Looking for examples of great, effective use of customer stories for marketing and sales. Anyone know of good stories?
Where to start. There are so many:
SEO Impact:
1. IBM has extensively incorporated customer quotes from their 3rd party customer reviews (from TrustRadius) into multiple pages on their site. The content is dynamically syndicated and matched to the theme of the page For information oriented pages like this (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/ibm-cloud-vs-aws), they have found on average a +30% lift in on page engagement. Moreover, the content is crawled by search engines and helps them rank on more key words and boost organic traffic.
2. If you Google the term "IPAM software" you'll notice that Solarwinds ranks #1. They too are using dynamic review quote syndication (from TrustRadius) to their landing page. Again all the quotes are keyword rich and help them to rank for more key words. Note that their count of reviews and score also are displayed in the search engine result (SERP), which increases click through rate.
3. If you Google Rubrik vs. Veeam, the #1 result is a page created by Rubrik. They too have syndicated customer quotes dynamically from TrustRadius reviews to that page and all the quotes are contextual to the nature of the page - competing with Veeam.
Conversion Optimization
1. Planful has incorporated quotes and award badges into ads that they are running to companies in their ICP that are showing purchase intent (based upon the signals we provide them about in-market buyers in their category - not just those considering them, but all those actively looking at competitors). They also incorporate dynamic review quote syndication. Through a combination of these strategies they've seen a +60% improvement in conversion.
2. Veeam uses customer quote syndication from reviews on conversion pages, like Free Trial, and has measured a conversion lift of +70% on pages like this - https://www.veeam.com/backup-replication-virtual-physical-cloud.html
Sales Enablement
1. A number of companies have built accessible quote libraries where AEs / BDRs can find the right quote to open a door, remove an objection or position against a competitor. We enable this for our customers through a Chrome Extension, but others use their own systems. Here's an example of what an AE can do - this is for Groove, a sales engagement platform, where an AE is looking up a competitive quote vs. Salesloft etc.
I'm biased, but I really like https://customers.twilio.com/ :)
I love how asana uses customer stories for their #withAsana campaign. Check them out.
As lawyers, you can imagine that our customers value referral and peer marketing as one of most genuine forms of selling and messaging. We're recently seeing the rewards of investing in solid customer narratives and segmentation of our customer base—and are learning more the entire time. https://www.clio.com/customers/
Side note: This content can be repurposed for a lot of different initiatives.
- Sales use stories to validate adoption of the product by similar sized/ niche customers and as engagement tools
- Marketing uses videos for landing pages, Facebook (targeted) and YouTube ads, and more
- PMM uses the b roll as fillers in product videos
- PMM uses these videos in co-marketing intitiatives, in product advocates engagement and more.
We're starting to test more people v. product images and videos in the rest of our content, so investing in your customers and creating that content can have a lot of value! Far from perfect, but we're iterating on it all the time.
I like how Project44 (supply chain software) creates and uses them. They have lots of stories too, which shows me that their process is a machine, as they’re not really such a big company.
You’ll notice their stories are often highlighting some measurable result.
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