue growth overall.
That way, you're actually operationalizing your referrals across the whole company.
To prove ROI (and optimize for it over time), you need clear metrics and tight feedback loops. For that, there are six critical metrics to measure:
As your referral rate increases, you should see corresponding decreases in time-to-close and CAC and corresponding increases in conversions and CLV.
Most B2B referral programs don’t fail because the idea was bad. They fail because the execution overlooked the nuances of how people behave, how B2B sales actually work, or how to keep momentum alive.
Here's why that happens, and what to do instead:
Too many companies launch a referral program, mention it once in a newsletter, build a web page for it, and then wait for leads to roll in.
What to do instead: Treat your referral program like a product launch. Create email campaigns, in-app prompts, customer success scripts, and partner webinars that actively promote it.
If your reward system takes a math degree to understand or offers something your audience doesn’t value, you'll struggle to find advocates willing to take part, and you'll have a hard time scaling your program.
What to do instead: Test rewards with your audience before rolling them out. Use surveys or interviews to find out what they actually care about (hint: it’s not always cash). Then simplify the terms and spell them out in plain English.
Most businesses ask for referrals at the wrong time—either too early (before value is proven) or too late (when engagement has faded).
What to do instead:
Map your customer journey and pinpoint moments of peak satisfaction—right after onboarding success, a positive CSAT score, or a product milestone. That’s when to ask for a referral.
A silent program is a dead program. If referrers never hear back about their leads or rewards, they might stop referring, even if they love your product.
What to do instead: Automate acknowledgment emails, status updates, and payout confirmations. Over-communicate, not under.
You'd be surprised how many programs stall because no one internally knows what’s working, what’s not, or how to improve it (you can solve this with software).
What to do instead: Build analytics into your program from day one. Use UTM links, CRM tracking, or referral software to measure source quality, win rates, and payout effectiveness. Review monthly and iterate quickly.
What works for self-serve SaaS products won’t work for enterprise-tier products. More complicated sales cycles require additional tiers, terms, and tracking mechanisms.
What to do instead: Tailor your referral motion to your sales cycle, deal size, and buyer behavior. Enterprise deals need referral introductions, not just link shares and signups. Your program should reflect that nuance.
Deeto gives you a centralized hub to run, measure, and optimize referral programs that scale. Instead of duct-taping spreadsheets to email sequences, you get a system that just works (and grows with you).
With Deeto, you can:
And it centralizes dozens of other customer-led growth tools: testimonial capture, case study workflows, UGC collection and curation, reference management, and more.
Request a demo to see it in action.
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