Too often, in B2B marketing, we confuse ‘marketing to customers’ with ‘marketing about customers’ .
Marketing to customers is about driving adoption, education, upsells, expansions. It is marketing of product updates, best practices, content, use cases, trainings etc. May involve community marketing as well
Marketing about customers is about including customers in your marketing. Comes down to development of case studies, reviews, testimonials, videos, references, webinars, customer awards and other content.
Sometimes, your customers are already talking about you - without your prompting - in the form of reviews and community posts. You can amplify that
These two functions are more different than you think. The audience is generally different (customers vs prospects), the goals are different (adoption vs acquisition). The nature of content is different and quite often the channels are very very different
If you want to do both well, best to keep them as separate but important initiatives. Run ‘marketing to customers’ as customer marketing within CS, or lifecycle marketing. Run ‘marketing about customers’ as customer advocacy within product or corporate marketing
Surely you can have one team managing both. But make sure to identify and brand them as two separate ideas, or you might end up diluting both