The game has changed when it comes effective marketing for B2B businesses. It’s no longer enough to make branded content that speaks about your solution and its benefits, now, to be truly effective, businesses need content that speaks from experience. Your customer’s experience.
Why do we need this perspective?
Because it gives authenticity and versatility to an asset that could otherwise be overlooked in pursuit of content that gives your prospect what they want: a real life, relatable, and practical example of how your solution has worked for someone in their industry, as told by that person.
If that’s not convincing enough, here are the three main reasons why customer evidence is an absolute must-have for any B2B business.
1. IMPACTFUL CUSTOMER STORIES
From the perspective of content and digital marketing, customer evidence stories can be hugely impactful and useful pieces of content. One of the biggest reasons for this is that a single customer story can become a piece of evergreen content that can be shared across your networks over and over again - and then repurposed into a wide range of formats so your audience doesn’t get bored. It also makes keeping up with content trends effortless. Oh, and it has huge benefits for your SEO given the opportunity to include popular long tail keywords.
2. SALES ENABLEMENT
For your sales team, customer evidence programs can create a wide range of content assets that can be used to help demonstrate to prospects how your solution has been effective for someone else in their industry that experienced the same problem. Another bonus to this is that as your library grows over time, your sales team will have a wider range of situations to choose from - increasing the possibility that you already have content to match the challenge of the prospect.
3. IMPROVING RELATIONSHIPS
It changes the relationship between you and satisfied customer. When your customer participates in an activity with you that doesn’t result in a direct sale, but instead a transfer of long-term ‘soft’ benefits, it gives them an entirely different understanding of your brand. This not only changes their perspective of you from ‘vendor’ to ‘partner’, it also increases the odds that they’ll remember (and recommend) you when industry colleagues are experiencing similar challenges. And given the strength of word-of-mouth, this can be an effective way for your network to reach further. The important thing here is to remember that when you’re crafting your content, keep it focused on the successes that it allowed for your customer, more than the your product itself. This emphasizes the positive results and impact your customer achieved.
With these three reasons in mind, it is clear that having an effective customer evidence program is one of the best ways to have content resonate positively with your audience.
If you are interested in starting your own customer evidence program, but aren’t really sure where to begin, check out our free ebook Customer Evidence 101: How to Turn Customer Success into Marketing Bliss with a primer on what you need to know before getting started.
