Featuring Customers on Your Blog
My friend and colleague Ray Gulick of Evolution Web Development ran a guest post from me today, "Nine Steps to Featuring Customer Successes on Your Business Blog."
Check it out to learn how to tap into this powerful source of blog content.
The Audience That’s NOT Seeing Your Success Stories
When a business creates a fresh customer success story, it's eager to get it out in the public for all to see.
The organization quickly loads it on the website and sends it to sales reps. Maybe they write a press release featuring that customer story.
But ultimatey, that story only goes OUT into the public.
There's a whole other audience - right at home - that should hear those powerful customer examples - your employees.
Every day, employees come to work for the good of the organization. They're manufacturing or writing code or processing payroll and likely don't hear much about the end result of all their work.
In truth, all employees are working toward making the company and its customers successful.
If they never hear those success stories, they lose a connection, meaning and pride in why the business even exists.
Here are 5 ways to share customer case studies or success stories with employees:
New employee orientation - Kick off the relationship on a positive note by including customer success stories in new employee orientation.
Email - Send an email with a story teaser and then link back to the full story on your web site. Be sure to congratulate the employees that contributed to that success.
Newsletter - Feature customer stories in your employee newsletter.
Meetings/Events - At employee meetings or events, talk about a couple of recent success stories or invite the customer to speak.
Intranet - Post all customer success stories on your company intranet.
Sharing those stories with employees gets them excited and bridges the gap between what they do and the difference the company makes for customers. You might also create employee evangelists that retell those stories to others.
The Success Story as Your “For Example”
In conversation, most of us seem really good about giving examples.
When you're trying to make a point about something, you might throw in a "For example..."
In sales and marketing, the customer success story is the most compelling "for example" you can offer. Yet too often, organizations get caught up in excessive description and promises without backing up what they say with examples and anecdotes.
Likewise, customer success stories and case studies are dragged down by too much general product description of how something works. It effectively derails the story.
The two lessons:
1. Use examples to enhance description - When describing products and services on the web, in collateral materials or conversation, always pepper in or link to customer stories as your "for example." Otherwise, those promises are just promises without evidence to back them up.
2. Don't bog down stories with too much description - In success stories and case studies, leave excessive "how it works" description out. Use other avenues for those details, and keep the story all about how the customer interacts with the solution and the results.
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