How to Use Customer Stories for B2B Demand Generation?
Grasping the proper use of customer stories for B2B demand generation is crucial for any business that seeks to build the necessary trust and credibility with would-be clients. Customer stories can serve to nicely illuminate the actual value of your product. They can also serve to highlight the actual impact of your brand on the world. They are not just testimonials; they are narratives that invite the listener to see themselves as part of the story.
Why Customer Stories Matter in B2B Marketing
Data reveals that 90% of individuals check digital appraisals prior to going to a commerce. As for B2B enterprises, client testimonials are the use of a kind of social validation that’s as potent as it gets. They nudge prospects along with the collaborative speed that B2B marketing often requires. What’s more, CEB research asserts that clients are 57% of the way through the buying journey before ever engaging a sales rep. So, obviously, anything a marketer can do to influence decisions from behind the scenes, and in a way that appears aboveboard, is to that mark’s benefit.
Moreover, client accounts can be utilized in diverse ways across many channels, which serves to amplify your demand generation work. Here are some reasons why these stories are significant:
- Construct Confidence: Real stories foster confidence.
- Increase Engagement: Attention is held by engaging storytelling.
- Highlight Solutions: Stories show how problems are solved.
Take Salesforce, for example. They tell compelling customer stories on their website showcasing how different companies use their platform to overcome obstacles. In doing so, they spotlight not only the effectiveness but also the versatility of their solutions.
How to Use Customer Stories for B2B Demand Generation?
Having gained an understanding of the weight that customer stories carry, let us now look into their effective implementation in B2B demand generation. We mean to suggest here a few methods of utilizing their persuasive power through your most important marketing channels.
- Identify Significant Customers: Start off with customers who have realized major results with your offering. These accounts should showcase the diverse range of use cases your offering caters to.
- Perform Interviews: Set up interviews with these customers. Collect perspectives on their problems, how your service solved them, and the outcomes they reached. This renders their story genuine and accessible.
- Create Engaging Content: Generate case studies, videos, or blog posts from the stories. Make sure they adhere to a well-defined format, and feature the following elements:
- The customer faced a challenge
- The enacted solution
- The achieved measurable results
- Share with purpose: Tell your relatable stories on your website, social media, and in email campaigns. People are much more likely to get engaged with written content if it features a story they can relate to. So tell these kinds of stories when you’re writing to your audience.
- Use for Lead Nurturing: Integrate these tales into your lead nurturing efforts. This can be crucial during the buyer’s journey, particularly in the consideration phase.
Examples of Effective Customer Story Utilization
A prominent instance is HubSpot, which places customer stories on a pedestal on their website. Their case studies serve as potent proof points of product efficacy. In addition, they feature video testimonials, which tend to create more engagement than text alone.
An additional instance is Slack, which employs customer narratives in its marketing campaigns to show the actual applications of its product. Its case studies frequently embed quantifiable outcomes, which makes them persuasive and compelling for potential customers.
Moreover, using platforms like LinkedIn can greatly boost these tales. When you share posts or write articles that discuss your customers’ successes, those stories can hit a much larger audience—and, in the process, you can help establish your industry leadership.
Measuring the Impact of Customer Stories
Effectively leveraging customer stories for B2B demand generation is contingent on understanding how to gauge their impact. Here are some primary performance indicators (PIs) to keep an eye on:
- Metrics for Engagement: Keep track of the social media space, and pay attention to the interactions that your posts are generating. In particular, watch for any changes in the volume of good old likes, shares, and comments. If your posts are increasingly or decreasingly getting these three forms of interaction, you may be onto or off of something. And you are always onto or off of something.
- Conversion Rates for Leads: Examine the rate at which leads convert after they have interacted with narratives about the customer.
- Traffic to the website: Look for sudden increases in the number of visitors to the pages that contain customer experiences.
As stated by MotionPoint, businesses that make use of client testimonials experience a boost in conversion rates of nearly 400%. Consequently, monitoring these sorts of metrics can yield some pretty insightful data for fine-tuning and otherwise reworking your demand generation push.
Conclusion: Transforming Customer Stories into Demand Generation Powerhouses
Comprehending the use of customer tales in B2B demand generation can be life-changing. By crafting stories that hit home, organizations can build trust, involve potential customers, and more efficiently convert prospects into paying clients. These narratives should play a part in most marketing channels. When they do, our collective credibility as an organization improves—some would say by orders of magnitude. In the case of far too many companies, this organizing principle isn’t even on the radar.
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