Success stories are case studies that show how your products or services have helped your customers. They're consistently ranked among the most effective forms of B2B content marketing, and for good reason: they can be powerful for your business too.
Why Success Stories?
The goal of a success story is to show prospects real examples of how your product or service solves a problem or meets an unmet need. It helps them understand why and see how other companies have used what you offer, and it makes the claims you make about your product far more believable.
Where to Start?
The best place to start is with your customers. Stay in touch with them in the days, weeks, and months after they buy. Many will have experienced great, sometimes dramatic, results, but you won't know unless you ask.
Once you identify a few standout cases, ask those customers for permission to publish a story about their experience. Then write it up with the focus on the customer and how they implemented your solution. Make your customers the heroes, and show how their performance improved thanks to your product or service.
Do not make it about your company. Prospects want to know how your customers experienced your product; they want to picture themselves in your customer's shoes.
Develop Three Dramatic Stories
After talking with customers, you may find you have many stories worth telling. The best ones for marketing are the most dramatic, because drama engages your audience. Hollywood lives and dies by it, and so will your success stories.
Three strong stories are all you need, and each should be very different from the others. Perhaps one is about a customer who struggled to find a solution, tried several products that didn't work, and was thrilled when they finally found yours. Another might center on the value of your customer service after the sale.
Each story should follow the classic three-act structure. Act one focuses on the customer's problem and their search for a solution. Act two covers seeking out that solution and the obstacles along the way. Act three delivers the payoff: finding the right answer, seeing real results, and making life at the company better. Structure your stories this way and they'll pull readers all the way through.
End with a Strong Call to Action
A good success story engages your audience, but to make it work for your business, it needs one more thing: a strong call to action at the end. After reading, your prospect is reacting with emotion and is most excited to learn how you can help, and most likely to act with the least resistance. That's the moment to invite them to contact you.
Where to Promote It?
There are several good places to publish and promote your success stories.
The first is your website. Create a dedicated success-stories page, or weave the stories into pages about select customers and the solutions you provided.
A second is direct marketing. Send a story to prospects after they opt in to your email, or include it in a direct mail program. Success stories add credibility, helping prospects see how their own company could benefit.
A third, and for B2B the most important, is social media, where LinkedIn leads the way. LinkedIn is where your buyers, their peers, and industry decision-makers spend their professional time, so it's the ideal place to share a success story and spark word-of-mouth. When people share and comment, that social proof reinforces that your stories are real. With your customer's permission, tag the featured company in the post to extend your reach into their network too. (Facebook and other platforms can help where your audience is active, but for B2B, LinkedIn is the workhorse.)
Examples of B2B Success Stories
Kikkoman Foodservice wanted to grow soy sauce sales in the foodservice market. By publishing success stories about how leading chefs use Kikkoman in their recipes, they attracted interest from chefs nationwide, so much so that chefs called asking to appear in their ads. That's success: when your prospects become so engaged with your stories that they want to help promote your product.
IBM uses success stories to promote its technology services. Its case studies show how banks and other large enterprises put IBM's risk-management and analytics solutions to work to assess risk faster, stay competitive, and bring new offerings to market sooner. They're a big part of how IBM shows prospects the real-world impact of its services.
Alfresco, an enterprise content management provider, shares a story about KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, which needed a central place to store, share, and manage documents for its worldwide workforce. The case study explains that KLM chose Alfresco for its ability to scale to a large user base without adding IT complexity, and that a successful pilot led KLM to roll it out to tens of thousands of employees across the organization. It's one of several stories Alfresco uses to build trust and close deals.
What's Next for You?
Now that you know the power of success stories, it's time to put them to work. You probably have more of them than you realize. Just talk with your customers. (And for more ways to reach B2B buyers, see our guide to the best ways to market in a B2B world.)
Want help turning your customer wins into compelling success stories? Get in touch with our team.
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