But fear not; there’s a secret weapon that can lift your brand above the noise: customer storytelling. It’s not just about spinning a good tale; it’s about building trust and creating connections by allowing your customers to do the talking for you.

Because it turns out that only 30% of consumers trust companies. That’s not a great percentage. So, if you run ads listing the six reasons consumers should choose your product, the consumer won’t believe you. However, if you have a verified customer post the six reasons they love your product, consumers will start to trust you.

And companies that are able to gain the trust of their customers outsell their competitors by up to “400% in terms of total market value” and customers are 88% more likely to buy again if they trust the brand.

Sure, you should still talk about yourself, share your origin story on your “About Us” page, and fill your product pages with all the product features your heart desires. But when it comes to telling potential customers why they should buy your product, the message is better received when it comes from actual customers.

While there are countless reasons why customers should be at the center of your marketing strategy, here are the top four reasons customer storytelling will help your business.

1. People trust customers (and even influencers)

Let me tell you a story of when I was trying to choose a travel credit card. I had been researching for weeks, and I just couldn’t decide. Then, a travel influencer on Instagram said she used the Capital One Venture Card. My research was then complete, and I immediately got the Capital One Venture Card.

Was that the best travel credit card for me? Who knows? But someone I trusted said it had good travel rewards, so I went for it.

The thing is, this story isn’t unique. According to a study from Oracle and Brent Leary, “80% of consumers have purchased products in direct response to social media content.” When it comes down to it, consumers are skeptical of businesses, so it’s no surprise they trust social media influencers, peers, and celebrities to give them advice on new products.

The reason influencer marketing is so effective is because influencers have already built a loyal following of people who trust their opinions. So, when an influencer introduces a product, their followers assume they have used the product and are promoting it because they love it. And most of the time, their followers can ignore the fact that the influencer may be getting kickbacks for promoting the product.

The real value of customer storytelling stems from the fact that real people don’t talk like brands. Instead of highlighting the latest technology, newest features, or energy efficiency, real people talk about how the product makes their lives better.

2. Big brands use customer storytelling because it works

I know what you’re thinking. Of course, big, established brands can rely on word-of-mouth marketing—they’re already household names. The truth is, customer-centric storytelling is a sound marketing strategy for any company. But just for fun, let’s check out some word-of-mouth marketing examples.

Tesla’s customer-driven marketing strategy

When was the last time you saw a Tesla ad? The answer should be “never,” because they don’t use traditional advertising and don’t spend any money on paid ads or endorsements. Tesla’s entire marketing strategy relies on customer referrals. Initially, Tesla offered extravagant rewards for referrals, including exclusive access to events, early delivery of new models, and even limited-edition vehicles. But they revamped the program in 2019 to offer more attainable incentives like Supercharging credits, FSD access, and discounts on new vehicles.

Duolingo’s polyglot fans

Duolingo acquires about 80% of its users through word-of-mouth marketing. Duolingo’s gamified approach, coupled with a witty social media presence, has created a loyal and enthusiastic user base. The app’s ability to quickly demonstrate language proficiency has fueled a viral loop, with satisfied learners sharing their success stories and encouraging friends to join.

This organic growth is evident in Duolingo’s impressive user acquisition costs, which are significantly lower than industry averages. By focusing on creating a product people love and leveraging the power of social sharing, Duolingo has proven that word-of-mouth can be a formidable force in driving business growth.

Dyson’s vocal customer base

By consistently introducing groundbreaking products like the bagless vacuum cleaner, the bladeless fan, and the Supersonic hair dryer, Dyson has cultivated a reputation for technological superiority. This innovation, combined with a strong emphasis on design and engineering, has created a loyal customer base eager to share their experiences.

While Dyson launched their brand in the 1990s with traditional marketing, they now let product quality and customer satisfaction drive word-of-mouth. Their focus on WOM marketing has intensified in recent years as social media platforms have amplified consumer voices.

