Seven Best Practices for Crafting Customer Success Stories

Video01Many companies write customer success stories and fail. Why?

Because they focus on themselves—their company, their product, or their service—and not on their customer. The proverbial spotlight is on the wrong actor.

Writing a customer success story is a delicate blend of art and science. It requires crafting a good story based on a real business challenge faced by a real customer. How can you bring your customer’s voice into the success story?

I recommend following these best practices:

1. Tell a good story. Like a journalist, find a “hook,” something about the customer’s situation that will resonate with others. You want the reader or viewer to identify with the customer. Pay attention to the details.

2. Ask good questions. Identify significant business challenges the customer faced, discuss how they negatively affected their business, and explore how the customer overcame these obstacles. Provide facts and figures where possible to bolster the quantitative side of the story.

3. Name a real company. Be as specific as possible when profiling the customer’s company. This authenticity makes a stronger business case and helps increase the connection with the reader or viewer.

4. Use real quotes. Let your customer’s personality shine through using their own words. Don’t script what they say into “corporate-speak;” it sounds formal, unnatural, and forced.

5. Be creative. Customer success stories provide information but don’t have to be boring. With inexpensive digital video and audio technology, you can inform and entertain. Videos, podcasts, and one-page documents all work. Of course, finding the right medium and achieving the right balance are key.

6. Demonstrate ROI. One ingredient in a successful customer story is being able to take a business issue and turn it into math. If you can create quantifiable Return On Investment, the story and lessons learned within it will have more impact and be more memorable.

7. Create a Call To Action. Enable the reader or viewer to take some action at the end of the customer success story. Provide a way to contact the company for more information. Websites, phone numbers, email addresses, and social media contacts are the most common.

Go Ahead and Brag: How to Leverage Your Customer Profiles and Case Studies

Using LinkedIn for Businesses

Do you use LinkedIn for your brand?

LinkedIn, as many of us know, represents the social networking realm for professionals. Between recent college graduates, the unemployed looking for work, or just a platform to meet more people in your industry, LinkedIn’s purpose is well received. However, when it comes to execution and “doing”, brands tend to get lost in what purpose they serve as an organization on this social network. Lets take a look.

1. Create a company page

 Starting with the basics, creating a company page with your brand’s information, logo and mission statement is a great starting point for LinkedIn.

 2. Community focused groups

One of LinkedIn’s (arguably) best features is the ability for a user or business to both create and join tailored groups to each profession. Are you a life science professional? There are many groups whose members are also in the industry. Are you in Public Relations? No problem, there are groups for that, too. Some groups are small or even private, whereas other groups have thousands of members (especially groups of a specific trade or publication). Promoting your brand through a customized group will allow you to administer all activity and oversee the community.

3. Engagement

LinkedIn is an excellent way to engage with your targets and clients. Send out LinkedIn status updates letting your followers know weekly updates with your brand or start group discussions leading people back to your LinkedIn page and back to your website. Engagement with your followers through LinkedIn will simultaneously help you grow your brand just by staying active on LinkedIn.

Is your brand on LinkedIn? How else do you like to use the social media platform to grow your business? Let us know and comment below! 

Social Media Recipe #1: How To Seed

Over the next several months, TRA360 will be blogging about our most coveted tips, tricks and how to’s in the social media world. As many of us know, social media has begun to take over marketing and branding. Social media has shaped up businesses across the world in addition to helping brands develop trust and credibility among their consumers.

This week’s social media “recipe” is about seeding. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of seeding, seeding refers to the act of generating content and “planting” that content in related online forums, platforms or discussion boards to find people who might be similarly interested in your content.

How To Seed

 

Ingredients

1 (or more) piece(s) of juicy content

1 working computer with internet access

1 completed LinkedIn profile

1 cup of motivation

3/4 cup of networking skills

Typically, seeding works well with blog posts, articles, newsletters, short research summaries, etc. The best piece of wisdom we have to offer here is do your homework. Seeding seems simple, yes, but in reality, if you are seeding in the wrong online locations your content is bound to be ignored. Do your homework by researching the top 10 locations of where your content will be read and replied to. Engagement is key here!

A LinkedIn profile is essential for seeding because of the “groups” feature. Joining related groups to your industry and seeding your content through these groups will help generate a buzz about your content. Writing about social media and not sure where to seed? Start with your own personal Twitter account, Facebook page, and knowledge share groups on LinkedIn. Other platforms allow their authors to be published and read by thousands including Social Media Today, Digital Doughnut, and Business 2 Community.

Good luck, seeders! 

Introducing HootSuite Conversations

Will you be using HootSuite Conversations?

Lets face it- as marketers we like to stay connected at all times. We can’t help but engage with our team members, clients, consumers and other marketers/PR pros alike. Yes, we rely heavily on Facebook chat and G-talk, but as of today, HootSuite has introduced the latest addition to the HootSuite family: HootSuite Conversations

HootSuite Conversations allows for internal collaboration within your brand. Whether you want to communicate with a team member, your boss or even your cube-mate, HootSuite Conversations allows for any and all social collaboration within the HootSuite dashboard. Another perk is the ability to import your Google or Yahoo e-mail accounts. With this new feature, social media initiatives and platforms are simplified and easily accessible to your entire company.

Building an online community within a community makes all-around communication easier and more enjoyable because of the organization. Everything from messaging someone to commenting on a group message is right at your fingertips. Although this is a brand new HootSuite feature, as a Social Media Strategist, I feel that HootSuite Conversations is the perfect concept that every brand can embody. HootSuite has moved on to bigger and better discoveries with your brand’s needs in mind.

Do you already use HootSuite? If so, will you be testing out the new HootSuite Conversations feature within your company?