Customer Evidence

Social Media and Vigor of Expression

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Customer Evidence, Marketing Operations, Social Media

I’m a professional writer. After a career spent putting ideas and experiences into words, I have come to believe in what Mark Twain called, “compactness, simplicity, and vigor of expression.” Twain might not seem entirely relevant in an age of social media, but you have to admit—that is an excellent formula for a good tweet.

Economy, clarity, accuracy, and immediacy are always high marketing virtues, no matter how many characters you get. Well-made customer evidence should clearly illustrate an organization’s experience with a product or solution and make it relevant to decision makers at other organizations. Like any good story, an effective case study or impact article should be about people that readers can relate to.

In shorter social media formats, the value of economy is obvious, but without a little vigor of expression, compact can turn out to be just short. Benefit metrics and customer quotes give case studies impact, and they can be easily repurposed into shorter formats to good effect. But good stories are usually more than the sum of their highlights, and on its own, a metric or a quote has a lot of work to do. When an IT manager at Acme Energy says, “I reduced my PC costs by $1 million,” it does have a certain je ne sais quoi, but it’s not the whole story. It begs the reader to ask, “How does Acme Energy compare to my business? How do that manager’s challenges relate to mine? It worked for her, but will it fit my needs?” Specific, concrete details about real business experiences provide genuine credibility and applicability to the quotes we use and the success metrics we cite, and credibility and applicability are exactly what makes good customer evidence so powerful in the first place.

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Writing Case Studies: The Hard Part

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Content Development, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Writing a case study is kind of like being Santiago, the aging fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It takes days to catch an 18-foot marlin, and then once you manage it, the sharks eat it. (That is, your case study goes through a rigorous editing and review process). But you get some sleep and live to write another case study.

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Listening is Believing

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Customer Engagement, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Customer evidence is argued to be the one of the most influential factors in the purchasing process. In fact, it’s second to personal experience. Customer evidence is why Jeremy Stoppelman created the online review community, Yelp. (Yelp experiences an average of 54 million unique monthly visitors, a testimony to customer evidence alone). It’s also why you send product webpages to trusted friends and family members before diving in and making a final purchase. As consumers, we desperately want to feel assured in our spending, and listening to the voice of our peers is a smart way to eliminate risk.

The impact of customer evidence is hard to ignore. It’s transforming marketing messaging, as companies of all industries and sizes are finally putting their customers’ voices before their own. By having true end users tell the story of a product or service’s success, genuine relationships are established. This leads to message believability (see Hierarchy of Message Believability diagram), creating purchasing confidence and eventually every organization’s end goal: happy and returning customers.

Takeaway: Companies need to loosen their grip on communication and let their best and brightest customers do the talking.

Traditionally, organizations have captured customer evidence in standard marketing collateral such as case studies or customer briefs. These are great tools to share with potential customers and even other employees. Yet, with the advent of new social communication channels, there is even more we can do. Facebook, Twitter, and Market Maven blogs are just a few examples of our world’s new two-way information freeways. These channels are changing the way we seek advice and customer evidence needs to adapt.

Today, you can “like” a company and read comments by their fans to gather information. Or you can ask a question directly to the community to poll responses. You can follow an opinion leadership blog about a particular product or service and ask the author directly about his or her experience. Depending on your experience with the blog, you can rate the author’s post or write a comment to express own your opinion. This level of engagement ultimately enhances the experience (and purchasing confidence) of other listeners in the audience. It allows these communities to come full circle, expanding along the way.

With this shift, it is clear that companies must evaluate how they are capturing and delivering customer voice. Are you sharing customer evidence in the channels in which your target audience spends time? Is the evidence “snackable” or consumable? If your organization is currently using more traditional mediums to capture customer evidence, you are ten steps ahead of most marketing teams (again, see diagram and focus on the x-axis). The good news is you can push this evidence even further by tapping into other mediums, using the same content, and delivering it through different channels.

Takeaway: Get the most mileage out of the most sacred part of your business: your customer’s voice.

