In my roles at both WooCommerce and Names & Faces, I’ve been responsible for customer stories. The process of writing them sparks joy and they add demonstrable marketing value.
Why write customer stories?
For one, I love talking to customers: hearing and capturing their needs and concerns and relaying them back to the product and/or customer success teams.
People with skin in the game – i.e. active users of the product – will always tell you honestly about product blindspots. It’s so easy to lose touch with customers and their pain points when you don’t work within the customer success division.
A few favourites: Scratch, Memento, Dishoom
Over the years, I’ve had wonderful conversations with smart people at a wide range of businesses that cover the full spectrum of inspiring and funny to humbling and very moving.
Here are five favourites:
- The Secret of Knowing People’s Names in Dishoom’s Award-winning Culture
- Scratch Pet Food: Changing the Dry Pet Food Industry for The Better
- Using Empathy, Woodwork, and eCommerce to Make Incredibly Hard Things A Little Easier
- From Day One to Successful Homeschool Bookstore on WooCommerce
- How eCommerce Was a Game Changer for a Lithuanian Mum
3X impact in LinkedIn remarketing campaigns
Having customer stories up on your website feels zeitgeisty but I’ve also seen the business value of writing them up. For example, over the past few months the promoted customer story posts on LinkedIn 3X outperformed our brand ads in Names & Faces remarketing campaigns.
This really has surprised me. At WooCommerce, my colleague Kevin and I noticed that TOFL content often outperformed brand ads in our awareness campaigns and came up with the mantra: Content for cold calling.
When it comes to remarketing, customer stories seem to be a thing. Even better is if you can match whoever you’re retargeting – by page visited or building an audience from your CMS – to their industry and lifecycle stage.
Make them pretty if you can
Depending on the resource you have available, you could use your regular blog post template or get a designer to build you a custom post to house your customer stories more creatively. For both WooCommerce and Names & Faces, I worked with our designer to build these custom setups in WordPress and Webflow respectively.
All this to say: write customer stories. And if you already have customer stories – try promoting them in your remarketing campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn and see what happens.
My template is below to help you get started: