Boost Business Growth with Customer Success Stories
Boost Business Growth with Customer Success Stories
Learn how sharing customer success stories can accelerate your business growth and attract new customers.
Marketing Customer Success
Customer success stories can greatly impact the growth of your business. They do this in 2 ways:
By helping to attract new business and new customers: When your existing customers share their positive experiences, it acts as word-of-mouth marketing and can reach a wider audience. It creates a clear use case for individuals and creates awareness of the offering. People are more likely to trust recommendations from their peers, so when they hear about the success someone else has had with your business, they are more inclined to give it a try. This all leads to increased brand awareness, a larger customer base, and ultimately, more revenue.
By helping existing prospects to gain trust in your brand to help close business deals that are in the works. When prospects see real-life examples of how your product or service has helped others, they are more likely to trust your brand and be willing to make a purchase. These stories provide social proof and build credibility, showing that your business delivers on its promises. They help to create an emotional connection, as customers can relate to the challenges faced by others and envision how your offering can solve their own problems.
Customer success stories and videos are a marketing offer that can greatly impact your pipeline from driving awareness to closing deals and could be considered as one of the most cost-effective investments in marketing that you can make. The investment could be in the time it takes to interview a customer and craft a compelling written story, social media posts or slide for your sales team for use in sales pitches - or in a video form to create short or long form video for the various platforms that can be used for promotion.
How to Collect Compelling Customer Stories
Collecting compelling customer stories is not always easy. Sometimes customers may be reticent to divulge too much information or their company may be concerned about how their brand might be affected by endorsing another company. With this in mind, asking for a reference should be done in a way that demonstrates the benefits for both the customer and your company as well.
Start by identifying customers who have had a positive experience with your product or service or who are your brand promoters. Reach out to them and offer them a clear plan of a joint marketing campaign that will highlight their brand in a positive way as a forward-thinking and modern company. Highlight the benefits they will receive by participating (free promotion, material they can also use). Make the process as easy as possible for them, providing templates or questions to guide their storytelling. Ensure your questions show a clear Return on investment (ROI) that demonstrates that the customer made a good decision and that any customer using your offering could also have a similar ROI. Collect the information with the following story in mind:
What were the specific details about the challenges they faced?
What was the solution that was provided and what did it do for them?
What results did they achieve?
These details will make their stories relatable and compelling to other potential customers. Finally, show your appreciation by thanking them for sharing their story and offer incentives if appropriate, such as discounts or exclusive access to new features or services.
Customer Success Videos
In addition to written customer success stories, videos are an incredibly powerful tool to showcase the impact your business has had on customers. Videos allow you to bring the stories to life and create a more engaging experience for viewers. Consider interviewing satisfied customers and capturing their testimonials on camera. This will add a personal touch and allow potential customers to see and hear directly from those who have benefited from your business. Keep the videos concise and focused, highlighting the key points of each customer's story. Create a longer video and then extract shorter snippets from it with key moments in the video for different uses.
How to use Customer Success Stories in your Marketing
Once you have the customer success content prepared - whether it is written stories or videos - sharing them is the next step. Expanding how they are used and getting the maximum usage out of them will go a long way. Consider the following:
One written story can be turned into a PDF download, a blog post, a slide for your sales pitch decks, testimonial quotes that can be placed on different marketing materials and on your website, a web page and other tools that use written pieces.
A video can be used as a long-form video that appears on your website, plays in the background at an event booth or placed on video platforms such as youtube. Shorter snippets of the same video can be shared on social media platforms, be used in presentations or in paid ad or email marketing campaigns.
Start by featuring them prominently on your website, creating a dedicated page or section where visitors can easily access and read the stories. This will ensure that anyone interested in your business can find them easily. Then, leverage the power of social media by sharing snippets or highlights of the stories on platforms like Facebook, Twitter Instagram, and LinkedIn. This will help increase the reach and visibility of the stories, as well as encourage engagement and sharing among your followers. You can also consider partnering with industry influencers or relevant publications to feature the stories, reaching a wider audience and establishing your brand as a leader in your field.
Measuring the Impact of Customer Success Stories
Measuring the impact of customer success stories is crucial to understanding their effectiveness and optimizing your strategies. Start by tracking the engagement metrics of the stories, such as the number of views, likes, comments, and shares. This will give you an idea of how well the stories are resonating with your audience and whether they are generating interest and awareness. Additionally, monitor the conversion rates of visitors who have read the customer success stories and then made a purchase or taken a desired action. This will help you gauge the direct impact of the stories on your business's bottom line. Finally, don't forget to gather feedback from customers to understand their perception of the stories and how they influenced their decision-making process. This qualitative data can provide valuable insights for refining your storytelling approach and making future improvements.
Customer success stories and videos are a compelling way to both attract new customers and convince existing customers to buy your product or service. Brandspot offers a Customer Marketing Package that can help you craft compelling customer success stories, take the burden of engaging, interviewing and creating the stories off of your team and deliver compelling videos you can use in your marketing. Contact us today!