3. Customer marketing strategies provide long-term SEO value

We already mentioned how your “About Us” page and product pages are the perfect places on your website to toot your own horn. These pages are also great for SEO because they’re packed with keywords and phrases. But you also want to include customer-generated content on your site so the SERPs can be filled with authentic, trustworthy content about your brand. Here are some customer-focused pages you might want to add to your website:

Customer reviews

Did you know that 90% of customers read reviews before they buy a product? When you allow your customers to speak for your brand, you get more user-generated content on your site and more engaged followers. It also helps improve your SEO and provides fresh content for search engines to spider.

These reviews can either be in written or video form. And always make sure to post your video reviews to YouTube so you can rank for keywords in two places.

Bonus points: Scour social media for customer reviews and mentions of your brand. Be sure to engage with your customers (both happy and angry), so these interactions will also end up in search results.

Case studies

While case studies aren’t traditionally written by customers, they do allow you to show potential consumers how other people use your product to build their business and make their life easier. If you’re a B2B brand, try to highlight well-known and trusted brands who use your product or service.

Testimonials

Testimonials are the fancy cousin of customer reviews. Brands usually request written or spoken statements from their happy customers to feature on their websites. While they’re not as candid as a traditional customer review, they do provide customer-centric content.

4. Word-of-mouth marketing still reigns supreme

As mentioned above, only 30% of consumers trust companies. On the other hand, 88% of consumers trust brands when a friend or family member recommends it. This means that if you want your customers to trust you, they need to hear about your brand or product from someone else, preferably a trusted friend or family member.

And the first step to building great word-of-mouth around your brand is to create a great product that people want to tell their friends about. When you provide quality products and good service, your customers will talk about your brand if they have a good experience.

Today, people are all too ready to share their opinions about products and brands. The trick is to provide a good experience to each of your customers, so they’ll want to share all their positive thoughts and feelings about your brand. Inspire rave reviews that can spark your next customer-driven marketing strategy. And the next time you think about creating a marketing campaign around your latest product features, consider focusing on your customers and highlighting their experiences.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs About Customer Storytelling

How can businesses implement customer storytelling if they don’t have a large customer base yet?

Small businesses can start by leveraging testimonials from their earliest customers. They can also engage with their audience on social media, encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences, and use these stories in their marketing materials. Partnering with micro influencers can also be effective.

What is a micro influencer?

A micro-influencer is a social media user who has a smaller, yet highly engaged, following, typically between 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They are often considered experts or enthusiasts in a specific niche, such as beauty, fitness, technology, or travel. Their recommendations are often seen as more credible and authentic, as they usually promote products they genuinely use and like.

What are some effective ways to encourage customers to share their stories?

Businesses can create incentives such as discounts, contests, or loyalty programs for customers who share their stories. Additionally, they can make it easy for customers to leave reviews by providing links and clear instructions. Highlighting customer stories on social media and in newsletters can also encourage others to share their experiences.

What are some common mistakes businesses make when using customer storytelling?

Common mistakes include over-editing customer stories to the point where they lose authenticity, not obtaining proper permissions from customers before using their stories, failing to follow up with customers after they share their stories, and not integrating customer stories across various marketing channels for maximum impact. Businesses should ensure stories remain genuine and respect customers’ contributions and privacy.

For more tips on customer-focused marketing, subscribe to The Content Strategist.

The post 4 Reasons To Add Customer Storytelling to Your Marketing Mix appeared first on Contently.

These are fundamentally human qualities: We like to be heard. We want to be understood. We seek a release from our pain.

There’s a lesson here for marketers. For a brand to truly provide a helpful solution, customers must have a pain point for you to address. With that pain point comes actual pain—whether frustration, anxiety, stress, confusion, embarrassment, or any other negative emotions.

