In this episode, Sam Shepler, a filmmaker turned entrepreneur with 9 years of experience in B2B video marketing and the CEO of Testimonial Hero shares proven ways to create a successful customer-driven marketing strategy.
Many companies don’t have a customer-driven marketing strategy in place, and they’re missing out on opportunities to cultivate loyal customers. Marketing is a huge part of any business, but it can be hard to know exactly what you should do.
The problem with most marketing strategies is that they’re based on assumptions about your audience and don’t take into account the needs of your customers. This leads to frustrated customers who feel like they’re being forced to buy something they don’t want or need.
Customer-driven marketing strategies are focused on learning more about your customer’s needs so you can meet them in the right way at the right time. It’s not just about selling products—it’s also about making sure those products solve problems for people and make their lives better in some way.
This blog post provides 9+ ways for CEOs to create a successful customer-driven marketing strategy. But first, let’s understand some terms we’ll use frequently.
- What is a customer-driven marketing strategy?
- Importance of customer-driven marketing strategy
- Customer-driven marketing strategy vs customer-led marketing strategy – same or different?
- Key elements of customer-driven marketing strategy
- 1. Identify Your Target Market (Analyze your niche and create detailed buyer personas)
- 2. Know your existing customers better than you know yourself
- How to prioritize and invest limited resources and time to serve the best customers and your market-driven strategy?
- 3. Know What They Want (Base your product development strategy on customer feedback)
- Customer-driven marketing strategy steps
- Step 1: Speak to your Customers
- Step 2: Conduct formal research
- Step 3: Conduct keyword research
- Step 4: Create solutions for customers’ needs and deliver value
- Step 5. Use feedback to improve your offering
- Step 6: Make word-of-mouth your main marketing force
- Step 7: Curate a positive customer experience to attract others
- Step 9: Discover the best ways to track the effectiveness of your customer-centric marketing strategy
- How to best reveal customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in your video testimonials
- How to develop content for each step of the customer journey
- How to ensure the way customers speak about their positive customer experience will resonate with your audience
- What a sales funnel would look like using customer provided quality content
- The missed opportunity for a customer-centric company that wants to invest in data-driven marketing
- How to tap into customer networks to further customer acquisition
- The opportunity for revenue leaders to develop a holistic customer-driven marketing strategy
- Developing your customer-driven marketing strategy
- Listen to the episode
- Some topics we discussed include:
- Related links and resources
- Connect with Sam
What is a customer-driven marketing strategy?
A customer-driven marketing strategy is one that focuses on building customer loyalty by addressing their needs in every aspect of their buying journey. It’s a strategy that focuses on targeting a specific set of customers, retaining them by meeting their needs, and using metrics to measure their satisfaction.
Importance of customer-driven marketing strategy
A customer-driven marketing strategy should be the cornerstone of your company’s success. Customer satisfaction is key to retention, and satisfied customers will tell their friends about you and increase sales in the long run.
Higher customer lifetime value (CLTV)
Identifying consumer segmentation and implementing customer-specific programs are part of customer-based marketing. A distinct value proposition to the appropriate consumers. It keeps clients for life.
Increase your customer base
A value-driven marketing strategy helps provide clients with the value they want. If you impress your consumers right away, you get referrals and word-of-mouth virality.
Boost customer loyalty
60 percent of committed customers will buy more from their favorite brands. You may link all consumer data and use it to make the customer experience more dynamic and fun. Enjoyable experiences increase income and brand loyalty.
In addition, customers who feel listened to are likely to share more information with you for free—like testimonials and reviews that can help build your company’s credibility. These strategies are focused on building customer relationships that last a lifetime, which is the key to long-term success in business.
A couple of customer-driven marketing strategy examples are –
For example, airline firms reward business travelers who use their services with frequent-flier points. As a client collects more miles, the value of the incentives increases. A frequency card can also be used as part of a company’s customer-driven marketing strategy.
Some businesses, for example, provide complementary services, access, and or support if clients use more of their services. To get the most benefits from a frequency marketing campaign, a business must commit to it for the long term.
