Emily Amos, founder of Uplift Content, will be speaking at CustomerX Con in Boston in a little over a week, and while she's there she will be conducting a “woman-on-the-street”-style interview with attendees. Her goal is to ask one single question of as many customer marketers and customer advocates as she can, and then compile the responses into a helpful resource for the customer marketing community. Here's the question: How do you measure the performance of your customer stories? To kick off her effort prior to the conference, she tagged several CMA professionals on LinkedIn, myself included (I'm honored), to answer her question. As usual, while on LinkedIn trying to answer the question, I ran into the character limit because my response was too long. So in order to share my long answer without a character limit, I created this blog post... My answer to the question: This isn’t exactly an area that the role I’m in typically is responsible to measure, however, I do have some thoughts about it. Because a customer story will likely live on a web page you can measure the basic web page metrics — traffic, click-thrus, conversions. You can even break this down a bit further if you have/use different formats of the story, like video vs. written to identify which format converts best. As conversions happen (form fills, etc.), you can likely track the lead through the sales cycle to closed won/lost status, if it gets that far. Then you can look at how many deals included that asset as part of the journey. So what’s measured in the scenario above is really just a strong indication, based on online actions, whether or not the story was effective at converting those site visitors into the next stage of the sales process. Unfortunately, we know that site visitors don’t always follow the most easily measured path that we marketers would prefer they take. In reality, you will never know if someone read the story, didn’t fill out the form for a demo, then later chose to return to your website, then reached out to a buddy on LinkedIn using your product to get the name of their contact at your org. Then they got in touch with someone and a deal ensued from there toward a close/won status. You can perhaps gain some additional insights by enabling customer-facing teams to use the customer story in their outreach toward sales (net new, up-sell/cross-sell). Even KR them on the usage of the story asset to hold them accountable toward using it (hopefully you’ve connected with Sales prior to creating the asset to ensure it’s fulfilling needs they have in the sales process to begin with). Give each Sales person a unique tracking link that can be used in email signatures, in decks presented to prospects, in email outreach and follow ups to prospects, etc. Then you can see how often the asset is being used by Sales — one measure of whether or not the story is effective: does Sales even use it? Then you can compare how often the sales team is using/sharing the asset with the traffic to the story online and ultimately the conversion rate of the web page the story resides on, and how many closed/won deals included that asset as a touch point in the sales process. Emily is a good human who is amazing with customer stories, so if you find yourself in need of help to craft effective customers stories, click the button below and check out her website.
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December 2024
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