Your goal, as a customer-obsessed marketer, should be not only to fix the pain point but to provide an antidote for the pain itself. As Spotify CMO Seth Farbman says in Josh Steimle’s excellent book Chief Marketing Officers at Work, “What we’re seeing when you release people from even small bits of anxiety or potential for regret or remorse is this explosion of this sense of freedom, and that freedom leads to a sense of empowerment, joy, and curiosity.”

In my last column, I made the case that the three stages of being an empathic marketer are not so different from those of being an empathic friend: Ask what’s wrong, show that you understand, and then suggest solutions.

In this column, I’m going to go explore how to use those questions in a way that helps both you and your customers. We often fail to even ask “What’s wrong?” because we think we know the answer already, which can get in the way of empathy. But luckily, as Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Dr. Helen Riess has found, empathy can be a learned behavior, and some of the following steps may help you train your brain to communicate better.

Go one-on-one

If you’re reading articles like this, you’ve probably done some research to better understand your customer. Maybe you reviewed existing buyer personas and journey maps, or created your own from scratch. Good on you in either case; these are foundational parts of your strategy.

But I also believe that these aggregations of human behavior can take away from our empathy. In one study, psychology researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University gave participants photos of eight children, only with names and ages, and asked how much money they’d give to save these kids’ lives. Participants were then shown just one child, told that kid’s unique personal story, and asked the same questions. On average, people gave twice as much to the individual child as they did to the eight kids grouped together.

Maybe marketers would benefit by paying more attention to the individual challenges of customers in order to trigger our emotions. As those psychologists discovered, an “identified victim”—their words for the one child—gives us more cause to open our hearts and our wallets.

Given the Ben Gurion study, you might want to systematize one-on-one interviews of prospects and customers. You could hire a journalist (hey, I know plenty!) to record an interview and ask below-the-surface questions about their buying process. Play it back for all the key people on your team to hear. That way you keep everybody focused on the customer’s need.

Put emotion on your map

At Monster, we’ve recently created new customer journey maps on both the B2B and B2C sides of the house.

On one side, the agency we worked with cleverly used emojis to identify the feelings customers felt at each stage. On the other, Caleb Brown, a journey mapping consultant who is also a professional cartoonist and a terrific moderator, helped us define the journey in terms of what he called “emotional valence.” He drew out a kind of musical staff and asked us to come up with words ranging from the most positive emotion our consumer might experience to the most negative. This exercise forced us to view the buyer’s experience through a lens of empathy.

Is emotion a part of your customer journey maps? If not, consider adding it. Take special care in defining the emotion, though: Instead of just writing sad, think about whether the customer is distressed or dejected or disappointed. Be specific. Go back to customer interviews to find the words people used.

Once you’ve named the pain, also map the opposite emotion (e.g. from “embarrassed” to “confident”) since that should be your north star.

So, if you’re that company Thinx that was barraging the NYC subway with advertising for period-proof underwear, your customer is embarrassed about leaks, and you know you want them to feel secure to do everyday activities (like whatever this woman is doing in the image above). Regardless of how you feel about the product, the messaging is not only memorable but emotionally on point as well.

Seek out complaints

Humans suffer from the unfortunate condition known as confirmation bias, when we seek out information that supports existing beliefs. Meanwhile, we also avoid information that challenges those beliefs, since as Jay Baer notes in an article on Adweek, our “bodies produce more cortisol [a.k.a. the stress hormone] anytime we encounter fear, rejection, or criticism.”

According to a 2017 survey by Clutch, only 10 percent of companies say “understanding customer sentiment” is a primary objective of their social listening strategies, yet this is a very useful way to get actionable insights. Instead of getting caught in an echo chamber of our biased perceptions, we have to force ourselves to have regular exposure to negative feedback.

You can learn a lot about your customers based on what they say to their friends over social media.

One low-cost way to do this: Send your social media team on a mission to gather complaints related to your products and major keywords. Focus groups are great and all, but participants may be eager to make moderators happy. The internet frees people of social convention, for better or worse. (See: Godwin’s Law.) You can learn a lot about your customers based on what they say to their friends over social media.

