We hate to break it to you but customers don’t care what your product does. Instead, they’re more concerned about what they can achieve with it.
Customers are driven by solutions that elevate their performance and simplify their challenges. The last thing they want is an extended list of technical features. They want a clear path to achieving their goals. They want bang for their buck. They want value.
In customer marketing, you're not just targeting a monolithic demographic – you're speaking to individuals who have already invested in your product and want to maximize its potential. The real art lies in demonstrating how your solution doesn't just meet their needs, but actively propels them toward their most important objectives.
To quantify and communicate customer value, customer marketers should focus on three core outcomes:
Curious to know how you get there? Here’s how you can achieve this:
- Center your core messaging around outcomes
- Tailor your content to each customer touchpoint
- Use customer data to quantify impact
- Create advocates using value-based storytelling
Aunalisa Arellano
Center messaging around outcomes
The most compelling marketing narratives don't showcase a product's complexity, but reveal the tangible benefits – the value – it offers the customer.
When customer marketing managers switch from feature-centric to outcome-oriented communication, organizations can create more resonant connections with their customers, demonstrating that they understand and are committed to solving real-world problems.
Apple: A case study
Apple doesn’t market the iPhone by focusing on its technical specifications like processor speed, RAM, or megapixels – although these features do exist.
Instead of saying, “Our iPhone has a 48-megapixel camera,” Apple’s messaging focuses on capturing moments for budding videographers – "Hollywood in your pocket.”
Apple showcases how the camera helps users take professional-grade photos of their family, adventures, or events, creating memories that matter.
By focusing on what customers can achieve – creating memories, feeling secure, improving health, or enjoying a seamless digital experience – Apple shifts attention away from technical specifications to outcomes that resonate emotionally and functionally with its users.
A stronger emotional connection leads to loyalty and preference.
Let’s take a B2B customer marketing example. Pretend you’re offering legal software and your user base is lawyers. While legal software might not sound like the most riveting product, with the power of customer marketing, you can move beyond the software’s mere functionality by demonstrating its transformative business impact.
You can go further than this with case studies, illustrating how your solution empowers law firms to work smarter, not harder.
Compelling testimonial examples could include:
- "Reduced contract review time by 40% using automated workflows"
- "Increased billable hours by 25% through enhanced productivity tools"
- "Streamlined compliance tracking, eliminating 95% of manual documentation errors"
Tailor content to the customer journey
Producing tailored, or segmented, content for your customers is critical to demonstrate ongoing value and drive deeper engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. But why? Well, each different stage of the customer journey requires distinct approaches.
At each touchpoint, existing customers will be asking themselves different questions as their relationship with your product evolves:
- Post-onboarding: “How can I use this product effectively to achieve my goals?”
- Ongoing adoption: “What else can this product do for me? Am I getting the full value?”
- Advocacy stage: “Why should I continue using this product, and is it worth sharing with others?”
Tailored content helps businesses directly address these evolving questions by speaking precisely to the customer's current mindset.
- A 30-second social media video can quickly spark initial interest
- A 10-minute tutorial can comprehensively demonstrate product capabilities.
- A 60-second customer testimonial can provide the social validation that ultimately drives conversion for upsells.
Eve Chatfield
Strategic content mapping turns information into a powerful catalyst for customer engagement, turning each interaction into a precise opportunity to demonstrate value. Doing this, companies can:
- Reduce cognitive friction during product adoption by providing clear, actionable guidance.
- Build trust and loyalty through relevant, contextual communication that shows you understand their goals.
- Accelerate customer mastery by helping users unlock deeper value and advanced functionalities.
- Drive retention and advocacy by creating pathways for ongoing success and measurable outcomes.
The goal isn't just to inform, but to make each piece of content feel like it was created specifically for the customer's unique moment of need – transforming generic messaging into a personalized value conversation.
Grace Gupta
1. Post-onboarding
Empower customers with tutorials
After onboarding, customers want to know how to extract maximum value from your product. This is where "how-to" and tutorial videos become crucial. These targeted “how-to” videos help customers navigate features and transform initial interest into sustained engagement.
Successful execution requires cross-departmental collaboration with customer success and your product management team to help articulate the complexities of the product (product management) and ensure the most common customer usages and challenges are highlighted in the video (customer success and support).
When starting out, it’s best to focus on simple, educational content that addresses common pain points. Think “best practices” videos or product walkthroughs that demystify complex processes.
For instance, create YouTube content like "5 Tips to Maximize [Feature X]" or "How to Set Up Your Dashboard in 3 Minutes" – concise, actionable guides that immediately demonstrate your product's value and enhance the customer experience.
These tutorials prove the product's ease of use while deepening your relationship with customers. By helping users unlock more value, you transform initial interest into ongoing engagement, ultimately encouraging customers to become advocates who naturally share their positive experiences with peers.
Dan Gable
2. Middle of the journey
Educate and upsell with explainer videos
At this stage, customers understand the product basics but are exploring deeper problem-solving potential.
Explainer videos become your strategic tool to showcase underutilized features, integrations, and advanced functionalities.
Informative customer education pieces of content like product videos and webinars can highlight how additional capabilities will enhance the user experience. At this point, the goal is to increase product stickiness and create natural upsell opportunities.