Getting buy-in from the company’s leadership is key as is getting everyone else on board as the company’s culture is oriented to support a customer-focused strategy.
The following resources may help with making your case if it hasn’t already been realized within the company.
You can find examples of a customer-driven marketing strategy here, a customer-driven marketing strategy pdf here, a customer-driven marketing strategy ppt here, and a customer-driven marketing strategy SlideShare here.
Customer driven marketing strategy case study
How can a website’s responsiveness and user interface be demonstrated? Probably by video, as Fantasy does on their case study for USA Today. The layout is kept simple and clear, with a big red play button at the top encouraging you to see their video makeover of USA Today’s website.
With basic instrumental music in the background, the video shows the website’s interface and various buttons being clicked.
As you scroll down on the page you see their stated objective of – “Make USA Today’s website responsive”. This is followed by stating the outcomes with a simple “1” followed by the words “Became the most viewed US News site.” Fantasy knows that this is all a potential consumer needs to know. Their CTA is “Contact Us”.
Customer-driven marketing strategy vs customer-led marketing strategy – same or different?
Sam is of the belief that it’s mostly semantics. And I think we’re playing around with different terms.
For business leaders, it is important to be able to drive business predictably. This is where customer-driven marketing or customer-led marketing comes in.
Sam likes the term customer-led marketing because it speaks to customers leading the way in communicating on your brand’s behalf. Another way to think about it is – It’s about sharing the customer perspective and having them be an active participant in telling that story.
Key elements of customer-driven marketing strategy
The 3 key elements of customer-driven marketing strategy that are common no matter the customer segment are:
1. Identify Your Target Market (Analyze your niche and create detailed buyer personas)
Is your marketing strategy based on what you have to sell or on the market needs that you can best meet?
If there is one thread that runs through my content and the interviews I have conducted, it is that successful marketing requires a constant focus on the customer. And the most common mistake that companies make is focusing solely on what they have to offer.
You can’t serve your customers if you don’t know who they are, so the first and most important step in developing your marketing strategy is to define and segment your market so you can target each group more effectively.
if you take the customer-centric route, your marketing strategy begins long before your product is created.
You must have as much information about your customers as possible. This will enable you to segment and target your marketing efforts. Whether it’s an email marketing campaign or a PPC ad, the success of both is determined by how precisely you can segment your customers into relevant groups and give them exactly what they want.
Depending on your brand and business, you may choose to target a single small market segment or several segments with varying needs and characteristics. You may already have a good idea of who your customer base is, but don’t make any assumptions.
In order to build a true picture of the demographics and needs of each market, it is critical to conduct thorough market research from a variety of sources, including web and social analytics, competitor research, your own customer databases, and customer surveys.
Once you have the data, the next step is to create a customer avatar or buyer persona for each target market. This is a text and visual summary of the average “ideal” customer in each market segment that you’re targeting. This can greatly assist you in creating marketing materials that resonate with your target audience because you have a clear picture of who you’re attempting to reach with your marketing messages.
So, how do you go about approaching your buyer personas?
Investigate your current customers. Make a few surveys and interviews, and collect their personal information.
Investigate your competitors. For example, you can simply read their case studies to learn who is using their products and what goals they are attempting to achieve with them.
2. Know your existing customers better than you know yourself
The modern era of customer-centric marketing and social media networking has given rise to a new world of consumer data and insight, as well as new ways to reach out to people through marketing and outreach.
While there are still arguments on how much data is too much, or how much you need to know about your audience, as more companies use data to better personalize and target their marketing campaigns, they ultimately raise the bar for all others. If you don’t keep up, you’ll find yourself falling behind.
The data trend is illustrated in this infographic from Semarchy, which highlights some of the main benefits of using customer data to improve your marketing efforts.