To give an example, let’s say two-page case studies are your marketing gems. The customer story is explained humbly, and the CEO of the customer organization shares a brilliant metric-filled quote, making your product truly shine. Instead of stopping there, perhaps your marketing team creates a shorter version of the story for a blog post. Or Creatives get their hands on the content and turn the metrics into a visual road map (also called an Infographic). Advertising can also be enhanced by spotlighting the CEO’s quote!

As marketers, it is our job to make the purchasing decision easy for our customers. The second best way to do this is by creating customer evidence and delivering it in a way your customer understands it best. Give your audience an arsenal of tools (or voices) to increase their confidence in your product or service. Deliver it in a way that is easy to consume and share in the channels they live in every day. Your customers are ready to talk; it’s up to you to give them the megaphone.

Writing Case Studies, Part 2: Ten Tips for Interviewing Customers

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Content Development, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

This is the second installment of a two-part series on customer case studies. The first post looked at the importance of using detail to tell a compelling and credible customer story. In this second post, Molly Dee Anderson, one of the talented staff writers at Projectline, offers 10 practical and insightful tips for conducting customer interviews.

“Interviewing is both art and science. The art comes in how you interact with customers, put them at ease, and encourage them to provide information. The science comes in what you ask and how you ask it.” – Casey Hibbard, Stories That Sell

If you are well-prepared for a case study interview, you can effectively gather the customer’s narrative arc-the challenge, the implementation of a product or service, and the positive results-in an hour’s time. You will also gain some choice quotes. Try these ten tips for conducting customer interviews with both art and science.

1. Review the customer’s website thoroughly. You may find relevant information in unusual places. Press releases often provide a concise description of the organization as well as insight into the strategic direction the company is pursuing. Use what you learn to engage with the customer, even if the dialog is not specifically pertinent to the case study. Interviewees will often appreciate that you’ve done your homework and will be more likely to give you the details you need.

2. Get a good working knowledge of the featured product or service. Customers sometimes assume that you are an established expert in the case study’s featured subject. Chances are you’re a writer with a generalist background, so you’ll need to do some research. Aside from getting detailed information from the product or service team, consider reading product reviews, watching videos, and walking through demos.

3. Build a detailed and focused questionnaire. Use complete sentences. Include questions even if you already have a sense of what the answers will be. Be prepared to prompt the customer with a possible answer in case they draw a blank. Once prompted, the customer will likely provide additional details. It’s also a good exercise to create a comprehensive questionnaire and then cut it substantially, based on the specific customer scenario. You probably won’t have time to ask all the questions anyway.

4. Remove distractions. When doing an interview, you’re on stage. You can’t afford to be distracted by anything. Avoid conducting an interview on an empty stomach. Turn off call-waiting, silence your cell phone, shut doors and windows, mute your computer, and set your instant messaging status to “Busy.” Also, sit up straight: It’s showtime.

5. Communicate the agenda to the interviewees. Prepare a script to introduce yourself to the interviewees. Explain how you plan to conduct the interview and what information you’re seeking. Let them know that you’re recording the interview and that you’ll be asking for details so you can get the most compelling story possible.

6. Adopt a persona. Try on an interviewing style. For example, you could assume the interviewing style of Larry King or Oprah. I’m a fan of Charlie Rose because his style is plainspoken, grounded, and engaged. And he’s good at asking for clarifying details about an interviewee’s statement: “But what do you mean when you say that?” Rose asks.

7. Take notes. You’re recording the interview, but audio devices sometimes fail. Plus, written notes help you ask more relevant follow-up questions. Cover your bases by getting down as much as you can with your pen and keyboard and then hope you never have to refer to those notes.

8. Don’t be afraid to ask a few “stupid” questions. It’s not possible to be an expert in everything. It’s better to ask an interviewee to explain something you don’t understand than pretend that it makes perfect sense and then later not know what to write. If you’re reporting about technology, for example, you can ask your interviewees to describe an implementation for you as if they were speaking to a general rather than a technical audience.

