Topics: Customer Advocacy
When it comes to your sales teams needing a reference for a sales call, do they know where to find them?
Is the list of references sitting in a spreadsheet/Dropbox/Google drive somewhere in the marketing department? On the corporate website (and way out of date)? Or even worse, in someone’s head or their personal notepad maybe?
If more than 75% of B2B buyers are consulting three or more sources of advocacy before they make a purchase decision - what are you doing about it?
Creating an advocacy program will help you and your company to make the most out of the opportunity. But how do you get started & what do you look for?
What are the different formats customer stories take? Let’s review the most popular formats, their benefits, and when to use them.
Among other benefits, Customer Stories show that a brand can accomplish what they say based on real stories and real results, making them a very powerful sales tool.
Customer Advocacy is a must-have for any company that wants to build trust or strengthen its position in the market. Therefore, most already have at least a few customer stories – or case studies – published on their website.
A question I have seen come up on many occasions: is there a particular number of customers that a B2B company needs to recruit before starting an advocacy program?
There is often a magic number used – especially among large global businesses – and that a customer advocacy program should include 35% of your customer base. However, I believe you can start on a much smaller scale. And it’s all about ROI.
These days, all companies with an existing marketing function create Customer Stories. (And if they don’t, they know they should!). This is an industry standard. But to be able to gain the full benefit of them, it is key to be effective during the creation process, make sure they are being used to bring in more customers, and finally, measure the ROI.
These are four stages of the Customer Stories production process that will help you to bring a programmatic approach:
It can be a short clip, a written story or anything in between. But one thing these all have in common is that they tell a story about your customer. A story so gripping that you want to watch or read till the very end. One that won’t see you skipping to the end because you don’t want to miss any ounce of the information right at the very the middle.