How to identify customers to create the best customer testimonials
Sam recommends we keep in mind four things. They are
- Keep in mind your overall strategy and what markets you are trying to break into
- Decide on verticals you want customer testimonials for
- Plan to have customer stories for every single buyer persona that you sell to
- Involve your sales and customer success teams to help identify your best customers
How to prioritize and invest limited resources and time to serve the best customers and your market-driven strategy?
Sam says we should figure out who that customer is that fits your ideal customer profile, and then try and get a video testimonial from them, and that’s just going to attract more customers.
For video customer testimonials to really work, it’s all about a customer, a prospect seeing themselves in the story that’s being told.
3. Know What They Want (Base your product development strategy on customer feedback)
Peter Drucker says:
The purpose of marketing is to know the consumer so well that the product or service suits him and sells itself.
The challenge however is that we live in a time when the most valuable resource is our target audience’s time and energy.
According to Thomas Davenport and J.C. Beck, attention economics is described as follows:
As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.
Nielsen says consumers are exposed to over 2,000 marketing messages a day. The fight for consumer interest has shifted from a message, medium, or technology battle to one of the customer insights.
So how do you meet your customers? You might not be able to talk to all of them.
Customer-driven marketing strategy steps
However, there are a few ways to use analysis and a customer-first approach to drive a successful customer-driven marketing strategy.
Step 1: Speak to your Customers
The easiest way to learn about your target customers is to ask them. Or, at the very least, ask a sample of them. Choose any of your best customers, your most well-known customers, or simply those who are most willing to provide you with input.
This is also a very cost-effective and reliable way to create content on a tight budget:
- Inquire about ALL of the difficulties they encountered that drove them to discover a solution.
- Inquire as to how they discovered you and in what stage of the purchase process
- Ask them what material they searched for and where they found it.
- Inquire as to why they choose you.
These responses can be used to create testimonials, blog posts, webcasts, whitepapers, and other marketing material for each point of the buying journey. Then look for ways to place the content in all of the channels they told you about when they went looking.
Step 2: Conduct formal research
In most organizations, formal research and analysis are not a priority or are woefully underfunded.
Formal customer insight research should aim to understand the main problems and issues confronting your target customers. It should describe all of the obstacles they face, as well as the relative importance of each. It should also define the relative importance of the platforms by which they seek information and the content types they seek at each point of the buyer journey.
Step 3: Conduct keyword research
At some point during the purchasing process, everybody uses a search engine. Understanding the keywords they use is not just a smart idea for customer-based marketing; it is a basic requirement of the company to recognize the keywords your customers use while searching for knowledge.
Keyword research helps you to get into the customers’ heads and discover what they are thinking at the precise moment when they have a content need. So, my recommendation is that any company develop a search-driven marketing approach to help build out long-term relationships.
Step 4: Create solutions for customers’ needs and deliver value
Your preliminary customer research should inform you of what your customers truly desire. You can then use this market intelligence to create products and services that meet their requirements. This approach, of course, is diametrically opposed to what many businesses do, which is to decide on their products and services first and then seek customers to buy them!
Advertising and traditional marketing methods are no longer required with a customer-first strategy because you don’t have to go out and find your customers – they’re already right there telling you what you want. The hard work is done if you truly listen to what they have to say.
According to Forrester Research’s report titled “Build Your Content Brand by Delivering Customer Value.” In order to gain insights into the importance of content marketing and the top strategies for how brands can become more effective with it, Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with marketers, agencies, and publishers.
Ryan Skinner, the report’s author, claims that:
Content brands are built by becoming trustworthy sources of valuable content that consumers actively seek out, engage with, and eventually advocate for. Unfortunately, marketers frequently lack the resources, talent, commitment, and patience necessary to invest in and see results from content marketing initiatives.
One of the report’s main conclusions is that most content marketing efforts fail to meet key objectives because of the “campaign” mindset that still pervades the marketing function. The continuous delivery of customer value through interesting and engaging content is at the heart of effective content marketing.
According to Forrester, there are four key objectives for effective content marketing:
- Customers are drawn closer to the brand by giving away valuable content, which increases the reach of content and encourages customers to freely and widely share it across their social networks.
