There is a question that comes up at almost every B2B SaaS company past a certain size. Someone in a leadership meeting asks: who handles customer references? Who builds the case study pipeline? Who runs our advocacy program? And after a beat of silence, everyone turns to the CS team.
Customer marketing is one of those functions that exists in nearly every company but lives on no one’s formal job description. At companies without a dedicated owner, the work defaults to wherever the customer relationships live. And customer relationships live in Customer Success.
This is not an accident. It is a structural reality. The moment you understand why, you can build something intentional rather than letting it pile onto your CSMs one ad hoc task at a time.
What Customer Marketing Actually Is
Customer marketing is the collection of programs and activities that activate your existing customer base to create business outcomes. Those outcomes fall into two buckets: protecting retention on one side, and contributing to pipeline and acquisition on the other.
It sits between marketing and customer success, but it is fundamentally different from both. Marketing acquires new customers. CS retains and expands them. Customer marketing turns happy customers into active participants in both of those goals.
In practice, it covers five main areas.
Advocacy Programs
Advocacy programs identify customers who genuinely love your product and create structured ways for them to promote it. This is not just asking someone to post on LinkedIn or leave a G2 review. A real advocacy program has tiers, participation incentives, and activation pathways. It tracks who is advocating, in what channels, and what the downstream impact is on pipeline.
Reference Programs
A reference program is what kicks in when a prospect asks to speak with a customer before signing. Every sales team needs this. And at most companies, CS runs it informally because they know which customers are happy, which ones can articulate results clearly, and which ones are appropriate for a given conversation. A formal reference program does this at scale and prevents the same five customers from being asked constantly.
Case Study Pipeline
Case studies require someone to identify the right customer, navigate internal approvals, gather usage data, and coordinate with marketing to actually write and publish the piece. At most companies this is a scramble. At companies with a real customer marketing function, there is a pipeline: customers in discovery, customers in production, customers cleared for publication.
User Groups and Customer Advisory Boards
User groups bring together customers who share a vertical, use case, or company size. Customer advisory boards bring your most strategic accounts into product conversations. Both require someone to recruit participants, facilitate, and follow up. Both land in CS when there is no formal owner, which is most of the time.
Community
Community is increasingly part of customer marketing at B2B SaaS companies. When it works, it reduces churn, accelerates product adoption, and generates peer-to-peer advocacy that no content team can manufacture. When it does not work, it becomes another dead Slack workspace with forty members and no activity.
Zach Hawtof, CEO and Co-Founder of Tightknit, spoke about what community actually requires on the Across the Funnel Podcast:
“The job of a community is really to help people that want to solve their problem and you want to solve their problem with them. And if you have a common goal with your community as a founder, and you give people the opportunity to even promote your business, many of them will if you give them the opportunity to. It’s a great way to keep people engaged and become advocates.”
The CS implication here is real. When community is working, customers are solving each other’s problems, and your CSMs can focus on higher-leverage conversations instead of being the first and only touchpoint for every question.
Why It Keeps Landing in CS
The reason customer marketing defaults to CS is not lazy org design. It is because CS carries the deepest, most current understanding of customer relationships.
To identify a good reference customer, you need to know who is happy, who is achieving results, and who has the communication skills to hold a prospect conversation well. That knowledge lives in CS. Marketing does not have it. Sales has a version of it, but only during the sales cycle. CS carries it for the lifetime of the account.
To source a compelling case study, you need to know which customer achieved something measurable, who championed the project internally, and whether the account is stable enough for that kind of visibility. Again, CS knowledge.
This is also why the informal version of customer marketing breaks down. When it is nobody’s job, it becomes everybody’s afterthought. Good customers get asked too many times. Others never get asked at all. The case study pipeline runs on whoever has time this week, which means it does not actually run.
Kristi Faltorusso, former Chief Customer Officer at ClientSuccess, described how she was restructuring her CS org to address exactly this on the Across the Funnel Podcast:
“Moving to specialty roles. More focus on community, more focus on retention and growth as specialty roles. And not having the CSM do that.”
That last part is the important bit. The goal is not to remove customer marketing from the CS org entirely. The goal is to stop expecting CSMs to handle it informally on top of a full book of business. When it remains informal, it happens inconsistently. When it becomes a dedicated role or a coordinated function with a real owner, it scales.
The Boundary Problem
The question that trips up most CS leaders is where CS responsibility ends and customer marketing responsibility begins. A useful frame: CS owns the relationship. Customer marketing owns the activation of that relationship for broader business goals.
A CSM identifying a happy customer is CS work. Turning that customer into a published case study, an active reference contact, or a community advocate is customer marketing work. The CSM should not be doing both, unless the company is at a stage where no one else can.
The challenge is that the activation step almost always requires the relationship knowledge that only CS has. Which means you need CS and customer marketing working together with clear handoffs, not CS owning the entire function by default.
What This Looks Like at Different Company Stages
At early stage, the distinction barely matters. If your CSMs are also running reference calls, collecting case study approvals, and managing a community Slack workspace, that is appropriate. You do not have the headcount to separate these functions. The important thing is to document what is happening so that when the team grows, you know what you are eventually handing off.
At mid stage, the case for a dedicated customer marketing hire or a formalized owner within CS gets stronger. You have enough customers that informal advocacy management starts to fail. You need someone whose full-time job it is to run the reference program, coordinate case study production, and recruit for user groups. Without that, all of it stays fragile.
At scale, the function should sit separately, with a dedicated customer marketing team working closely with CS leadership, marketing, and product. CS becomes the intelligence layer: they know who is ready, who is right, and who should be protected from overexposure. Customer marketing handles the activation from there.
What to Measure
Customer marketing is often left unmeasured because it does not fit cleanly into CS metrics or marketing metrics. But if you are building it intentionally, you need something to track.
Pipeline influence is the most direct metric. How many deals involved a customer reference call, a case study, or a peer review? How did those deals close compared to deals without that support?
For community and user groups, look at active participation over time and whether community members churn at a different rate than non-members. The latter is more telling than any engagement metric.
For case studies and reference programs, track coverage (what percentage of your customers have a published story), depth (how many active references you have by segment), and utilization (how many times each reference was used per quarter). Burnout happens when utilization is too high on too few customers.
Having a unified view of account health makes this significantly easier. Hyperengage helps post-sales teams see which customers are engaged, which are reaching milestone moments worth capturing, and which accounts are strong candidates for advocacy programs, all without manually piecing it together across five different tools.
Conclusion
Customer marketing is not a new function. It is one that most B2B SaaS companies have been running informally inside their CS teams for years, just without the name or the structure.
If your CSMs are managing reference calls, chasing case study approvals, and keeping a community going on top of their books of business, you already have a customer marketing program. You just do not have a customer marketing function yet. The difference is whether it is built intentionally with ownership, measurement, and resources, or whether it keeps surviving on CSM goodwill and spare capacity.
The teams that get ahead here are the ones that name it, own it, and design it properly. The longer you wait, the more it costs you in burned-out customers, missed pipeline opportunities, and advocacy that never scaled past a handful of names on a reference list.
