What B2B Gets Wrong About Ecosystem Marketing

I've been watching something shift in B2B marketing over the past 18 months, and it's taken me a while to put my finger on exactly what it is. We're seeing a client right now who's growing almost entirely through community referrals. They're doing zero traditional marketing—no paid advertising, no SEO, no outbound. Their conversion rates from community referrals are well over 50%. As their founder said to me recently: "Our goal is to be the table."

That phrase stuck with me because it captures something fundamental that B2B has been getting wrong. We copied B2C's performance playbook—paid ads, funnels, attribution models—but we completely missed the community playbook.

The Playbook B2B Forgot to Steal

Think about how B2C built brand communities, user-generated content, and superfans. Nike didn't just sell trainers; they created running clubs. Peloton didn't just make exercise bikes; they built a movement. These weren't marketing tactics—they were the entire growth model.

B2B looked at B2C and took the wrong lesson. We saw their paid search budgets and conversion funnels. We built our own versions of programmatic advertising and marketing automation. But we ignored the bit that actually made those brands defensible: the community around them.

Emily Kramer, former Head of Marketing at Asana and founder of MKT1, writes that ecosystem marketing is "using third parties to drive growth by co-creating value and leveraging shared audiences." The critical word there is "co-creating." Not broadcasting to. Not partnering with. Co-creating.

Why Traditional Channels Are Losing Their Edge

Every B2B marketer I speak to is feeling the same squeeze. Paid advertising costs are climbing whilst performance drops. SEO traffic is declining as LLMs increasingly answer queries directly. Outbound is drowning in a sea of AI-generated emails. Even product virality is harder when your prospects are overwhelmed with new tools every week.

The traditional B2B playbook assumed scarcity of attention but abundance of trust. You could buy someone's attention through ads, then convert them through a decent demo. That equation has flipped. Attention is everywhere—TikTok, LinkedIn, podcasts, newsletters—but trust is scarce.

This is where ecosystem marketing becomes essential rather than optional. Elena Verna, Head of Growth at Lovable, argues that "the goal is no longer to produce everything in-house but to empower creators to generate content about you, and then repurpose it across paid and organic."

What "Being the Table" Actually Means

Let me tell you what this looks like in practice. The Series A SaaS company I mentioned earlier doesn't create content in the traditional sense. Instead, they facilitate co-creation:

Survey for topics: They ask their community what challenges they're facing and what they want to learn about.

Inner circle deep dives: They bring together 10-15 customers in a WhatsApp group for an intense one-week collaborative session on a specific topic.

Wider community sessions: They host webinars where that inner circle shares their insights with the broader community.

Facilitate, don't dictate: Their role isn't to present or teach. It's to moderate discussion and pull out the most valuable insights.

The content that emerges from this process is completely unique. It's never been seen before because it's the collective wisdom of practitioners who are actually doing the work. And here's the bit that makes it powerful for distribution: those same people who co-created it become your amplifiers. They share it because they're genuinely proud of what they contributed.

The Laboratory Approach to Ecosystem Growth

This isn't about replacing your entire marketing function overnight. It's about applying the same experimental mindset we advocate for campaign testing to how you build relationships.

Start small. Identify 5-10 customers who are genuinely engaged with your product. Not necessarily your biggest accounts—your most enthusiastic ones. Invite them to help shape something: a playbook, a framework, a piece of research. Make them the heroes, not your brand.

Test what happens. Measure not just the content performance but the relationship depth. Are these customers becoming advocates? Are they bringing in referrals? Are they giving you better product feedback?

The advantage of this approach is that the playbooks and frameworks that emerge can then feed your traditional channels—SEO, social, thought leadership—but the content is fundamentally different because it's actually novel.

Why This Works Better Than Traditional Partnerships

Most B2B ecosystem strategies focus on other companies: integration partners, resellers, agencies. Those matter, but they're not where the highest-leverage opportunity sits.