- Reaching out to customers early in the purchasing process
- Integrate analytics and CRM to connect content marketing efforts to the demand funnel.
Forester identifies the following as the most common content marketing mistakes:
- Customers receive insufficient value from the content.
- Branded content suffers from a lack of a solid distribution strategy that allows it to reach customers.
- Inadequate investment in developing a brand publishing capability
- The ability to wait for results that do not appear immediately
- Inability to connect content marketing efforts to business outcomes
Forrester recommends that marketers transition from “random acts of content marketing to a true content brand.” This can be accomplished by:
- Creating content that customers will value
- Developing audiences as a key asset
- Data from the audience is being used to inform future interactions.
- Improving business outcomes by optimizing over time
Step 5. Use feedback to improve your offering
Tools like live chat and online feedback boards can be a great way to connect with your customers.
Using customer reviews and requests will not only help you develop better products and services in the future, but it will also demonstrate to your customers that you are listening to their opinions and that they matter. This is a powerful way to build confidence and loyalty.
Since customer communication is such an important aspect of customer relationship management and a customer-driven marketing campaign, the customer service team becomes an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. Ensuring that anyone in the business who deals with customers in some way has an outstanding customer experience benefits both parties.
The customer receives the assistance they need and experiences productive interactions with your team, while your company improves its brand image and learns how to make better goods while improving customer retention.
When your customers are pleased with what they buy from you and how they interact with you, they will tell their mates. And word-of-mouth marketing can be more effective and have a larger and longer-lasting impact than any form of advertisement or SEO campaign.
Step 6: Make word-of-mouth your main marketing force
Word-of-mouth consumers convert faster because they already have a degree of trust and faith in your company that they received from the individual who suggested your shop.
People who come through other means, on the other hand, may know little about your store and will need to be persuaded first. Their levels of ‘confidence’ are lower, and conversions are lower as a result.
Furthermore, if anyone has had a positive experience with your company and spreads the word, they are likely to share helpful hints (e.g., be sure to pick up your discount voucher, or log in to get a free gift, etc.) that make your offering more appealing to that person BEFORE they have even visited the web.
Customers who come through word of mouth have a degree of trust and belief that other sources do not have.
Before you do anything else to develop successful word-of-mouth marketing strategies, there is one thing you must ensure.
That you are already providing an outstanding customer experience.
It is almost difficult to persuade people to refer their friends and family to your company if they had a bad experience. It’s challenging even with an average one.
You might also go the other way and build a storm of negative publicity.
People refer others because they want to share something they are passionate about. Not only that they could get a discount for doing so.
And, with 65 percent of customers having severed relations with a brand due to a single negative experience, it is more critical than ever to establish that amazing customer experience.
Step 7: Curate a positive customer experience to attract others
After you’ve persuaded customers to participate, the next step is to publicize it. This does not imply that everybody should have five minutes of fame.
Make it exclusive and difficult to ensure that your customers share content that is not only high quality but also aligns with your brand’s vision and message. Retailers may highlight customer experiences in a photo gallery on their website or spark a vote-off between entrants to exploit active users and get others to start sharing as well.
By curating and showcasing only the best content you’ve collected in one place, you’re tapping into several drivers of action — appreciation, accomplishment, and challenge — which is rewarding for those who are noticed and will inspire their peers to share.
Step 9: Discover the best ways to track the effectiveness of your customer-centric marketing strategy
You can get as advanced and sophisticated as you’re willing to.
Most people don’t really track it. They usually go off anecdotal responses to determine if it is influencing the pipeline and helping deals close.
Sam says the fact that any sales marketing content is being used effectively in the sales process is quite rare. He thinks 80% of content that is created by marketing goes unused by sales.
Quite often when he asks customers how the videos are working, he gets responses like –
“They’re working great. Sales love them, they’re using them to influence deals. They helped us win this deal. And they want more of them.” But they don’t necessarily attribute exact dollar values to them.