3. Advocacy stage
Showcase customer success stories
When customers achieve significant results, they become your most powerful brand advocates. Testimonial and success story videos can transform individual experiences into compelling narratives that attract potential customers.
It’s good practice to keep these videos short, aspirational, and impactful – ideally 30-60 seconds.
Eve Chatfield
How to get case studies
Streamline your approach to collecting top-notch customer testimonials by setting up a recurring task for your customer success team. Use a tracking spreadsheet to log new testimonial leads, including reviews from platforms like Trustpilot.
This system helps identify engaged customers who may be open to sharing their success stories after your product has made a positive impact on their work.
To simplify the process of securing these valuable success stories, consider the following steps:
- Create an email template tailored to each product to make outreach more efficient.
- Include a Calendly link for scheduling a case study interview or a document link with targeted questions for customers who prefer not to be on camera.
By organizing your efforts and providing multiple options for participation, you’ll increase your chances of capturing compelling stories that showcase your product’s value.
Include specific feature results and pair testimonials with in-product visuals for a stronger connection. A powerful example might be: "How [Customer X] Increased Productivity by 25% with [Your Product]" – a narrative that speaks directly to potential customers' goals.
Use data to quantify impact
For customer marketers, data is your one true ally when it comes to demonstrating value.
While qualitative outcomes like improved user satisfaction and customer confidence matter, quantifiable results are what truly solidify your product’s impact. The key lies in identifying and communicating metrics that align with your customer's business goals.
Identify the metrics that matter
Start by asking: “What does success look like for our customers?” The answer to this question will vary based on their objectives.
Let’s return to our hypothetical legal software product. Customer marketers whose product’s end users are lawyers will be mainly interested in this:
- Time savings: “Reduced contract review time by 40% through automated workflows.”
- Increased efficiency: “Eliminated 95% of manual errors with real-time compliance tracking.”
- Revenue growth: “Boosted billable hours by 25% with productivity tools.”
Beyond these hard metrics, quantify softer, often-overlooked areas of impact, such as:
- Stress reduction: “Enabled legal teams to focus on high-value client work, reducing burnout and administrative fatigue.”
- Team empowerment: “Improved team collaboration with shared dashboards and automated workflows.”
Show impact over time
Customers want to see continuous value, not just initial success. Implement quarterly business reviews (QBRs), data-rich email updates, or personalized dashboards to share progress and growth over time. Highlight trends like:
- Increased feature adoption rates
- Enhanced efficiency metrics after implementing new tools
- Measurable ROI gains
These insights must be routinely shared to ensure customers see the ongoing value of your product – and how it evolves to meet their needs.
Turn customers into advocates with value-based storytelling
Your best marketers are often your most satisfied customers. Advocacy isn’t just about encouraging reviews or referrals. When companies chase new referrals and reviews, this reduces these meaningful moments to tactical transactions rather than the strategic partnerships they posit.
it’s about amplifying customer success and transforming their wins into powerful stories. A customer success team can do this to a point; they provide the data and the introductions.
Case studies are customer marketers' big moment, their opportunity to sing for their supper. When done right, storytelling creates an emotional connection and reminds customers why your product remains essential to their success.
Breathe life into customer success
Okay, maybe don’t let your customer success manager (CSM) colleague read this part of the article – we’re only teasing! But oftentimes, customer success teams don’t have the capacity or skillset to properly leverage these success stories.
Storytelling can highlight how customers are using your product to overcome their challenges and achieve their goals. Success stories (AKA case studies) shouldn’t just focus on results – they should emphasize the journey to those results:
- The challenge: What specific problems or pain points were customers facing?
- The solution: How did your product empower them to overcome these obstacles?
- The results: What measurable and emotional outcomes did they achieve?
Example:
Instead of simply stating, “Our software increased productivity by 30%,” share a relatable story, something personal with sentiment to it. Cast your mind back to our legal hypothetical product:
"For Smith & Co., juggling tight deadlines and extensive documentation was causing stress across the team. When they implemented automated workflows, they reduced administrative time by 40%, allowing attorneys to focus on strategic client work. The result? Happier clients, less stress, and 25% more billable hours.”
Diversify your advocacy content
Advocacy isn’t one-size-fits-all. Tailor your content formats to resonate across different channels and customer preferences:
- Short video testimonials: 30–60 seconds to use on social media, highlighting specific outcomes paired with product visuals.
- In-depth case studies: Rich narratives showcasing metrics, customer quotes, and clear before-and-after transformations.
- Customer interviews or panels: Long-form webinars or live events where customers share their experiences in their own words.
Reflecting on your customer value communication
Are you still trapped in the feature-describing wilderness, or have you discovered the path to truly communicating value? Can you confidently articulate the tangible outcomes your customers achieve beyond mere technical specifications?
Your next steps
Over the next quarter:
- Audit one piece of content this week, ruthlessly rewriting it to focus on customer outcomes.
- Set up a call or task for your customer success manager to provide you with customer insights or case study leads.
- Map your content to specific journey stages, and identify three metrics that demonstrate genuine customer value.
This isn't just about tweaking language – it's about reimagining how you connect with your customers. Schedule a cross-team workshop and develop a compelling customer success story that transcends cold, hard numbers.
The clock is ticking. Your first transformation starts now.
What story will your customers be telling about you in 30 days?
