In an era where attention spans are dwindling, video content is becoming increasingly important as a tool to capture and maintain a customer’s interest. Video provides marketers with an opportunity to tell stories that truly engage the customer, while also providing a platform to effectively communicate their message.
So how do you craft a powerful customer story with video? Let’s take a look.
Why Should You Tell a Customer Success Story?
First, let's talk about the importance of telling a customer success story.
The Power of the Customer Story
The power of storytelling has been recognized for centuries, and it is no different in the business world. When you share a story about a satisfied customer, you create a connection with your audience that goes beyond just selling a product or service.
Building Trust
By sharing a customer success story, you show potential customers the real-world benefits of your offerings and how they have helped others just like them. This creates a sense of trust and credibility that can be difficult to establish through other means.
Differentiation
Additionally, customer success stories can help differentiate your brand from competitors by highlighting your unique selling points and showcasing your ability to solve real-world problems.
Expand Your Reach
Sharing customer success stories also has the potential to expand your reach and attract new customers. Positive word-of-mouth referrals are a powerful marketing tool, and sharing customer success stories can generate just that.
When you share a story about a satisfied customer, it is likely that they will share that story with their friends, family, and colleagues. This, in turn, can attract new customers to your business and help you grow your customer base.
Be Clear About Your Message and Goals
Before creating any video content, it’s important to establish what message you want to convey and what goals you want to achieve. This will help ensure that your story is crystal clear from the start, allowing you to easily guide viewers through your narrative without getting lost in details or tangents.
Customer Focused Customer Stories
Your story should be focused on the customer and their success, not on your product or service. Your goal should be to highlight how your offerings have helped your customer achieve their goals and how your company solved their problems. By doing so, you will create a story that is relatable, authentic, and compelling.
To use a Star Wars analogy - you want to be Yoda guiding your Luke Skywalker (your customer) in the story. Your customer is the hero and you are the guide.
Goal Setting
To ensure that your message is clear and focused, it is important to have a well-defined goal in mind before you start crafting your story.
Are you trying to demonstrate the effectiveness of your product? Are you looking to showcase how your service can help solve a specific problem? Whatever your goal may be, it should be clearly defined and tailored to your audience.
Audience First Perspective
Additionally, it is important to keep your audience in mind when crafting your compelling customer success story. What are their pain points? What are their goals and aspirations? By understanding your audience, you can create a story that resonates with them and showcases the benefits of your product or service in a way that is relevant to their lives.
By being clear about your message and goals, you can create a powerful and impactful customer success story that will resonate with your audience and drive results for your business.
Bring Your Story To Life
Once your main message has been established, it’s time to bring your story to life! Utilize all available tools in order to make sure that your video grabs and keeps viewers’ attention—including compelling visuals and captivating audio.
Check out our blog post on video editing to get even more ideas on utilizing the best techniques in telling a great story with video.
Connect On an Personal Level
A good story should evoke emotion from the viewer, so be sure not to skimp on quality when creating visuals or sound effects for your video.
Start by introducing the customer and their problem, and then explain how your product or service helped them overcome that challenge. Use descriptive language to paint a picture of the situation, and showcase the specific benefits and features of your offerings that helped your customer succeed.
Visually Interesting Customer Success Stories
Visuals are a powerful tool in storytelling, so make sure to incorporate high-quality images and videos into your story. These visuals should be relevant to the narrative and should help to illustrate the customer's journey. Consider using infographics, animations, or other graphics to help explain complex concepts or statistics.
Finally, audio can also play a crucial role in bringing your story to life. The right music can set the tone for your story, while sound effects can help to emphasize key points and create a more immersive experience for the viewer. Make sure to choose audio that complements your story and helps to enhance the emotional impact of your message.
Overall, bringing your story to life requires a thoughtful and intentional approach. By utilizing all available tools, including visuals and audio, and crafting a compelling narrative that engages your audience, you can create a customer success story that truly resonates with your viewers and drives results for your business.
Make a Shareable and Compelling Customer Success Story
When creating video customer success stories, it is important to make it as shareable and compelling as possible. A well-crafted story can have a powerful impact on your audience, but in order to truly maximize its reach, you need to make it easy for people to share it across different channels.
This means optimizing your video for different platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, so that it can be easily found and shared by your target audience.
Just a Matter of Optimization
One effective way to make your story shareable is to create shorter versions of the same video that are specifically designed for different social platforms. For example, you might create a 60-second version of your video for Instagram or a 30-second version for TikTok.
By creating these shorter clips, you can reach a wider audience and increase the likelihood that your video will be shared.
We dive deep into this topic in our blog about micro content.
Make it Interesting
Another key factor in creating shareable and compelling customer stories is to make sure that it is visually appealing and engaging. This means incorporating high-quality visuals and audio, as well as using descriptive language to create a narrative that resonates with your audience.
By doing so, you can create a video that is not only informative but also emotionally impactful, making it more likely that viewers will want to share it with others.
How to Measure the Success of Your Customer Success Stories
Measuring the success of your customer stories is essential to understanding the impact they are having on your business. There are several metrics you can track to evaluate the effectiveness of your videos, including views, engagement, and conversions.
Views
One key metric to track is views. This measures the number of times your video has been watched, and can provide insight into how many people are being exposed to your brand through your customer success story videos.
Views can also help you gauge the effectiveness of your video's distribution strategy. You can track views on various platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites.
Keep in mind what your goals for the video that you set before the project started. Just because a video has only a handful of views doesn't automatically make it a failure or a bad investment. More on that shortly.
Engagement
Another metric to track is engagement, which measures how actively your viewers are engaging with your video. Engagement can include actions such as likes, comments, and shares, and can help you understand how your audience is responding to your content.
High engagement rates can indicate that your video is resonating with your audience, while low engagement rates may signal the need for changes to your video content or distribution strategy.
Conversions
Finally, conversions are a crucial metric to track for customer success story videos and what I believe to be the most important. This measures the number of viewers who take a desired action after watching your video, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.
Tracking conversions can help you understand the direct impact of your video customer stories on your business's bottom line. As I alluded to earlier, if you have only a few hundred views in your video, but many conversions - I would still call that a successful video!
If you are using customer story videos as a bottom of the funnel social proof asset, be sure to communicate consistently with your sales team to get their feedback on the impact of the videos to their deals. In our opinion, this is a crucial step for the customer advocacy team to take to ensure you are accomplishing your goals.
By measuring the success of your customer story videos, you can optimize your videos for maximum impact and ensure that they are driving real results for your business.
Conclusion:
Utilizing videos as part of your marketing strategy allows businesses the unique opportunity of sharing stories in an engaging way with happy customers both old and new. Crafting an effective customer story takes thoughtful consideration in order to grab and keep viewer attention while also conveying a clear message which resonates with them.
When done right, videos offer incredible potential when it comes to marketing success. Don't hesitate to reach out to us here at The Customer Story if you want to work with a partner on this endeavor.