Could that be done? Yes if you have the resources and bandwidth as well the technical chops and the appetite to get really technical with your video hosting players, like a Vidyard or Wistia, and integrate that with your marketing automation platform.
How to best reveal customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in your video testimonials
Sam says there are different types of customer video content, like customer video content, testimonials, objection crushers, advertisements, and other use cases.
A testimonial however in its simplest form is really a before and after story.
Most prospects are in denial that they have a problem. Sam says –
“As sellers, our prospects are in denial that they even have a problem, to begin with. No glowing endorsement is going to matter to them until we get them to admit they have a problem.
The initial (before) part of a customer testimonial should talk about the problem and the challenges, and then the next (after) part covers how it was solved and the results.
It’s very critical to establish the before, otherwise, no one’s going to care because if I don’t believe that I have that problem as a buyer, there’s no fertile ground for the results to really impress me and have an impact when those results land.
How to develop content for each step of the customer journey
You can’t think of content as a set of one-off projects if it’s at the heart of your plan. Its development must be driven by a systematic strategy.
Since it is such a vital piece of the marketing puzzle these days, it must be used in all stages of the consumer journey. While many people divide this journey into three stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Content
To provide more granularity I believe that it could be broken down into seven key stages. These stages are:
- Know
- Like
- Trust
- Try
- Buy
- Repeat
- Refer
These stages will take a person from their first experience with your company regardless of whether you have a customer-driven marketing strategy or not, to the point of purchase, where they will not only become a customer, but also a loyal fan and advocate for your company.
To keep a person engaged with your company as they pass through the consumer path, you must provide them with content that facilitates their needs and journey during the process, and the best way to do this is to align the content you want to create with the different phases we covered above.
Customer Journey Mapping
It’s important not to get ahead of yourself when it comes to the customer journey. I sometimes see businesses attempting to persuade prospects that they can fix their issues before they even realize they have them.
To map out your consumer experience, you must first consider who your audience is, including their desires, needs, and pain points, as well as the types of questions they would ask themselves before seeking a solution like yours.
You must understand the customer’s journey in order to create content for each stage of it.
How to ensure the way customers speak about their positive customer experience will resonate with your audience
Sam says that the client that you’re working with should really be clear as to the USP (the unique selling point), which you are then looking to reinforce via your testimonial.
Often an unintended consequence of doing these interviews is that customers will share an alternate point of view or USP that can help evolve your positioning.
As long as you have a happy customer, you’re gonna get a great testimonial, you might even learn something new that you didn’t even realize in the process.
Given that effective customer testimonials need to be in a story format we have a challenge on our hands. The challenge is that most people don’t have a natural storytelling gift.
So the question is how will we go about ensuring that we’re able to craft and edit it, into something that is usable and will resonate with our intended audience?
To solve the problem Sam says you need to figure out what you want at the end, and then write the questions that will elicit those responses, those building blocks to the story. A breakdown of the process would involve the following steps:
- Figure out the strategy first.
- Decide on what the perfect quote sounds like
- Decide on 2-3 key messages your audience should walk away with after viewing the video
- Ask the right questions to elicit the story from the customers – remember you only have one take as customers are busy and doing you a favor.
- Edit the video to condense it and form a relatable narrative
But how do you ensure that they’re actually being able to deliver value or highlight value in their experience, or certainly talk about outcomes that they have achieved?
Tips Sam suggests:
- Sync up with your customers in advance, and find some common ground around what you want to emphasize. Do a 30-minute call, where you can talk through the interview questions before conducting the actual interview can help.
- At times you might be able to tie a metric to the outcome
- Keep in mind that the voice of the customer is just another medium for content, and all of your content should support and align with your key message, your strategic narrative.
- So then the question is, how do we just get what the customer is saying to add further impact to that strategic narrative at the highest level.
How to use customer perceptions and feedback to improve your marketing the product experience
You need to be able to draw conclusions and understand what are the commonalities that customers value.
For example, Sam says for his company – the ease of use despite there being a lot of pieces to producing a customer video. Then once they realized that that’s what people appreciated, they just kind of started pushing that in their messaging.