Poll throughout the process

If you want to know how someone feels, there’s no better way than to ask. Whenever we greet friends, the first thing we do is ask how they’re doing. But when it comes to our customers, we typically only ask how they feel at two points in the buying cycle:

1. In our initial research stage, when the question is conditional (e.g. “Would you buy this product?)
2. Following a purchase, with the question framed in past tense (e.g. “How was this experience?”)

But a buyer’s journey is not just two points. (It’s called a journey for a reason.) So another way to listen to your customers is by soliciting feedback during the middle of the process.

Setting up a one-question survey on the product page is an easy way to address this. It could reveal buyer motivations, challenges, and other insights. For example, you could ask: “Help us serve you better: Did you understand the benefits of X after reading this page?” You could also pair the poll with a discount for the next purchase.

If you’re worried that the survey would disrupt the flow of purchase, take a look at a study conducted by marketing professors Utpal Dholakia of Rice and Vicki Morowitz of NYU Stern. Using a pool 2,000 customers from a financial services company, the researchers gave half of the participants a brief customer satisfaction poll. The other half acted as the control group. A year later, the researchers reported that “the customers we surveyed were more than three times as likely to have opened new accounts, were less than half as likely to have defected, and were more profitable than the customers who hadn’t been surveyed.”

Steer into the pain

In some fields, empathic listening is a required skill. Props to reader Jessica Schimm for pointing me to a beautiful piece on Medium by a woman named Lily Benson, who recounts her experiences volunteering for a suicide prevention hotline—work that requires an immense amount of emotional generosity.

What I especially loved about this piece was her explanation of something she learned in training called “steering into the pain”:

I already knew, though didn’t (and don’t) always faithfully practice, the basics of how to listen well: being present, validating, asking questions, and sometimes the hardest part, not trying to fix things. Steering into the pain goes a step farther — when someone is telling you about something that hurts, not only do you stay there with them, and not minimize it or change the subject or talk around it or try to compare it to something or find a way to make it better, you stay there with them, and you go in deeper. You ask questions. Like: what’s the hardest part? What do you miss about him?

She goes on to talk about how this conversation becomes a release. People no longer felt alone with their suffering. As Benson writes, “Pain is this isolating thing, something that feels like it separates you. But it’s also one of the things that you share with every other human on earth. It can be an opening for intimacy, and for connecting with the shared humanity of the people around you.”

While I want to point out there’s a clear distinction between something as serious as saving a life and something as trivial as selling a product, I do think Benson is offering a universal lesson here about empathy and listening. You want to make people feel like they aren’t alone, and drive your inquiry directly (but gently) into their pain. I’d bet that Jeffrey Slater, Chief Listening Officer at The Marketing Sage, would agree with this idea—he has written that a core attribute of the empathic marketer is to “ask penetrating and respectful questions that dig deeply into the psyche of their audience.”

You want to make people feel like they aren’t alone.

Scientific research supports Benson and Slater. The leadership consultancy Zenger/Folkman studied 3,492 people in a management training program, pulling out the top 5 percent of people perceived to be the most effective listeners to find out what they were doing differently. These top listeners weren’t just nodding along silently; they were asking questions that “promote discovery and insight.”

If you have a sales process with a lot of touchpoints, look for opportunities to guide your customers deeper into self-inquiry. I bet you’ll find they want to talk and will welcome the empathetic ear. If they don’t, they might not have enough pain to require a solution—and you may want to think about getting a different job. (Ahem, Monster.)

Here’s the best news: Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to implement these takeaways at the moment, simply reading this piece may have made you more empathetic. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, just believing that empathy is a learnable skill often leads to more positive feelings for those who hold conflicting views from us, people who are suffering, and people who are different.

Margaret Magnarelli is the senior director of marketing and managing editor for content at Monster. This is the second column in her series on empathic marketing. You can read the first one here. Part three will be published on The Content Strategist next Friday.

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