At Kustomer, customer marketing was a part-time job. We were a startup, resource-strapped, and a PMM was handling it alongside everything else. What that produced was two case studies a quarter and an occasional testimonial video.
What Changed When We Made It a Dedicated Hire
The results were concrete:
- Reference call volume went up because someone was building and maintaining those relationships instead of scrambling when a deal needed them.
- G2 review velocity went from two or three reviews a week to as many as ten, driven by Pendo campaigns that put the ask in front of customers at the right moment.
- Expansion pipeline grew because customers actually knew what we’d shipped.
Before we had dedicated ownership of the customer communication calendar, CSMs were fielding questions about features customers had read about in a press release. When CSMs are fielding product questions customers first read in a press release, customer marketing is a task that falls to whoever has a spare hour.
What the Function Should Own
The default answer is too narrow. Case studies, maybe a reference program. That’s the case study factory definition, and it’s why the function stays underfunded. The fuller scope is customer evidence, launch communications to existing customers, lifecycle and expansion programs, and advocacy. Every one of those requires dedicated ownership to work.
Customer Evidence
The evidence work is a pipeline management problem. Written case studies, video testimonials, G2 reviews—each serves a different moment in a deal cycle, and producing them on demand when a rep needs one is a symptom of not having a system. When we had dedicated ownership, case study output tripled. More importantly, we could finally fill vertical and use case gaps that had been holes in our library for years.
The job is to keep candidates in progress across the customer lifecycle, maintain a library organized by use case and vertical, and own the strategy for how evidence gets deployed. Which case studies go on the website versus in the sales deck. How video testimonials get sequenced. How reviews get activated when a competitive deal needs them.
Launch Communications
Every launch has two audiences: prospects and existing customers. The existing customer side almost always gets treated as a downstream CS task. At Kustomer, the dedicated customer marketing hire owned that motion across every launch we ran.
The Data Explorer launch is a good example. Data Explorer gave CX leaders visibility into the performance of their entire CX organization, so every customer had a reason to care. Rather than sending a generic marketing email, our customer marketing manager wrote the launch communication in the CSM’s voice, sent from the CSM’s name, and made sure every CSM knew what was going out and why before it did. Customers adopted the feature, sent us quotes, and those quotes drove more adoption. That flywheel starts with the communication being personal enough to actually get read.
Lifecycle and Expansion
This is the highest-leverage motion and the hardest to staff inside PMM because it requires someone who understands the product deeply enough to know which features drive retention, which ones generate expansion, and where customers get stuck. That person needs to be running in-app campaigns, building lifecycle email programs tied to product releases, and producing the QBR decks CSMs actually use. That is a full-time job.
The Funding Decision
A CMO deciding whether to fund this function is really deciding whether their existing customer base is a growth channel or a retention obligation. At Kustomer, the difference between customer marketing as a PMM side task and customer marketing as a dedicated function was two case studies a quarter versus six, two G2 reviews a week versus ten, and customers who complained they didn’t know what we’d shipped versus customers who adopted features and gave us quotes we could use.