9. Be persistent about metrics. Your interviewees will not always be prepared to state numbers such as return on investment, revenue increases, or cost savings. You can nudge them with a leading question such as: “Would it be fair to say that your employees are saving 20 minutes a day by using the new productivity tools?” If you encounter reticence, then offer to follow up about metrics by sending email or by putting queries in the review draft.

10. Be humble. The art of interviewing is primarily the art of listening and putting the interviewees at ease. When they have explained a complex concept, tell them what you heard them say-in your own words. That way they’ll know you’re listening. Gently direct the conversation, but make sure the interviewees get most of the airtime. You may be the host, but they are the stars of the show.

Writing Case Studies: The Narrative Arc

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Content Development, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Case studies are true stories, and true stories communicate credibility. They help readers understand how a product or service works in a real setting. Case studies validate solutions by going into specifics and providing details about a customer’s experience. When you write a case study, you tell a story that helps people imagine scenarios-and they are moved to act as a result.

We humans love to hear about other people, and we often look to others to help us decide what to do. Narratives are most powerful when we read about people like us. Stories can build trust, increase sales, and shorten the sales cycle.

Take the example of a company in Singapore that develops business software for managing human resources, customer relationships, and accounting. Its customers frequently asked for customizations, so it decided to build an application with ready-made modules that could be customized by anyone. It hosted the application in the cloud in a way that was reliable, highly available, and scaled on demand. Other software vendors in the same market space will want to know how the Singaporean company solved its challenge. A case study can provide the answers.

In another cloud success story, an online ticketing company needed to ramp up its technology to be able to sell 150,000 tickets in a few hours in order to handle traffic for a large music festival for a marquee customer. Before, its best record was selling 2,000 tickets in two hours, so it had a long way to go. It implemented a cloud solution that used sharding technology to distribute the ticketing data across multiple database servers-and sold 150,000 tickets in 10 seconds. The CTO described the technology as a “windfall” for the company. That’s a pretty compelling result and an example of how a product or service can completely alter a business model. Readers will want to know the details of the story.

The structure of a case study gives you an excellent framework for capturing the elements of a customer’s story. The three main sections are designed to contain the classic narrative arc and tell the age-old story of the hero: People meet with challenges to overcome, find solutions, and ultimately triumph.

  • Challenge. Describe the customer’s circumstances. Every customer has challenges to address, or it wouldn’t be shopping around for solutions. For example, a customer might be looking to lower costs, bolster data security, or expand revenue opportunities. It’s especially important to start the narrative in this section. This is where you draw the reader into the story. Use details and revealing quotes. Keep in mind that although people work in a variety of organizations, they are ultimately seeking the same kinds of things-like innovation, profit, competitive differentiation, and success.

  • Implementation. Provide information on how the customer met its challenges by using a product or service. This section is the heart of the case study, and can be the most exacting to write. Every customer uses a product or service in a different way and it’s your job to record the specifics of the solution, including any custom deployment details or workarounds. Keep in mind that the customer—and not the solution—is the hero of the story. Avoid constructions such as, “The product made it possible for Company A to sell 150,000 tickets in 10 seconds.” Instead, write, “Company A used the product’s sharding capabilities to scale beyond what a single database could provide.”

  • Results. Summarize the advantages that the customer gained by using the product or service. Start with a summary of all results and provide a compelling general quote that speaks to the solution’s overall value. Then give each individual benefit a heading and describe the proof points for each result. This is where you can use metrics related to results, such as productivity improvements, cost savings, improved profits, or increased revenue opportunities.

When writing a case study, keep in mind that your job is to make abstract concepts—such as how a product or service works—concrete and comprehensible. To build credibility, rely on a high level of detail, which helps make prose more convincing. To get readers engaged in an emotional way, provide specifics. Think of case study writing as one step away from journalism. You are the storyteller with a human interest piece to write, and that story is true. It’s honest labor, and it’s fun.