4 Ways to Leverage Customer Success Stories in Inbound Marketing

How are you using customer success stories in your inbound marketing?

In inbound marketing, customer success stories directly address your customers’ pain points while providing social proof of the efficacy of your products or services. If you are only using them on the Testimonials or Customers page of your website, you’re missing an opportunity to leverage powerful marketing content.

In a recent article titled Stories Sell: How to Write a Powerful Customer Success Story, we shared the process of writing customer success stories and why you should include customer stories in your marketing content. In this article, we’ll go a step further and explore the ways to use customer success stories, or case stories, in inbound marketing. While this article focuses on customer success stories, the same opportunities exist to leverage case studies and testimonials.

Ways to Leverage Customer Success Stories in Inbound Marketing

Blog

A customer success story is a celebration of a customer’s success that tells the story of how they overcame obstacles by finding a solution to their problem and achieving their goals. Use these stories on your blog to shine the spotlight on your customers while also providing insight into how real companies are using your product or service and the reason they chose you over the competition. Case stories provide an opportunity to earn your potential buyers’ trust while they are considering their options.

Ways to write blog articles around customer success stories include interviews, guest posts from customers, and articles featuring customers in a particular niche who have a common need and are similarly using your product.

Video

The power of video in marketing is undeniable. There are many ways to use customer success stories in video marketing. Video testimonials provide compelling proof of your service and can be brief or expanded.  Include them in customer stories that dive into the company’s history, their growing pains, and how your service solved their problem and allowed them to overcome their roadblocks. Or, simply produce a short but impactful video showing the company, its problem, the solution, and its success.

With one customer success story, you could create multiple videos of varying lengths, which can be hosted on YouTube, embedded in web pages and blog articles, and shared on social media.

Social Media

Sharing customer success stories on social media is an excellent way to highlight your customer while expanding your reach. Tag your customers’ accounts so that their followers can engage with the post and celebrate their success as well. Be sure to avoid being self-promotional. Focus on your customers for better engagement.

Types of social posts you can create from customer success stories include links to blog articles, videos, “Customer of the Week” posts, and quotes.

eBooks

When creating new resources and eBooks for your inbound marketing campaigns, don’t overlook the power of case stories. There are many ways you can include them in marketing resources, including:

• Create a compilation of customer success stories into one eBook.
• Use customer success stories in your eBooks as examples of how companies have successfully implemented the methods laid out therein.
• Write an in-depth case study and offer it as an eBook or white paper.
• Conduct a research study using data you’ve gathered from your customers. Add case stories to bring the data to life.

Bonus: Sales Content

When you map content to the buyer’s journey, don’t forget to leverage the power of case stories.

The use of content is a prime opportunity to align marketing and sales. Customer success stories should be made available for use by your sales team when working with buyers. They will appreciate being able to use customer success stories in outreach and follow-up emails, sales calls, and pitch decks.

Now that you have a few ideas for using customer success stories in inbound marketing, we’d love to get your feedback. Have you tried this? What has been successful for you? Share your comments with us so we can learn from you!