The Power of Customer Success Stories: How to Leverage Content Marketing for Maximum Impact
Customer success stories offer B2B companies a powerful way to share their work with customers.
Over the years, from the days of marketing gurus like Gary Halbert, David Ogilvy, etc., stories have been a powerful marketing tool. Now, companies leverage customers’ success stories as a content marketing tool. Stories build trust and credibility. They improve lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.
There are many ways to leverage customer stories for content marketing. Case studies and testimonials are the most common. We’ll go beyond case studies and testimonials to evaluate and discuss other creative ways B2B companies can leverage their customer success stories to boost their content marketing returns.
What Is a Customer Success Story?
A customer success story, or client story relates the tale of customer’s encounter with a company’s product or service. It includes detailed information, from the point of contact to the challenges, positive experiences, and how the products or services addressed their needs. Smart B2B companies understand that prospects trust what a customer says about a company and its products and services more than what the company says about itself. Therefore, they leverage customer stories to boost their content marketing effectiveness.
Customer success stories work best with prospects in the consideration stage of their customer journey. Early in the customer journey, customers may be eager to hear from others who have used a particular product or service they want to purchase. Customer-centric companies use customer success stories to dispel these fears and show how they’ve helped customers with similar challenges. They highlight challenges and pain points, and how the company solved these challenges.
Here are some ways B2B companies can leverage customer success stories to enhance their content marketing efforts:
Case studies are the most common ways companies show prospects how their business operates. Beyond sharing customer success stories, companies use case studies to narrate the customer journey and how they address every customer’s needs.
Sharing customer success stories with case studies requires B2B companies to highlight how their customers used their products or services to overcome challenges and achieve their business goals. They include key metrics, testimonials, and use cases and add compelling narratives to show their offerings’ value and effectiveness.
Companies can use blog posts to share their customers’ success stories. This is useful, especially to B2B companies that wish to show detailed use cases of their products or services to enable their prospects to see how they are the best fit for their business.
To successfully share customer stories with this method, B2B companies must make blog posts about their customers, detailing their pain points and how their products or services provide the solution. These blog posts can be presented as interviews or guest posts from customers.
Videos are powerful content marketing tools with multipurpose use in content marketing. B2B companies that want to leverage their customers’ success stories to drive visibility and conversion must use video testimonials.
Video testimonials don’t just capture your customers’ stories more engagingly and compellingly; they also build trust and credibility faster, as the prospects hear directly from the customers. Video testimonials can be incorporated into other content marketing formats like published blog posts, shared on video-sharing networks like YouTube, posted on social media, or attached to emails.
With over 4.2 billion social media users worldwide, companies understand the impact building trust and credibility on social media platforms using their customers’ success stories would have on their business.
To effectively leverage social media for sharing customer stories, companies develop social media campaigns that focus on sharing their customer stories. Share them as quotes, short video clips, infographics, and other repurposed content.
Encourage customers to share their stories using specific hashtags; when they do, they respond and engage with them by quoting their stories and pushing the success stories to their followers. This increases engagement on the company’s social media accounts, thus, increasing visibility and leading to more lead generation and sales.
Webinars are fast becoming a vital content marketing channel companies can leverage to share exciting news and information with their prospects and customers.
B2B companies can use webinars to share customer success stories by inviting customers for interviews. In these interviews, their customers will share their stories, beginning with their challenges, how they sought solutions, and how the company’s products or services addressed their needs.
Given the nature of webinars, companies can have more in-depth conversations with their customers, highlighting the key benefits they derive from their products or services. This gives prospects a detailed insight into the customer experience success stories and helps them envision telling their stories someday.
Email marketing has remained a powerful content marketing channel companies adopt to nurture leads into buying and repeat customers.
Leveraging email campaigns to share customer success stories helps companies handle customer objections and convince them to try their products and services. This strategy will work best in multichannel marketing where other strategies, like video testimonials, podcast episodes, webinars, blog links, etc., are incorporated to give the prospects more reasons to trust the company.
Customer stories and testimonials are powerful content marketing tools that future-centric B2B companies adopt to build trust and credibility. They make it easy for companies to showcase their values and benefits.
Success stories also make products and services relatable. When prospects see other customers who have been in their shoes and had a successful experience, they imagine themselves achieving the same feat. This influences them to purchase the products without further objections.
Furthermore, customer stories enhance content marketing efforts as they can be repurposed into valuable content that supports lead generation and conversion.
Learn more about the power of stories: How Brand Storytelling Increased ROI 2,700%!
Like a typical story, customer success stories and testimonials follow a structure. They move from problem to solution.
That means companies should first narrate their customers’ challenges. Then, talk about how they sought solutions. End with how their products and services provided the customers with the needed solution.
This approach enables the prospects to envision the customer’s journey. It also provides insights into how their problems can be addressed with the company’s products and services.
Customer success stories can help a company generate massive leads and help it nurture prospects into buying customers. However, handling B2B customer success stories is delicate, as companies must seek their customers’ consent and tell the story strategically. Always ask permission before sharing success stories.
Leveraging customer stories for content marketing is a powerful marketing approach for fB2B companies. When executed properly, it can greatly improve ROI.
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Jeanne Grunert is the founder and president of Seven Oaks Consulting, and an award-winning writer and content marketing expert with over 30 years of writing, marketing, and business experience. She writes, teaches, and speaks frequently on all things writing, content marketing, and personal branding. Jeanne currently serves as the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors (NAIWE) Branding and Marketing Expert. She holds an M.A. in Writing and an M.S. in Direct and Digital Marketing (awarded with distinction) from New York University. Jeanne is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed Majek Family Mysteries and Pricing Your Services: 21 Tips for More Profit.
Christopher ‘Positive Equator’ Iwundu is a freelance SEO content marketing specialist with over five years of experience. He works with B2B and B2C business owners looking to generate and convert leads with content marketing. Chris is a Seven Oaks Consulting website contributor.