How can you source customer candidates for marketing case studies, articles, videos, bylines, speaking engagements before you need them?
Imagine you're shaping up a lead gen campaign centered on a specific pain point that you solve for your customers. You want to include real stories from enterprise customers who love you in a customer panel webinar, and then leverage for video, social, email, landing pages, etc.
However, finding great evangelists with unique or compelling stories can be time-consuming and tough. It's like trying to find a friend at a big concert if they're not answering their phone.
It takes a lot of time to search Slack, Pendo, email, social media, etc. Sales' customer reference list is not an option, as they're asked for favors by everyone and rightfully protected from overuse. You can put the word out to colleagues, but they may not remember that great person from a month ago, and you can't ask too often as you'll use up precious social capital.
At a previous company, we gathered customer contacts and stories, sourced from all sorts of places, before we needed them - and built a searchable database of possibilities for marketing that became our growing record of customer past contributions.
The Airtable below is a practical, low-cost (we're-not-ready-to-pay-for-a-customer-advocacy-platform-yet) way to gather all your possible customer story candidates in one place.
1. Gather (or automate) customer leads from your digital sources.
We'd find great leads in our company #celebrations channel, on social media, Zendesk, product webinar Q&As, from CS Managers, and in #sales and #won-deals channels. Stories, testimonials, and snippets that marketing could use come from dozens of places. We also trained everyone over time to Slack us their stories/people.
Slack automations and Airtable's web clipper for Chrome makes collecting possibilities very quick and painless.
We'd end up with a list like below with some basic info - source, state, name, role, segment, etc.
2. Update with project details when you work with this person.
Airtable lets you use the same spreadsheet data with as many different visual/filter overlays as you need. As you generate any kind of marketing engagement - participation on a speaker panel, case study, written/video testimonial - you update the record and add links to your content and dates.
Over time, we built a great list of customer contacts who'd contributed to 150+ marketing deliverables that we could sort by state, deliverable, pain point, or market segment.
3. Leverage over time to tap into your evangelists.
This came in handy at one point when we'd set up a new sales team to proactively go after a growing inbound-generated segment that we'd never targeted before; it was extremely helpful to quickly see what existed that we could use, and find customer evangelists to help us build out sales enablement and campaigns.
There were many times when the PR team worked with someone for case studies/bylines that I never met, but was able to identify months later for a customer panel.
Another variation for this database is to maintain ONE entry per individual and link to all the marketing assets/engagements, managed on another database tab in the same table.
If you'd like to see more of the Airtable linked above, please click here (requires a free or paid Airtable account).
