Building customer relationships in B2B is the single most overlooked growth lever available to founders and revenue leaders. Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group and bestselling author of The Content Formula, argues that companies focused on educating their customers, rather than promoting their products, see four times higher retention rates and three times higher revenue per customer. The mechanism is counterintuitive but measurable: stop promoting, start educating, and buyers come to you.
Quick Answer: Building customer relationships in B2B means consistently educating your buyers on the challenges they face, before you ever mention what you sell. Companies that do this retain customers at 4x the rate of those that don’t, and see 3x higher revenue per customer over time.
In this episode of the Predictable B2B Success podcast, Vinay Koshy sits down with Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling book The Content Formula. Michael has spent two decades championing a customer-centric approach at organizations of every size, from SAP and Nielsen to growth-stage SaaS companies. His thesis: marketing that educates outperforms marketing that promotes, every single time. The conversation covers how to build customer relationships at scale, the content types that drive retention, and the data that proves it all.
Why Building Customer Relationships Requires Stopping the Promotion
Most B2B companies spend their marketing budget telling people how great they are. Michael Brenner calls this a fundamental misreading of the market.
“If you ask your mom what marketing is, she’ll say it’s a TV ad or a billboard,” Brenner explains. “But marketing is a strategic lever for growth. It’s the communication you need to start having a dialogue with your audience so you can earn the right to talk about what you want to sell.”
The cost of getting this wrong is steep. Research Brenner cites found that companies sending 48 or more promotional messages per month actually see sales decline. Buyers have moved from tolerating marketing messages to actively revolting against them.
The business case for relationship-first marketing is clear: According to the Harvard Business Review, retaining a customer costs 5 to 25 times less than acquiring a new one. A five percent increase in customer retention can drive profit increases between 25 and 95 percent. The companies earning these numbers are not the loudest promoters, they are the most consistent educators.
The Education-First Framework That Builds Customer Relationships at Scale
Michael Brenner’s framework reduces to four words: reach, engage, convert, retain. Each stage depends on the one before it, and education is the fuel at every step.
When Brenner was leading content at SAP, he discovered that 99.9 percent of visitors arrived by searching SAP’s brand name directly. They were already customers or already knew the company. Educational content changed that, it reached people who had never heard of SAP by answering the questions they were actively searching for.
“When you create educational content, you start to reach the people who don’t know who you are through educational content on the topics that are relevant to what you sell,” Brenner says. “You’re reaching new people. And the group of people searching for solutions to industry-wide challenges is significantly larger than the number of people searching for your brand.”
A direct answer block on the framework:
To build customer relationships through content, apply Brenner’s four-stage model:
- Reach, Create educational content around the questions your ideal customers are searching for, not around your product features.
- Engage, Track which content drives the longest time-on-page; Google now ranks for latency because engagement signals value.
- Convert, Use engaged readers as warm leads for sales conversations, not cold outreach targets.
- Retain, Maintain a content subscription list and cross-match it to your customer base. Subscribers retain at 4x the rate of non-subscribers.
How to Find the Questions Your Buyers Are Actually Asking
The simplest research tool available is one almost no company uses systematically: Google autocomplete.
“Take the name of your persona and go to Google autofill,” Brenner explains. “If you type ‘radiologists are’, you’ll see, in rank order, what most people are searching for. Salary. Training. Stress. AI.”
Brenner used this technique with a healthcare manufacturing client whose target buyers, radiologists, were too busy during the pandemic to engage with product content. Instead of promoting equipment, his team wrote about the four things radiologists actually worried about: stress management, salary benchmarks, continuing education, and whether AI would replace them.
“That series of content was the most successful this company ever created,” Brenner says, “because it was 100 percent focused on the people they were trying to reach. And those people did engage on product pages and start to have conversations with salespeople.”
The three-input research stack for building customer relationships:
- Google autocomplete, type your buyer persona + “are” or “need” to surface real search intent
- Salespeople, ask what questions prospects ask in their first three calls; these are article topics
- Support tickets, cluster repeat questions into evergreen educational content
The Content Types That Deepen Customer Relationships
Not all content builds relationships equally. Brenner draws a sharp line between content that engages and content that alienates.
Long-form content (engagement time: 5–6 minutes): Non-promotional, educational pieces that answer genuine buyer questions. These are the posts that rank, get shared, and generate backlinks.
Promotional content (engagement time: under 1 minute): Anything that leads with “why you should choose us.” Brenner’s data shows this content actively drives visitors away.
