The magic of a good customer story and how to use it in your marketing
If customer success stories aren’t a part of your PR or marketing strategy then you may want to reconsider. Not only are they a great way to showcase your company’s expertise, they also allow you to build personal connections with prospective customers, building your credibility and reputation in the process. If you combine this with the ability to repurpose and retarget them, customer success stories give great potential to reach a variety of platforms and markets so your brand is recognised by wider audiences.
The proof is in the pudding
Research has demonstrated the incredible value of a good customer testimonial, with some markets reporting that:
91% of consumers say reading a positive review online will make them more likely to use a business
76% of customers state they trust online reviews as much as a recommendation from a family or friend.
Though using customer stories in a B2B marketing strategy might look a bit different to an online review in B2C markets, the premise remains the same: people want to see that real people have used your product or service, found value in it and achieved their goals.
When they can see this, your brand is dramatically humanised and more readily trusted.
Starting point? Understand which customers are happy to get involved - who would like to highlight the successes of their work? They may find this exercise really useful to raise their profile to internal or external audiences. Let them know that they can edit and approve the story before it’s used anywhere externally.
What should a good customer success story include?
Every customer story is different and every marketing strategy will have different targets and varying formats. This means that the way you present your customer stories will be different to others and the content may change over time.
However, here’s a few key elements you could aim to incorporate in your customer stories:
An explanation of your customer’s company (their purpose, values and ideals)
Problems faced by your customer at the start (What issues did they have? Why was this a problem for them? Bear in mind that this may tackle sensitive or confidential subjects so find ways to ensure the client’s messages are protected)
The targets and goals your customer aimed to achieve (What did they want to improve? When did they want to improve this by and by how much?)
The strategies you put in place (including planning, targets, aims and changes made)
The results (think long and short term - What return on investment can be seen? Understand the starting measurements and show improvements after implementation. What did the customer’s employees think about it? What does this mean for the company?)
Quotes from your customer’s employees (CEO’s/managers etc.)
How to use customer stories in your marketing
The great thing about customer stories is that they can be repurposed into so many forms. Once you’ve got the details together, you can reuse this information in a multitude of ways, across a variety of platforms, including:
Case studies
News releases
Award entries
Reports/Whitepapers/Articles
Social media posts
Case studies
Creating a case study is a great way to demonstrate the finer details of the ways in which you’ve helped your customers as it allows you to highlight and expand on different stages of the working-relationship and strategies at play. This could include displaying customer’s problems and targets, the strategies/products/ideas you used to achieve these targets and the outcomes you helped your customer attain. They can be quite educational, showing others how issues can be resolved.
Whenever possible, it's important to include stats and quotes to emphasise the differences you made and enable future audiences to understand the outcomes they could also achieve.
These case studies can be placed on your company website so any visitors can see this shining testimonial of your work, whilst you can repurpose it into a range of other content too....
News release
News releases are a great way to reach new audiences and highlight your customer stories to those who may not naturally come across them on your website.
The key with these news releases is to ensure the angle is truly centred on the customer’s aims and outcomes. In other words, though your own company will inevitably be mentioned, the story can’t be about you and everything you did for them. The focus must explicitly be about the customer’s needs and how they understood the project.
Largely, the HR media and their readers aren’t interested in hearing about your own triumphs; they’re interested in educating - learning about best practices, unique ways of working and overcoming key issues that they may be facing. A story that focuses on the customer’s problems and successes will inherently give them these things, whilst subtly (but effectively) showcasing you as an expert on resolving the issue.
Other than detailing the project at hand, comment from both your’s and your customer’s company works well in a news release.
It also good to remember that customer stories may not get an instant whammy of great news coverage, but they can have a longer shelf life - a journalist may use the story in the future if it fits an angle they’re working on.
Award entries
Award entries are a brilliant way to showcase your client’s work while gaining industry recognition and credibility. If you want to be considered a market leader, winning awards is a great way to go.
Award entries are very particular, however, and must be written in certain ways - each award organiser and category will be different. For example, it’s vital to show a clear ‘before and after’ picture of your client’s work. I.e what issues did they face before and how exactly were they overcome? This needs to be factual, so do check with award organisers if information provided by your customer is confidential. For instance, they may need discretion about the depth of the issues beforehand or if any financials are shown.
Key to this is detail. For example, if your customer previously had a problem with employee engagement, what exactly were their levels of employee engagement before and after your help? By what percentage did it increase and exactly what processes were put in place to achieve this?
Another core element for an award entry is innovation. Your customer story must display an innovative solution to the problem. It’s not just about ‘best practice’. What’s the memorable story here? Why is it original?
Reports/Whitepapers/Articles
If you have a report, white paper or article ready to go, incorporating customer stories can be a great way to bring your angles to life. Customer experiences underline your expertise in solving actual issues. Using real life circumstances helps to illustrate your findings and show off its relevance to the real world and real people.
In this instance, customer stories can be used to emphasise your thought leadership, innovation, results and adds a personal layer to your content marketing strategy.
Social media posts
Another way to use customer stories is by turning them into social media content. Often a simple customer quote can make an eye-catching picture. Alternatively, a short video of your customer explaining their experiences can create an engaging, memorable and captivating post.
Being able to physically see and hear from customers in this way establishes a far stronger personal connection between you and new potential customers. Having a wonderful human element in your marketing brings your work to life.
As well as this, because of the breadth of social media, your content has the ability to organically reach wide audiences when people like, comment or share your posts.
All of these actions can make your team and your clients feel really proud that their work is being picked by you as industry leading. What’s more, creating one marketing tool and then using it across numerous platforms provides so much more return on investment. Bang for your marketing dollar? Oh yes, Repurposing is the way to go.
If you’d like to see examples of repurposing in action, do shout. We can easily show how this is a win-win for all.