The Media Wants Your Customer Stories
Journalists are constantly looking for interesting stories to bring to their audiences.
"When PR agencies and businesses come to me with customer stories, I’m always interested‚" said Mila D’Antonio, Managing Editor of 1to1 Magazine. "It’s a challenge to get a good story if it doesn’t have a good customer story in it." (from Ch. 9, Stories That Sell)
You can bring customer stories to journalists in a couple of ways:
A story press release
A story pitch, with a customer story or customer reference in hand
The story press release
The "story press" release highlights a specific customer connected with your news. Maybe it’s a product release or an announcement about that customer’s success. Weave the customer’s story right into the press release.
Several of my clients craft press releases that highlight specific customers. Here’s an example from Customer Expressions.
When creating my own press release this week, I turned to a relevant story for an engaging intro.
The story pitch
If you don’t give a customer example in a press release, still offer a customer success story to a media outlet to increase your chances of getting a journalist’s attention.
With your pitch, you might give some bullets about the customer’s success, send a video or written case study, or recommend that the journalist talks to a specific customer.
If you don’t provide it, reporters will likely ask to interview a customer anyway. It’s better to be prepared.
This takes the focus off the vendor business (which editors really like), and puts it on the successful customer, made successful with your solutions.
I’d love to see any examples you find of customer stories in press releases.
PR: Stepping Stone to a Case Study?
Selling anyone on anything is usually a process. The same goes for convincing customers to be featured in a customer case study. Sometimes you have to baby-step customers toward sharing their success story by initiating other joint marketing activities instead.
Last week, a software company I work with learned that its big-name customer wasn’t ready to go public with a full customer story yet. The customer suggested they revisit the topic in 6 months or so, when results will be better. But my client wanted to get something documented publicly now, and be able to leverage that credibility.
The resulting solution was a compromise that pleases both parties. They will start with a "feature" press release announcing the relationship and offering additional details about the solution. The release reads almost like a case study, but isn’t as long. It goes beyond just announcing the relationship to touch on the client’s needs, some highlights of the solution, and some initial results.
The software firm and its client both get a public announcement, while the compromise respects that the client isn’t ready to officially document its success quite yet.
What have you seen work in moving customers toward a case study?
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