B2B Marketing: Are You Leveraging Your Customer Case Studies For Demand Generation?

Marketers often see customer marketing as no more than a sales enablement activity. They put a customer reference program in place to help sales in the late stages of the buying cycle. Then they might develop customer case studies and proof points in the form of brochures that they’ll hand over to field and inside sales teams to engage customers mid-funnel. But rarely do they leverage customer stories in successful demand generation programs for top-of-the-funnel engagement.

Customer advocacy is about getting customers to share their stories and helping them broadcast these stories where your prospects can be reached: on your company’s website, in off-line or online communities, on social media, reading industry analyst reports, and so on.  

There are lots of simple and effective demand generation tactics you can use to leverage customer advocates:

• Recruit a customer to share his/her success with your product on a webinar,
  
• Help him/her write a blog post and then promote it widely via social and paid media
  
• Invite a customer to speak on the company’s behalf at conferences, tradeshows, and user groups
  
• Nominate your customer for industry awards, featuring his or her  story in videos and e-books to be used on inbound and outbound channels.

Also of course, before involving your customers in sharing your company’s message, make sure you have some solid foundations for a healthy customer advocacy program, which includes

• Good Customer Experience: Do you have a large enough pool of happy customers? How large a pool will you need? Read my blog on NPS
  

• Strong Internal Processes: Do you have  a process in place to recruit your happy customers, and manage  the process as they become effective advocates?
  

• Sizable Advocate Base: How big is your current advocate base? What’s the coverage of these customer stories by target market, by phase of the buying cycle, or by tactics and content type? How many of them are willing to share their name publicly.

Also of course, before involving your customers in sharing your company’s message, make sure you have some solid foundations for a healthy customer advocacy program, which includes:

• Good Customer Experience: Do you have a large enough pool of happy customers? How large a pool will you need? Read my blog on NPS
  

• Strong Internal Processes: Do you have  a process in place to recruit your happy customers, and manage  the process as they become effective advocates?
  

• Sizable Advocate Base: How big is your current advocate base? What’s the coverage of these customer stories by target market, by phase of the buying cycle, or by tactics and content type? How many of them are willing to share their name publicly.
  

You work to make your customers happy. But are you making your happy customers work for you?

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