Customer profiles (not case studies): Traditional case studies require legal approval and read like testimonials. Profiles are interviews with real customers about their work, challenges, and day, with no promotion required. The endorsement is implicit: they chose you, and they’re interesting people worth listening to.
“We don’t need legal approval for profiles,” Brenner says. “You just get on a Zoom and learn about them. What challenges do you face every day? Tell me a funny personal story. What book are you reading? That content engages because it’s human.”
Employee-activated content: Rather than asking employees to share press releases (advocacy), Brenner recommends asking employees what they genuinely want to share (activation). Real voices outperform brand voices because readers can detect inauthenticity within seconds.
Building Customer Relationships Through Retention Content
Retention is what Brenner calls “the long lost business goal of marketing.” Most companies focus almost exclusively on acquisition. But the data on retention content is compelling enough to reorder priorities.
When Brenner’s team cross-matched content subscribers against customer lists at multiple clients, they found:
- 4x higher retention rates among customers subscribed to educational content newsletters
- 3x higher revenue per customer from the same cohort
The mechanism goes beyond simple loyalty. At SAP, ERP customers consuming HR content, articles on performance reviews and management skills, were converting into leads for SAP’s HR software. Educational content was generating cross-sell revenue that no product-focused campaign would have reached.
“Your customers stay longer and they spend more,” Brenner says. “But what’s really interesting is that you can cross-sell and upsell existing customers from one line of business to another through your educational content, because people are managers too, and they need to learn how to do a performance review.”
The retention content formula:
- Build a newsletter around your buyers’ professional development, not your product updates
- Cross-match subscribers to customer records quarterly
- Track retention delta between subscribers and non-subscribers
- Present this data to leadership as marketing’s measurable contribution to revenue
Original Research and Its Role in Customer Relationship Building
For companies that want to accelerate authority, Brenner points to original research as one of the highest-leverage investments available.
IBM’s CEO study, produced at a cost of several million dollars, became the most cited and linked-to piece of content IBM had ever created. McKinsey and Accenture have built entire business development engines on proprietary research.
For companies that cannot fund primary research, Brenner recommends a simpler alternative:
“Look in your industry for companies that are doing research. Right your point of view. Do a summary. Interview a customer about the research. These things can be really helpful if you can’t afford to do your own.”
One approach that worked at SAP: aggregate predictions from ten to twenty industry influencers and publish a “trends” report. Total cost: outreach emails and formatting time. Result: high engagement, strong organic rankings, and significant social sharing.
How to Build Customer Relationships at Events (Even When There Are No Events)
Brenner frames event marketing and content marketing as the same activity through different distribution channels.
“Events are just content planning, you find topics, get experts to talk about them, invite customers for networking,” he explains. “Then you throw it all into a couple of days at a venue and walk away. That’s a huge missed opportunity.”
The content playbook for event marketing:
- Transcribe keynote presentations and publish them as long-form articles
- Cut short video clips for LinkedIn distribution across the following weeks
- Use event hashtags to keep conversations going on Twitter and LinkedIn
- Repurpose panel discussions into FAQ-format blog posts
- Feature speaker quotes in monthly educational newsletters
The result is a year-round content calendar built from a single event investment.
The Authenticity Problem in B2B Content
Authenticity is frequently discussed and rarely delivered. Brenner’s test is simple: can you read this content without sensing the promotion lurking behind it?
“You can’t fake it,” Brenner says. “Faces sell. That’s been true for newsstands and news magazines for decades. It’s still true online.”
His most consistent recommendation: put real people, customers, employees, executives, in front of the content. Let them tell real stories. Remove any language that was written to make the company look good rather than to make the reader more informed.
The practical formula Brenner uses to inject personality into otherwise dry content: What [X] can teach us about [Y]. He used it to write about what marketers can learn from Game of Thrones and from the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
“It’s a fun and simple way to bring in current events and apply it to your industry,” he says. “That’s one formula I like to use with clients.”
Making the Business Case for Customer Relationship Marketing
Brenner spent years frustrated that marketing executives could not make the business case for customer-centric content. His book, The Content Formula, opens with a chapter called “Build the Business Case” for exactly this reason.
The framework is straightforward:
- Reach: Show the percentage of your current search traffic arriving via branded terms. This is your baseline, the audience you already have, talking to itself.
- Engage: Document time-on-page improvements as you publish educational content. Google now uses latency as a ranking factor.
- Convert: Track lead source attribution. Show what percentage of inbound leads came from educational content versus paid promotion.
