The value of customer feedback is exponential. While many businesses look at customer feedback to pick out statements as testimonials or which customers to ask for online reviews, you can take it even further. Customer feedback can be the spark for your content marketing with customer stories.
Uncovering The Bigger Story & Winning More Business
You’re asking every customer for feedback, your getting lots of feedback. Some opens your eyes on areas to improve, some affirms areas you know are strengths and some comments worth marketing. This sharing commonly happens as a testimonial and might be 1 to 3 sentences in length.
While it’s short, positive and a great statement of your service or product, you likely know there is more to the story of this happy customer. Go get that story.
Hello Content Marketing
Developing a small but easy process to take your happy customers from a testimonial to a case study is a great idea and a great way to win your next customer. Your use of a feedback platform like ours can be light that shines on bigger things to be created.
Best of all, it fits into a winning content marketing strategy of creating content your users value … content from customers, not your sales department.
An Example Process Of Feedback To Full Story
1- Ask all of your customers for feedback (we suggest you use GetFiveStars of course)
2- Take the best customer feedback ratings and comments from the month or quarter and follow-up with those clients, asking them if you could “feature” them in a story.
3- Create a template for your story by developing a set of questions to ask that customer. Send them an email or doc that contains questions like these for them to answer.
- What were you looking for or to accomplish?
- What were the factors in choosing our service/product?
- What stood out in the buying or service process?
- What was your favorite part of the finished product?
- What team member assisted you the most and how?
4- Take their answers to the template and build them into a story. If you have zero writing ability, find a freelance writer to polish this up for you. You can even just publish the Q & A version of it.
5- Get photos from the client or use ones you took or go take a few of the customer with the finished product, service, etc. Use words and visuals to tell the story.
Tell The Story
Once you have it pulled together, the story will be perfect on your website. A great plan would be to commit to doing 2, 4 or 6 of these a year and building our a “Customer Story” section out. Each story would be it’s own page.
BONUS: Once you post a story, you can then use your blog, Facebook or Twitter to share multiple posts and tweets about the story. Quotes from it, photos from it and excerpts from it make for great micro-content on social media channels. You can get 10-20 social posts from one story easily.
Customer Story & Case Study Examples
Here are a few other businesses and various types that are already putting customer stories to work. Case studies are not just for B2B, they work great for B2C. In fact, we do them here at GetFiveStars (and hope to do more).
Gonyea Homes
This home remodeler in the Minneapolis area has a dedicated section of their website recapping past projects. This portfolio offers a great look at the details, before and after photos and outcome of the project. Each project has a full detailed page that conveys their expertise, craftsmanship, ideas and final product. If you are in construction, landscaping, exteriors or similar this is a no-brainer for your online marketing.
Harlands Accountants
This UK accounting firm does a fantastic job of highlighting a handful of their customers that they have achieved results for. Their case study section provides a focus on companies they have helped and with what services. Tax planning, tax savings, growth funds, credits and more are all a part of the stories they tell for each client.
Slack
Messaging platform Slack has become a household name for internal business communications. They offer a great Customer Stories section to help you learn how the benefit companies like Jet.com. While this is a classic B2B case study, you can gleam a lot from these on how to structure your customer questions and stories.
Do More With Your Customer Feedback
I hope this post starts some ideas for you on how to capitalize even further on customer feedback. The value of feedback has so many benefits, please share with us if you start using your customer feedback as the start of a bigger customer story.
