Customer stories are powerful tools to showcase your brand's value, credibility, and impact. They can also help you generate more exposure, engagement, and trust on your PR and social media channels. But how can you use them effectively to boost your visibility and reputation? Here are some tips to help you leverage customer stories for your PR and social media strategy.
Before you start collecting and sharing customer stories, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. Do you want to increase awareness, generate leads, drive conversions, or build loyalty? Do you want to target a specific segment, niche, or industry? Having a clear goal and audience will help you craft customer stories that resonate with your ideal prospects and influencers.
Identify Compelling Customer Stories: Start by identifying customers who have had positive experiences with your brand. Look for stories that are relatable, unique, and showcase the value your products or services provide.
Seek out stories that have a progressive arc. Was there an issue or a challenge a customer had that someone on your team helped them resolve? Was there something the customer learned that they didn’t know before? Think about beginning, middle, end. Where did your company/org support that arc?
Customer stories can take different forms, such as testimonials, case studies, reviews, interviews, videos, podcasts, or blog posts. Depending on your goal and audience, you need to choose the format and platform that best suits your message and style. For example, if you want to showcase your product features and benefits, a video testimonial might be more effective than a written review. If you want to highlight your customer's journey and success, a case study might be more appropriate than a short quote. Likewise, you need to select the platform that matches your audience's preferences and habits. For example, if you want to reach a younger and more visual audience, you might want to use Instagram or TikTok rather than LinkedIn or Twitter.
In my experience, if you have an interesting success story that speaks to a current trend, it’s best to pitch it as an exclusive to a journalist writing about the trend BEFORE using the story anywhere for marketing purposes. Once the story is in the public domain, journalists are less interested and they obviously don’t want to cover the same story their peers are covering. This is why offering an exclusive can really help a company get into a story they wouldn’t otherwise have mentioned or featured in. Get PR first to elevate awareness of your company’s offer, boost credibility and increase share of voice. Then, market the story and media coverage of the story as social proof.
When using social media to showcase video testimonials, try not to over-produce the content. Young audiences are drawn to unfiltered, unscripted, and authentic storytelling. You’re capturing a real person’s story, not making an infomercial.
Once you have your goal, audience, format, and platform in mind, you need to collect and craft customer stories that showcase your brand's value proposition and personality. You can collect customer stories by asking for feedback, conducting surveys, interviewing customers, or monitoring online reviews. You can also incentivize customers to share their stories by offering rewards, discounts, or recognition. When crafting customer stories, you need to focus on the problem, solution, and outcome. You need to highlight how your brand helped your customer overcome a challenge, achieve a goal, or improve a situation. You also need to use emotional and descriptive language, include relevant data and facts, and add visuals or audio elements to make your stories more engaging and authentic.
The final step is to promote and repurpose your customer stories to maximize their reach and impact. You need to share your customer stories on your PR and social media channels, as well as on your website, email, or other marketing materials. You also need to optimize your customer stories for SEO, using keywords, tags, and meta descriptions. Moreover, you need to repurpose your customer stories for different formats and platforms, adapting them to suit the context and audience. For example, you can turn a video testimonial into a blog post, a case study into a podcast, or a review into a social media post. By promoting and repurposing your customer stories, you can increase your exposure, engagement, and trust among your target audience and influencers.
Representation matters. Look at all of the content your company has produced and evaluate the types of stories, people, and communities that are highlighted. Notice any trends? If you have DEI+/IDEAL resources in-house, team up with them to ensure accurate and affirming representation is built into your communication plan. If you don’t have those resources, seek them out!
Request Permission: Reach out to the selected customers and ask for their permission to share their stories. Ensure they are comfortable with being featured in your PR and social media efforts.