It’s a great opportunity to just get that customer research that you can turn into super valuable sales and marketing content.
How best to act on customer feedback to further your customer-centric approach
Customer feedback or customer research isn’t the main goal of customer video content. The main goal of customer video content is to drive revenue. That said time and again there are just fortuitous learnings through interviews that could be fed back to develop products or services.
How to make the ask to capture the relevant content for customer testimonials
Sam says he helps consumers make that request behind the scenes. He suggests the ask comes from the individual with whom the customer has the best relationship. It’s usually from their account manager or the person who sold the contract.
To get a yes, you need to do the following:
- Ask questions of yourself like – “How can I make this a two-way value exchange?” So my customer isn’t just doing me a favor, they gain something from it. One technique is that the best testimonials make the consumer the hero of the tale. And they make the person talking the story’s hero. So it’s excellent for industry recognition and pure recognition, and we often advise our customers to reach out and say, “Hey, wonderful job! We want to use you as an example of excellent practices in your sector, therefore let’s record the tale.”
- When you reach out, you also want to answer any of their immediate questions like – “How long will this take and will I get an opportunity to examine it prior?”
The ask is along the lines of – “Do you want to share your experiences? It’ll just take 30 minutes if it’s a remote testimonial, and you’ll get to check everything else beforehand if that’s okay with you.”
So that addresses a number of potential problems, and most individuals have 30 minutes to spare at least once a week.
How to determine the best way to proceed with content creation
The short answer is it depends.
Some clients, especially smaller software subscribers, may not require a discovery call or pre-call. Huge enterprise customers that have a close relationship with an account manager, might want to do a pre-call.
In a way, Sam is curating part of their successful experiences. This is a great way for customers to better explain the value in their further offering, minimize friction in the sales process, and close agreements faster.
What a sales funnel would look like using customer provided quality content
A typical sales funnel usually consists of the following steps: prospecting, qualification, presentation, and follow-up. Customer-provided testimonials can be an excellent tool to help you with each stage of the sales process. Before a prospecting stage, you can have prospects watch your videos in which customers talk about what they like about a product or service. Your prospects will also begin to see that other people are satisfied with your services.
Customer-provided testimonials are also great at increasing customer engagement. People will engage more with your content when they think that their opinion matters.
Customer-provided testimonials increase the likelihood of a consumer buying from you because quality content provides trust and it is informative for the customer which lowers friction during the sales process. Customer-provided testimonials also save you time because they can easily be shared with salespeople, who can then focus on follow-ups.
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Sam recommends, creating a 90-seconds to two-minute version. In addition, you can also create a 30 to 45-second version, and a 15-second version.
So if even starting at the very top of the funnel, you can have a ton of success using those 15-second versions at the awareness stage which can be used as ads to get people onto your website.
The 45-second version is a good length for driving conversions on a landing page. Why?
Because you are still early in the buyer’s journey and you probably don’t wanna watch a super long video. But 45 seconds is a good length.
And then in terms of the 90 second to 120-second videos, these can be used anywhere but they can be used on customers’ pages (these are usually a page where you see a big logo rack, customer list, customer case study. It’s kind of like the pillar page for all of their social proof basically), home pages as well.
They can also be used by individual sales reps to kind of keep deals moving by sharing them in a follow-up message. Perhaps something along the lines of – “Hi, there, Mr. Or Mrs. Prospect, I wanted to share this example featuring Company X, just like you. Have a look at how they’re… And you… ” Ideally, it’s the same exact org title as you’re selling to. If you’re selling to a director of marketers, have a look at how their director of marketing… Marketer achieved X with us recently.”
It’s like sharing a new video case study with them. It obviously works best if you have a good relationship and if your prospect is further down the funnel.
Anything is more credible coming from a customer and you can create micro-content and slice and dice your longer interviews and use them at different lengths where people have different attention spans, in the whole buyer journey.
