Highlight your customers. Ask them for testimonials and interviews. And share those customer stories all over your marketing channels.
Every business is built upon promises. Promises to offer customers better results, better experiences and better solutions. But how do you earn trust with our audience and convince them that your brand has all the answers they're looking for? If someone has to tell you that you can trust them, how can you genuinely trust what they say? Of course everyone will say they are the best. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing because at its heart, it’s a third party endorsement. Third-party endorsements happen when someone other than your staff or company publicly approves or supports your products or services. So when creating brand trust in the marketplace, you want to think about amplifying word-of-mouth marketing. How can you do this? The answer is simple: Create compelling content they can relate to; more specifically, use stories that your company and consumers can both benefit from. People want to share information and stories with their friends. Our brands are hard-wired to be social animals. So in marketing, you should be distributing stories for your audience to talk about. “Brands need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” - Jeremy Ross Miller If you're just starting your business and or you want more customers for your business, then storytelling is your content format of choice. Think like a media company. You should adapt this thinking to your content strategy by giving your own customers a voice and a platform.
This is a community-centric approach. Community building wins.
“We have made it our goal to nurture our relationships with our customers and empower them to become brand advocates, turning guests into the loyal guest, and ultimately an advocate for the brand.”
– Rob Palleschi – Global Head, Hilton Hotels & Resort Community building and story-telling is how you can amplify word-of-mouth marketing and share third-party endorsements (customer stories) that genuinely earn trust with new and recurring customers.
The key to community building is to not make it all about you. You might be the figurehead and hero of the community you’re building, but you want to create a culture of lifting others up in your community. And you have to be the example. Highlight others.
Additionally, let your community interview you. Your own customers or community members might have podcasts or social media shows. Whether they have 10 followers or a million. Take the time out of your day and support what they're doing by going on their show and sharing the content on your social media.
It's reciprocal. There are multiple ways to do this.
Customer interviews via blogs or Zoom videos
Sharing a message to your community stating you're accessible for interviews
Community member interviews via Zoom videos
Collecting customer feedback via forms
Asking for genuine reviews on Google Reviews
Asking your customers for video testimonials
Re-purposing positive feedback from customers into testimonial graphics
The key is re-purposing.
Turn one customer testimonial into 15 different posts.
Testimonial graphics are branded graphics for social media to share testimonials from customers. They're easy to create and share.
Simply collect positive mentions from customers via Google Reviews, social media comments, emails, from your staff interacting with customers, or from an online form.
Copy the best quotes and paste them onto a graphic using a tool like Canva. Below is an example of Kennected re-purposing a testimonial into a testimonial graphic.
Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. The app includes templates for users to use. The platform is free to use and offers paid subscriptions.
Canva is very easy to use and I strongly recommend using it. I recommend not using last names and pictures of your customers in the testimonial graphics. Keep it custom with job title or who they are.
Kennected is a great example for customer interviews via videos too. In this YouTube video, you can see Kennected’s Chief Marketing Officer, Elliot Drake, jumping on a zoom call to interview one of their customers. The format is simple. Introduce the customer and spotlight at a high level who they are. Once the 20-30 second introduction is completed, Elliot has a checklist of some questions to ask the customer about their product experience. Here’s an interview question checklist that any business can use when interviewing their customers: Customer Interview Questions X= the name of the business/product 1. Who are you and what do you do? 2. What was your problem like before you used X? 3. What was your motivation for trying X? 4. What impact do you see X making in their industry? 5. What have you enjoyed the most when working with X? 6. If you were to recommend X to your colleague friend, what would you say? 7. What was your main concern that would have prevented you from using X, and what put your fears to rest? I’ve used this checklist of questions to collect testimonials for years. Note: The 6th and 7th questions usually generate the best quotes from customers. Here’s the trick: In content creation, you want to repurpose the best content as much as you can.
REPURPOSE TESTIMONIALS. If you were to ask one of your customers if they are willing to be interviewed about their product experience, you might collect enough content to repurpose what they said.
Create testimonial graphics and post to social media
Post the full interview to YouTube
Post the full (or short clips) of the interview to social media
NOTE: Remember when I said to “think like a media company”? Tag your customers when you post about them. You’re literally giving them free exposure and brand awareness. If you do this enough, you will literally start to get customers asking YOU to interview them because they want the spotlight. You can get so many testimonials from this strategy
Use Tools like Otter Ai to transcribe the audio from the interviews so that you can re-purpose the interview into a blog.
While you transcribe the videos, look for the best 1-2 lined quotes from the customer. You can use these 1-2 lined quotes for your website, landing page, or product branding.
In marketing, brand storytelling provides a genuine glimpse into a company's culture and what it does to deliver and fulfill its promises. It offers a window to the soul of the company and shows a side of it that the consumers can relate to. It shows the real mission behind why their team of professionals work hard everyday to deliver a unique service or product. Brand storytelling, in a nutshell, is a company’s method for building human connections. Highlight your customers. Ask them for testimonials and interviews. And share those customer stories all over your marketing channels.
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