Your customers’ stories are so rich in possibilities it’s hard to cover off all the potential applications to showcase your product or service.
Future customers receive them like a gift, as they take away much of the risk associated with purchasing an untested product - gaining insights across both the value proposition and what really differentiates your service from your competitor’s.
Like online reviews, consumers use customer success stories as part of their research, looking to their peers’ opinions when making purchasing decisions. Follow this step-by- step process to promote your latest customer success story and watch the leads come in!
Step 1 – Ask your favourite customers to tell their story
Reach out to your satisfied customers to ask this question: Would you be able to do us a favour and find 20 minutes in your busy day to participate in an interview for a customer success story? Make sure you list all the benefits – including how it will make them look good too. Who doesn’t want to be viewed as a forward-thinking, innovative organisation - ahead of the curve.
Step 2 – Interview and write the customer success story
You only get one shot at this so it needs to be handled by a professional who can extract all the goodness and spin it into a yarn that new customers will relate to and act on.
Step 3 - Media Release
Once the customer has agreed to participating in a media release, it’s important not to publish the case study in any way until the media release has been approved and distributed. Why? Because journalists have no interest in old content that has been sitting on a website or elsewhere.
Step 4 - Website
Have a dedicated case study page on your website where all your customer success stories live.
Advertise them on your home page so new customers can easily click through to your case study library page.
Include these stories on relevant pages, such as product pages or dedicated pages focusing on a vertical market.
Step 5 – Social media
Promote the heck out of these wonderful stories through your social media channels by doing the following:
Write a blog post focusing on your audience’s needs and include any obstacles your customer overcame.
Share these stories with relevant LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, pushing traffic through to your website where users can read the full version of your customer’s journey.
Step 6 – Create videos from customer success stories
Website visitors find video content more engaging than pages of text. A short video on the home page of a happy customer is worth a thousand words.
Step 7 – Email marketing, slides, lead-gen content and webinars
Use quotes and statistics from your customers’ stories.
Create a process or a ‘how to’ for your prospects to follow based on the success of your customers’ experience revealed in these success stories.
Step 8 – Measure all the above
How often are the full customer success stories downloaded?
Work upstream to discover how users are navigating the website to find these stories.
Make sure there’s a lead form on the customer success story library page - making it easier for prospects to fill in a request form for a call back.
Ask the sales team about their leads, did any recent sales come via the customer stories?