Build a customer-led marketing strategy: Lessons of success

Things like market research and competitive intelligence can clue you into features and capabilities that can be replicated into your own product plan - but customer relationships can't.

As marketing leaders at On24 and Trust Radius, we've discovered that a customer-led marketing strategy isn't just a nice-to-have—it's essential for sustainable growth and genuine market differentiation.

We're Allyson Havener, CMO at TrustRadius, and Tessa Barron, ex-VP of Marketing at On24 and in this article, we’re going to go through:

Foundations of customer-led strategy
Shifting to a customer-centric focus
Integrating your customer team
Translating customer stories into revenue
Measuring success and ROI

(Since this talk, Tessa Barron has moved on to become CMO at Lumivero. Congratulations Tessa!)

This article is a condensed overview of a talk from our New York 2022 Customer Marketing Summit. If you have a membership account, you can watch the talk in full here.

The foundation of a customer-led marketing strategy

At its core, a customer-led marketing strategy puts your customers' success stories at the heart of everything you do. "Your competitors can build that feature, they'll look at what you're doing and they can build it. They can move that just as fast as you can," shares Allison from Trust Radius. "What is that competitive differentiator? It's really your customer voice and harvesting that."

At On24, Tessa's team publishes at least 25 customer stories every quarter, demonstrating the scale and impact possible when you fully commit to a customer-first approach. But it's not just about quantity—it's about creating a systematic approach to gathering, sharing, and leveraging customer insights across your organization.

From product-centric to customer-centric: a strategic shift

“We're lucky at On24 in that we can tangibly see how our customers are using our product," Tessa explains. "In whatever way possible, that is the place to start—really get that deep knowledge of how your customers are leveraging your product, and use that to inform what your use cases are."

This shift has led to unexpected opportunities. For instance, after COVID, On24 noticed their pharmaceutical customers started using their solutions to engage patients, not just doctors.

"We had never thought we're traditionally B2B. We had never thought that our solutions were going to be leveraged in that more of a B2C manner," Tessa shares. "But by paying attention to our customers, we realized, wow, that's a whole other use case, a whole new opportunity."

Building an integrated customer marketing team

Creating a successful customer-led marketing strategy requires more than just collecting testimonials—it demands a fully integrated approach across your organization.

At On24, we've developed what we call a "SWAT team" approach, bringing together experts from multiple departments to capture and leverage customer insights effectively.

"Marketing plays the quarterback, but we are not the only group touching customers," Tessa explains. "There are so many different touch points that we all have with our customers, and we have to bring in all sides of the journey to ensure we're able to really get a holistic understanding of what's going on."

Our team structure includes:

A dedicated community expert
A product marketing specialist focused on verticals and use cases
Customer insights team members analyzing survey data
Product team representatives
Platform success team members
Customer success team representatives

Turning customer stories into revenue

We approach customer story collection like a marketing funnel, with both inbound and outbound strategies. "We always want to have channels that are open for our customers to come to us," Tessa shares.

This includes award submissions and regular callouts during webinars and emails asking customers to share their stories.

But we don't just wait for stories to come to us. We actively hunt for specific stories that align with our seven key verticals and use cases.

We've created a comprehensive grid system that helps us target the exact types of stories we need:

Specific verticals (e.g., technology, pharmaceuticals)
Use cases within those verticals
Success metrics and KPIs
Channel treatment tiers

Making customer stories work for sales

One of our most successful initiatives has been transforming customer stories into powerful sales enablement tools. "It's the best cold-calling strategy," Tessa notes. "When you start to have little pockets of success where a story can turn into a new opportunity at an account, that just allows for everyone to understand how important it is."

We've seen this in action. Recently, one of our Account Executives landed a meeting with a VP at a pharmaceutical company because he could speak specifically about their needs using relevant customer stories.

Despite not being a pharmaceutical industry expert, he could discuss scaling Key Opinion Leader (KOL) engagement credibly, earning trust, and moving the conversation forward.

Creating a customer-centric culture

Building a customer-led marketing strategy requires buy-in at every level of your organization. At On24, our CEO refers to our approach as a "go-to-customer strategy" rather than a "go-to-market strategy"—a subtle but important distinction that puts customers at the center of everything we do.

For organizations looking to build this kind of culture, we recommend starting with your current customer base.

"You might have a whole part of your customer base where you're seeing success that nobody even knows about," Tessa advises. "The only way that you're going to be able to recognize that pattern and enable the sales force to go and replicate it is by investing in stories and understanding how that particular industry is leveraging your product."

Measuring success and ROI

When it comes to measuring the success of a customer-led marketing strategy, we look at it holistically rather than tracking individual stories.

We monitor:

The uptick in conversion rates within specific verticals
Changes in sales velocity
Volume increases in targeted account cohorts
The overall impact on pipeline and closed deals

For those planning long-term growth, there's another compelling reason to invest in customer stories. "When you go public, you have to have customer stories," Tessa emphasizes. "You can't make up for years worth of advocacy in the nine-month period that you have to go public."

Conclusion

A customer-led marketing strategy isn't just about collecting testimonials or case studies—it's about making your customers' success the driving force behind your entire go-to-market approach. As Tessa puts it, "Customer stories are the least expensive form of marketing, and it's something that your competitors will never have."

By putting customers at the center of your strategy, systematically collecting and sharing their stories, and using these insights to drive product innovation and sales success, you create a sustainable competitive advantage that can't be replicated. In today's competitive landscape, that's more valuable than any feature or capability you could build.

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