Whether it's high-production videos featured on the main stage at your annual conference or soundbites from a Gong recording of a QBR, hearing from real customers is more powerful than a spec sheet or demo could ever be.
And it’s no easy feat, finding and sharing customer testimonials. Anyone who has managed a customer storytelling program knows just how much work goes into a case study (do we still use that term?) before it makes its website debut. It can take months to get case studies to the point of approval and once they’re published, they can end up sitting in a dusty Google Drive folder, forgotten and unused. It’s a bad use of your investment, in time and dollars.
There’s often a chorus of “more!” when it comes to customer evidence. More quotes. More stories. More slides. And that’s often driven by evidence KPIs focused on quantity because, let’s face it, it’s easy to measure quantity. But it also fails to address a key point. Whether you’re tasked with producing 10 stories or 100, the question is: Are you telling the right stories? And, more importantly, are those stories being used?
You need a strategy
A strategy gives you parameters—and when it comes to curating a powerful customer story, parameters are what you need.
Maybe your inbox is overflowing with story nominations. Or, maybe you find yourself combing through last year’s win wires for a lead. In either case, you need to know what you’re looking for. The bar needs to be higher than a customer who checked yes next to the case study box when they signed up.
A well-defined evidence strategy does three things:
1. It defines the stories your business needs to focus on (and why).
Whether it's specific themes, products, personas—or another set of criteria—the stories you need to tell should always align with top-level priorities, whether short- or long-term.
2. It outlines your approach to identifying and prioritizing those stories.
Once you have your priorities defined, you can choose (or pursue) the right stories. If your pipeline exceeds your budget or capacity, your strategy provides the parameters you need to deliver the stories (and formats) that will make the most impact.
3. It establishes how those stories add value to the business.
Customer testimonials have a job to do, they can’t just sit on your website. We know there’s value in measuring more than just the number of customer assets you create. Tracking revenue influenced or leads converted from a single story (including any derivative content) will showcase a return on the investment into customer stories.
Build a storytelling framework
Every organization will have its priorities that will inform its customer evidence strategy, but having a framework makes it easier to establish. Whether you’re starting a new role tasked with creating customer stories, planning your strategy for the next fiscal year, or just want more clarity in how you choose which stories to produce, these steps will help you craft a powerful storytelling strategy that showcases not just your customers’ successes, but your value to the organization :
- Audit Your Assets: Conduct a thorough audit of your existing content library. Where are assets saved? How are they tagged (if they’re tagged)? Where are there any apparent gaps in themes or products? The best place to start is by taking inventory of all the customer content that exists today and in which formats.
- Survey Your Stakeholders: What is the current level of awareness of existing assets? Do the materials that exist today serve the needs of those who use them? Establish benchmarks when it comes to organizational awareness of existing content. Determine whether you have gaps in content or gaps in awareness of content. Each scenario requires a different solution.
- Define Your Priorities: Talk to leaders. Refer to top-level organizational priorities. Together, along with the insights uncovered in the previous two steps, determine where to focus. This could mean creating derivative content from existing stories based on the formats the sales team needs most. It could mean producing new stories that feature enterprise customers to help your organization move upmarket. It could also mean both. Part of building your strategy is balancing competing needs from different areas of the business. One way to approach this is by creating tiers. Consider stories that align most closely with your organization’s top priorities as first-tier stories. What treatment do these stories receive vs. second- or third-tier stories? How many first-tier stories can you create, considering budget and resources? This leads to the next step…
- Assess Your Resources: It’s important to be realistic with your strategy. How much budget do you have to dedicate to customer evidence? How will you allocate it? You may not have the budget to create high-production videos for every single story nomination you receive—but not every story needs to be produced at that level. Knowing where to prioritize and invest will help set expectations and make sure you see a return on your investment. Plus, you’ll have the justification to back up requests for more resources in the future, if and where needed.
- Put Your Content to Work: Once you’ve published a new piece of evidence, make sure you have a plan for how it will be used. At this point, your content’s job is just beginning. Refer back to what you learned earlier: who needs the content and in what format? Make it easy for them to find and use it. And continue to survey stakeholders quarterly to ensure your content (and your strategy, overall) is addressing their needs.
I got my start in customer advocacy eight years ago with a role in customer storytelling. Fast forward to today, where I now have the opportunity to work with clients on developing their customer evidence strategies. And in a couple weeks, I’ll be speaking at the Obsession CLG Tour in San Francisco on this exact topic! I’m so excited to share my framework that I hope will help customer marketers elevate their storytelling programs. It’s kind of a full circle moment for me. Grab a ticket and share in this moment with me.
