by: Ashwin Balakrishnan

After multiple front-row seats at fast-growing B2B brands, I’ve become convinced of one thing above all:

Customers create customers.

This isn’t a groundbreaking claim. Yet even when marketers do team up with them, we tend to skim the surface of what’s possible. A four-line quote for a topic you chose to please the search engine gods does not a customer collaboration make.

Every B2B brand striking oil these days gets their content marketing right by investing in buyer research so they can speak with and for customers, not to them.

They learn what their ideal buyers talk about in group chats and at conferences, the words they use to describe their problems, the pressures and insecurities that finally push them to market, and why they choose one product over another.

These days, I get to peek behind the curtain of a handful of interesting tech products every month. The ones that treat their buyers and customers like partners tend to have an easier go of the whole make-more-money thing.

The relatability gap is smothering your content while it sleeps

Before you lean on customers to differentiate your content, you have to make peace with why the industry has a problem in the first place.

AI may have democratized slop, but human marketers have always produced plenty of it. B2B content acquired a reputation for being soulless and undifferentiated long before creative failure was available as a monthly subscription.

The root cause is that most B2B brands produce content in a silo that’s constantly spraying customer repellent in a 50-mile radius. Safety, consensus, and productivity theater replace customer insight as the arbiter of what makes for good work.

We write to satisfy legal teams and CFOs instead of to persuade buyers… so we sound like board meeting notes instead of a useful product.

We pitch bland campaigns that sales won’t push back on because “they worked for our competitors!”… which only makes customers think of them instead.

We keep optimizing for search engines, LLMs, algorithms, and Asana projects that look good during quarterly review week… and customers barely even know we exist when it’s time to buy.

Meanwhile, those pesky humans who feel things are still in charge of financial decisions.

Much of the friction that makes content marketers weep is self-inflicted. We apply the 2010s inbound playbook to 2026 with its disproportionate emphasis on volume, speed, and consensus over quality, relevance, and taste (which I define as what you learn from looking at all the things that didn’t work).

Content worth producing is still going to involve a little discomfort, but it’ll stand out and get results — and you can look back on it with pride. These pulls from my highlight reel only exist because of collaborating with customers:

• reaching the year’s 7-figure pipeline target in just 167 days by adding the voice of the customer to ads, landing pages, and sales enablement
  
• $202,407 new MRR from an activation sequence where customers showed new signups which features gave them the fastest time to value
  
• 882 new signups for an adtech SaaS from a virtual skills workshop taught by customers and other subject matter experts from the paid media industry

Customer-led content kills 99.99% of anxiety-causing germs

Every time I team up with customers on content, I’m reminded of how unnecessarily difficult I used to make my job by ignoring them.

The founders and marketing leaders I work with today agree: They make the work feel distinct and human, simplify production, and lower CAC by making it easier to win buyer trust.

Aside from how well it works (see above), what I love about the customer-led approach is that it gets rid of the guesswork around content strategy and the tension of justifying it to leadership.

Customers tell you what others like them care about and pay attention to, who they trust, and how and why they buy — all the answers we agonize over in marketing meetings bathed in fluorescent lighting with zero participants who can speak on behalf of the ICP.

But customer-led content only works if you layer it on top of a strong messaging foundation: differentiated positioning, sharp industry POV, narrative themes, internal and external champions, and a single idea that your brand is known for.

Once you’ve got that foundation in place, you can start building programs around:

• original research reports with inputs from internal and external SMEs
• customer-led content for social, SEO/AEO, video, events, and other channels
• turning employees and influencers into social creators for your product

The old content playbook is no longer enough — here’s what works now

The traditional content marketing skill set rooted in search and social is still relevant, but the people I know getting results today are pairing that with journalistic rigor.

I hired for this combo while building Optmyzr’s marketing team, and together, we built a customer collaboration framework that I still use with my clients today.

1. Start with a list of your most engaged customers — the accounts and people that use your product regularly and can’t imagine any other way to work. Depending on how your revenue teams are set up, you may have direct access to this data via your CRM or need help from your customer success team.
   
   
2. I also like to build a secondary list of employees who can serve as subject matter experts (e.g. your head of engineering at a devtech SaaS) and external partners (e.g. ideal customers who have influencer standing). You can’t always get a customer’s time, but that shouldn’t stall your program completely.
   
   
3. Establish or articulate your brand’s POV. There are a thousand methodologies for interviewing customers and buyers to find out what pushes people to market and what pulls them to your product. Your POV should focus on what you believe about the industry you serve and where it’s headed. This is what you’ll rally your work around and develop content themes for. April Dunford has a fantastic outline for this in her Substack on positioning in the age of AI.
   
   
4. Once you have your expert data in place, segment your customer and SME lists based on whose areas of expertise correspond to each content theme. Then, develop your actual content plan — ideas, topics, deliverables — around this SME map. I use Notion to keep track of experts and what I’ve produced with them, but any similar project management tool will do.
   
   
5. Customer and SME time is valuable, limited, and hard to procure. I find that production goes smoother when I ask for a single block of 60-90 minutes to cover 3-5 topics for the quarter, rather than a weekly or fortnightly 30-minute call.

One of my favorite experiences using this was working with an adtech SaaS on a product masterclass series. We started by asking the customer success lead for a list of 15 accounts showing high adoption, usage, and satisfaction.

Once we found the customers with motive and means to work with us, we built the narrative starting with the thesis for their use case. What were they trying to solve, how did they approach the problem, and why was our product deemed the right tool for the job?

Instead of ending up with traditional case studies — which focus on outcomes and act primarily as a sales asset — these lead with customer experience and knowledge. It centers the customer, instead of just making the product look good.

I’ve also used this framework to avoid the sameness trap when I created a client-led tactical playbook for a digital ad agency’s lead magnet. We started with their POV around a specific problem their ideal clients were facing, then collaborated with their existing clients to provide the answers. The playbooks were segmented into chapters for the different ICP verticals, roles, and use cases they service.

In both scenarios, production and distribution both became much less stressful. None of the cross-functional teams at my clients’ companies pushed back. Their audiences started sharing the content and talking about the content without being asked to. More ideal buyers found their way into the pipeline, actively entered the sales cycle, and closed with less effort.

Customers started creating customers.

You can’t compare that to what you get from writing standard issue SEO 101 content and hoping that the right people search for the right things.

The effort is worth the initial aggravation.

If working with customers were simple and easy, every B2B team would be doing it. That’s a good thing, because everyone copying each other was the problem in the first place.

At first you’ll feel frustrated, especially before you build a body of similar work to earn credibility with customers and while getting your leadership to switch from proven tactics.

But set a clear strategy and keep at it, because it doesn’t just work — it’s wildly effective, never goes out of style, and is one of the last real ways for content teams to hedge against copycats. ■

---

Ashwin Balakrishnan is a copywriter and content specialist who runs The Copy Trail, a conversion marketing consultancy that helps B2B tech brands add speed, efficiency, and scalability to their pipeline. Find this Jersey-boy-trapped-in-Asia on Twitter and LinkedIn.