#open-share
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Hello! My team is looking to break out our customer story strategy into tiered buckets. Not every customer can do a long form case study, but we still want to involve customers in other storytelling opportunities. This is all new though and was curious if anyone has done this before? Do you have a process of how you sort customers? What content types fall into what tiers?
Hey Madeline! Here's some advocacy menus that have been shared in the past (might even be included on the CMA Weekly site?) but the LogicGate one does a great job of identifying opportunities based on what appeals to the advocate, I think.
Yay thank you!!!
storytelling for the win!
love this topic - so many people just ignore these great customers stories if they can't go full bore traditional named case study. having a menu of lower-friction ways for customers to engage and share positive proof points is key - gets you a much broader representation across customers (esp ones in tougher industries like Fed Gov, Financial Services, Oil&Gas, Pharma, etc)
Definitely throw surveys (where they have the option to be anonymous) into the lower friction bucket. Great way to get a lot of good content quickly if you have a larger user base. There's different flavors of videos too (selfie vs high production). Reviews probably in the middle effort-wise since they have to create an account. Even worth having different flavors of case studies (e.g. snapshots vs high-production brand stories)
The key on getting participation for the lower friction stuff is to decouple the individual from the company/corporation - ie make it feel like they are just talking as themselves (e.g anonymous quote) vs doing a full-bore case study which implies they need to get legal/pr and the corporation to sign off which is scary
also related - when sales or c-level execs say "we need more case studies!" don't interpret that literally/narrowly and try to go get more case studies only. "case studies" is just the most accessible term they know - have a more liberal/broad interpretation of the spirit of what they are asking, which is "I need more customer proof to demonstrate to this prospect that we've delivered results to someone in the same industry, use-case, size, region, competitor, etc
I'm currently rolling out a "lower tier" customer spotlight Q&A that positions the customer contact as an expert in the industry. Questions are focused around her professional experience, her thoughts on topics like skills needed or important things to consider, and what she likes most about a couple of our features. So not as data heavy, no fear of giving away trade secrets, and feels like more of a "give back" when making the logo ask as we are talking about how great THEIR employee is.
So far, it's been really well received and (knock on wood) hoping to get a couple published before end of year.
@Evan Huck - all great advice!! Thank you for your tips. I've copy and pasted them into my working document for this program. 🙂
@Marie Elliott - I'm very interested in how you're executing this. I'm going to DM you!!