The default assumption in B2B marketing is that analyst relations anchors your market awareness strategy. Gartner, Forrester, IDC show up on every marketing leader's priority list. For mid-market companies selling to mid-market buyers, the ROI math often doesn't hold.
The Math That Didn't Work
Our ICP at Kustomer is mid-market CX leaders running customer service operations at companies with 100 to 2,000 employees. These buyers find software by searching Google, asking peers, reading reviews, and getting recommendations from their networks.
Minimum engagement with a major analyst firm starts at $45K or more per year. That buys limited access. We had a lukewarm mention in a Forrester report that didn't move the needle with our target audience. The investment-to-impact ratio was poor. We needed an alternative that matched how our buyers actually discover and evaluate software.
The G2 Bet
We made a strategic investment in G2 as our primary social proof and market awareness channel, and built a cross-functional campaign with Customer Success to systematically generate authentic reviews from satisfied customers.
The tiered incentive structure gave CSMs a financial reason to prioritize review outreach as part of regular customer engagement: $50 per review for the first three from their accounts, $100 per review after that.
Setting Teams Up for Success
We built a review outreach kit that gave CSMs everything they needed: timing guidance on when to ask (after a successful QBR, after resolving a major issue, after a feature adoption milestone), verbal and visual cues to identify the right moment in a conversation, and email and phone talk tracks with specific language that removed the friction from asking.
The talk tracks did more than provide language. Many CSMs felt uncomfortable asking customers for reviews because it felt salesy. We reframed it: the review helps other CX leaders discover a platform that could solve their problems, and it gives the customer's voice visibility in the market. Removing that psychological barrier was as important as the operational tools.
The Compounding Returns
Within three months, we generated 50 new reviews on G2. The impact was immediate and compounding. We earned multiple G2 badges (Category Leader, High Performer, Momentum Leader) and deployed them across paid ads, our website, sales decks, and email signatures. Each badge reinforced our positioning at every customer touchpoint.
The return I hadn't fully anticipated: G2 reviews feed into AI models. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about CX platforms, review data and competitive comparisons from G2 influence what those models surface. Our G2 investment was simultaneously building presence in AI-powered search, a dual-channel play that compounds through both traditional and AI-powered discovery.
Demand Gen with Limited Resources
G2 was one piece of a broader demand generation strategy built for a company without unlimited budget. Our channel strategy was intentional and tiered:
- Reddit and Meta for cold awareness, reaching buyers who weren't actively in-market but matched our ICP
- LinkedIn for retargeting, re-engaging people who had shown intent signals
- Google Ads for high-intent capture, bidding on competitor and category keywords
- G2 for high-conversion social proof, catching buyers at the evaluation stage
We also ran A/B testing on our pricing page, testing layouts, messaging, and calls to action. Map each channel to a specific stage of the buyer journey, measure ruthlessly, and double down on what works.
The companies that win on market awareness understand where their buyers actually go when they're evaluating software, and build credibility in those places. For Kustomer's buyers, that was G2, peer networks, and increasingly, AI-powered search. We built for that reality instead of the one we inherited from enterprise playbooks, and it paid off.