- Retain: Run the subscriber cross-match analysis. Present the 4x retention number to your leadership team as a measurable marketing outcome.
“When I was at SAP, 99.9 percent of people who found us through search typed SAP into the search bar,” Brenner says. “They already knew who we were. We needed to create content that reached the people who didn’t. Educational content changed that number.”
FAQ: Building Customer Relationships in B2B
What is the most effective way to build customer relationships in B2B? The most effective approach is consistent education, creating content that answers the real questions your buyers are actively searching for, before you ever introduce your product or service. Michael Brenner’s data show this produces 4x higher retention and 3x higher revenue per customer than promotional content strategies.
How does content marketing help build customer relationships? Content marketing builds customer relationships by positioning your company as the most helpful resource in your category. When buyers encounter your educational content during their research phase, they arrive at a sales conversation already informed, already aligned with your thinking, and already trusting your expertise. The Harvard Business Review notes that retaining a customer costs 5–25x less than acquiring one, and educational content is the most scalable retention tool available.
What types of content build the strongest customer relationships? Long-form educational articles (5–6 minute engagement), customer profiles (not traditional case studies), employee-activated content, and original research all outperform promotional content in building lasting customer relationships. Brenner specifically recommends avoiding case studies that require legal approval in favor of human-interest profiles that let customers tell their own stories.
How do you find topics that resonate with B2B buyers? Use Google autocomplete: type your buyer persona title followed by “are,” “need,” or “want” to see the actual search terms your audience uses. Then cross-reference with your sales team’s most frequently asked questions from prospects and your support ticket clusters. These three sources give you an evergreen editorial calendar built entirely from real buyer intent.
How long does it take to see results from a customer relationship content strategy? Brenner worked with a B2B technology company that went from zero to one million monthly page views in just over a year by publishing consistent educational content. While results depend on publishing frequency and competitive density, companies that publish two to four educational pieces per week and track engagement metrics typically see measurable improvements in reach within three to six months.
What is the biggest mistake B2B companies make when trying to build customer relationships? The biggest mistake is promotion disguised as content. Brenner calls this “insidious promotion”, content that seems educational but subtly pivots to selling. His data shows this content averages under one minute of engagement, while genuinely educational content averages five to six minutes. The drop in engagement is immediate and measurable.
Conclusion
Building customer relationships in B2B is not a soft goal, it is the most measurable growth lever most companies are leaving untouched. The companies winning on retention, revenue per customer, and long-term authority are the ones that made a decision to educate instead of promote.
Michael Brenner’s body of work offers a clear model: reach new buyers with educational content, engage them long enough to earn their trust, convert them into informed leads, and retain them with content that keeps delivering value after the sale closes.
If you are working to build your company’s content authority and earn the kind of trust that shortens sales cycles and increases lifetime value, Sproutworth helps B2B tech companies produce the educational content that makes this strategy work. Connect with us to learn how.
Listen to the full conversation with Michael Brenner on the Predictable B2B Success podcast.
Episode Details
Guest: Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group
Resources mentioned:
- Marketing Insider Group
- Michael Brenner on LinkedIn
- The Content Formula by Michael Brenner
Some topics we cover in this episode include:
- Marketing in the age of disruption: Why promotional marketing is losing effectiveness and what replaces it
- Mistakes businesses make in building customer relationships: The common traps that push customers away
- What marketing really is and why content should play a role: Redefining marketing as dialogue, not broadcast
- The missed opportunities for companies that rely only on customer support: Why support data is not a substitute for educational content
- The importance of building customer relationships: Why relationship-first marketing outperforms promotion
- Why education needs to play a key role in building customer relationships: The four-stage reach-engage-convert-retain model
- How to build customer relationships to facilitate retention: The 4x retention result from educational newsletters
- How to be authentic via your content: Why real people and real stories outperform brand voices
- Keys to building customer relationships through original research: Why IBM’s CEO study became their most cited content
- The place for original research in building customer relationships: Low-cost alternatives to million-dollar research programs
- And much more
Listen to the episode
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Related Links
Guest resources:
– Marketing Insider Group
– Michael Brenner on LinkedIn
– The Content Formula by Michael Brenner
Related Resources
Related Sproutworth episodes:
– How to Drive Revenue Growth With Customer Retention Done Easily And Right
– Client Relations: 10 Techniques to Drive Growth and Profit
– Marketing Frameworks: 9 Must-Know Frameworks That Drive Growth
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