Your customers already have the audience you want to reach. They're already trusted by your prospects. They're already having conversations about the problems your product solves. The question is whether you're helping them tell better stories or forcing them to sit through yours.

Consider what this means for your growth model. Traditional B2B acquisition might cost you £200-500 per lead through paid channels, with 2-5% conversion to customer. Community referrals? You're looking at near-zero acquisition cost and conversion rates above 50%. The mathematics is compelling, but more importantly, the relationships are durable.

The Infrastructure You Actually Need

The beautiful thing about ecosystem marketing is that it doesn't require massive budgets. What it requires is commitment to a different way of working.

Essential elements for ecosystem-led growth:

• Dedicated community facilitation (doesn't need to be full-time initially)

• Tools for collaboration (WhatsApp, Slack, or similar for inner circles)

• Clear frameworks for co-creation (what you're building together, and why)

• Systems to capture and synthesise insights from community conversations

• Distribution strategy that credits contributors prominently

• Regular cadence of engagement (monthly or quarterly works for most B2B)

• Metrics focused on relationship depth, not vanity numbers

The Series A company I've been working with has one person spending about 40% of their time on community facilitation. That's it. But they've made it a strategic priority, not an afterthought. The founder participates in community sessions. Product roadmap decisions reference community insights. They've built it into how the company operates.

Where Most Companies Go Wrong

The failure mode I see most often is treating community as another channel. Companies build a Slack group, seed it with customers, maybe host a monthly AMA, then wonder why it's not driving growth.

Community-led ecosystem marketing isn't a channel. It's a mindset shift from broadcast to convening. From creating content to facilitating creation. From owning the narrative to enabling others to build it.

The second failure mode is impatience. You're not going to launch a community and see pipeline the next quarter. The companies that win with this approach think in 12-24 month timeframes. They're building relationships and reputation, not running campaigns.

What This Means for Your Marketing Mix

I'm not suggesting you abandon paid advertising or SEO tomorrow. But I am suggesting that the balance is shifting. Elena Verna notes that Gamma attributes over half of their growth to influencers and community-driven content. That's not a niche play anymore—it's a primary growth engine.

Think about your current marketing budget allocation. How much goes to creating content versus enabling your customers to create it? How much goes to buying attention versus earning it through community? For most B2B companies, the split is heavily weighted towards the former. That needs to rebalance.

The companies that will win over the next few years won't necessarily have the biggest marketing budgets. They'll have the strongest communities. They'll be the tables where their customers want to gather, not the broadcasters everyone's learned to tune out.

The Closer You Get, the Better Your Product Becomes

Here's the bit that makes this approach even more compelling: the closer you get to your prospects and customers through community, the more influence they have on your product roadmap. This isn't a bug—it's the entire point.

When you're facilitating deep conversations with practitioners who are using your product daily and others who are evaluating alternatives, you hear things that never make it through traditional feedback channels. You understand the actual problems people are trying to solve, not the ones you assumed they had.

This creates a virtuous cycle. Better product insights lead to better product decisions. Better product decisions lead to happier customers. Happier customers become better advocates and bring in more qualified referrals. More qualified referrals convert at higher rates because they're coming through trusted recommendations.

The traditional marketing flywheel was: create content → drive traffic → convert leads → close deals. The ecosystem flywheel is: facilitate community → co-create insights → enable advocacy → attract qualified referrals. The latter is slower to spin up but far more durable once it's moving.

Start Being the Table

If you're reading this and thinking "this sounds great but we don't have time to build a community," you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't whether you have time to build community. It's whether you can afford not to.

Your competitors are probably still stuck in the broadcast mindset, which means there's a window of opportunity here. The companies that move first on ecosystem marketing in their category will build relationships that become very difficult to disrupt.

Start small. Find your 10 most engaged customers. Ask them what they'd like to co-create. Facilitate the conversation. Make them the heroes. Measure what happens.

Don't try to build Slack communities with thousands of members or host massive conferences. Just be the table where interesting conversations happen. The rest will follow.