The missed opportunity for a customer-centric company that wants to invest in data-driven marketing
The missed opportunity according to Sam is thinking very tactically and then missing the big strategic opportunity.
Video testimonials are usually used at the bottom of the funnel. The opportunity lies in being able to use customer-driven marketing content all the way throughout the funnel in different formats.
Thinking about this from a revenue or sales perspective these could also be used on win-back campaigns to further retention and lifetime value.
Sam sees customer video content evolving over time into more of a full-funnel strategy, as opposed to just being that sort of like a bottom-of-the-funnel asset.
He also sees customer content and customer-led marketing being a more kind of cross-functional holistic strategy, especially for companies who think as a revenue team and not as just a siloed series of departments.
How to tap into customer networks to further customer acquisition
The process can have very significant positive network effects on your business. Think about it:
- You get in touch with your customers by creating video content with them
- Create the customer testimonial video
- Share it with your prospects and ask your client to promote it to their customers.
Thereby creating a pool of potential prospects who in turn are likely to sign up for your product or service.
Customer-driven marketing strategy: creating value for target customers through other use cases
Customer-led marketing is a great example of thinking beyond the typical testimonial.
Sam says there are two use cases worth mentioning.
A great use case is sales enablement videos such as an objection crusher video. These are videos that you send to smash a specific argument.
Instead of a comprehensive before and after story with a wonderful plot arc, these videos are ones you send if they have a concern or if they try to put decision-making off because of the complexity involved. You can send that objection-crushing video on how easy and seamless the deployment process is.
The other is employing customers for content marketing. You can grab great snippets during your customer interviews. You could enquire, “How are you?” What is your current industry X challenge? Do you have any advice for other CXOs?
So you can use that content, which is wonderful content marketing. It’s not a testimonial. It’s an implied endorsement but there is no mention of your products or services. But it provides good insights and adds value to your content.
The opportunity for revenue leaders to develop a holistic customer-driven marketing strategy
Revenue leaders should think about customer video content and customer-led marketing as a strategy, rather than just social proof.
The opportunity lies in being able to get customers to speak for you in extremely innovative and successful ways. There’s so much room for creativity if you can get past a process-driven approach.
However, like most things you need to start small. Start with video testimonials if you don’t have any. That’s the first step. A video testimonial is the first step in creating any client video content or if you only have written testimonials.
Eventually, you can build content marketing versions of those objection-crushing testimonials. So it’s kind of a spectrum. There’s plenty of room for advancement and the more customers you can involve in your marketing, the more credible your message will be and easier it will be to achieve your business goals.
Developing your customer-driven marketing strategy
Designing customer-driven marketing is a great way to create more loyal customers and drive up your sales. Customer-led marketing can be done in many different ways, but the first step is creating videos that show them how easy it is to use your product or service.
There are plenty of other options you could explore as well such as involving them for content marketing and using customer testimonials in innovative ways like providing an objection crusher video instead of just a traditional testimonial video. The goal should always be to make things easier on both yourself and your customers so they enjoy their experience with you and come back for more!
Listen to the episode
Some topics we discussed include:
- What is a customer-driven marketing strategy
- How to use feedback to improve your offering
- What is the best way to identify customers that really speak to your product or service
- How Sam recommends we prioritize and invest our limited time and energy into our best customers
- A customer-driven marketing strategy requires customer stories but what are the best ways to craft and edit them so they resonate with future customers
- How to get your customers to agree to appear on video
- How to make the best of it when they do—what questions to ask them
- The biggest mistakes made around customer-led video content
- Pre-requisites for creating powerful testimonials
- How best to track the effectiveness of the customer led-videos
- and much more …
Related links and resources
- Check out Testimonial Hero
- Get additional insights from Brian J Brown – How to Get Customer Testimonials That Boost Sales
- Listen to my interview with Rob Balasabas – How to Monetize Your YouTube Channel and Build a Community
- Check out my interview with Justin Brown – 10 Effective Ways on How to Gain Traction on YouTube
- Discover powerful entrepreneurial characteristics needed to drive growth
Connect with Sam
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