Today, we’re talking about customer experiences as fuel for content. We all know the power of customer stories, but it’s sometimes challenging to come up with ways to weave them into different content formats. Alfredo Deambrosi, content marketing manager at Perspectium, is doing some really interesting things with customer stories. And I know that you’ll get some great ideas from what he has to share.
Key Takeaways
(8:39) Customer stories are real and authentic ways to market your solutions.
What I love about doing this is that it’s so organic and authentic. You know, we’re not manufacturing pain, we’re not promising solutions that can be imagined. The success is real. And you can hear from the customers themselves.
(9:16) Create content around themes your customers are talking about.
As time went on and we recorded more customer webinars, I started hearing more patterns and new themes kept emerging. Multiple customers talked about this pain point or that Perspectium benefit. If multiple customers are talking about this, we should be talking about it too, and maybe talking about it even more than we already are.
(11:12) Use customer stories when onboarding so new employees really understand your product and company.
I also ended up creating a customer ebook that has a series of stories. This is really useful for the sales team. In fact, for a while, there was a certain part of the sales team that this was kind of required reading for them so that they get a better understanding of not just customer stories, but the story of Perspectium.
When someone’s coming into the organization, they want to know, “What do we do? What are our products? What is the Perspectium story?” They can look at that customer ebook, that collection of customer stories. It’s through that collection of customer stories that they really learned the Perspectium story.
(18:11) Incentivize customers to share their stories by making them the champion.
There is an incentive in customers talking about their own success. And, I know you and I have talked before about the fact that it’s the customer who’s the champion, and the vendor is the ally. We’re the sidekick when we’re telling the story of the customer. So, if we have a customer webinar, it’s a chance to feature that customer and that organization’s success, and that department’s success, and then the success in particular of the person who’s speaking.
(20:23) Listen to your customers, and their experiences will naturally integrate into your marketing content.
Listen to the customers. The customer experiences will naturally integrate into the marketing content. One way of listening to the customers is to listen to conversations between sales and customers. Another way is to read forums where they hang out and talk about the challenges that your solution deals with. If you have recorded customer webinars, listen to them. I’ve listened to all of our customer webinars multiple times.
If you marinate in the stories of the customer experience, all of your content will taste like authentic experiences. Whether or not you explicitly state that companies X, Y, and Z did this to your audience, what they’re reading will taste like their experience.
Transcript
(Laura 1:24) Alfredo, we’ve been talking marketing strategy for a couple of years now. I’m so excited to have you on the show.
(Alfredo 1:34) Glad to be here, too. Thanks so much. I’ve really enjoyed following your work. And wow, what an honor to be here on What’s Working Now.
(Laura 1:42) Awesome! So, for those who may be new to you, can you share Perspectium’s elevator pitch? And also tell us a little bit about your role there?
(Alfredo 1:53) Sure. So, Perspectium delivers packaged integrations for ServiceNow, which is a large SaaS platform that enterprises use to manage workflows. And we provide the only solution for moving enormous volumes of ServiceNow data into data warehouses without crippling the performance of the ServiceNow platform. So, companies need this for BI analytics and machine learning.
We also enable cross-platform workflows across ServiceNow with other service management tools and providers and customers. And then we also provide backup and migration tools for ServiceNow to help enterprises protect their applications and data.
These packaged integrations are delivered as a fully managed, fully monitored service. And they’re configured from within a native ServiceNow application. Customers include AT&T, PepsiCo, PayPal, Southwest Airlines, UPS, so these are large enterprises that manage complex workflows and massive volumes of data. So that’s Perspectium.
Actually, we are in the process of getting acquired by BitTitan. So that’ll change things a little bit, but it will still be a product within the suite of products that BitTitan has.
Ao then, as far as my role, I’m the content marketing manager. And I get to work with just an amazing marketing team. And that’s not just me saying that. I have a friend who works outside Perspectium but knows the marketing team. And he told me that department is stacked and loaded with talent. And he’s right, and I’m taking advantage of it.
When I came in, in 2017, my boss Craig said, we have these customer webinars of customers talking about how and why they use our product. And your first assignment is to go through these and clip especially strong segments that our sales team can use to nurture their leads by giving out a video clip here and there. A very short clip that targets particularly what our salesperson thinks that lead could benefit from. And as I did so and listened through the webinars, I realized that the whole webinars were gold. I took clips from them, but they also ended up inspiring a whole lot of our content.
(Laura 4:39) Nice. And it’s interesting because everyone talks about the power of storytelling and customer experiences, but you and your team, to your credit, have really figured out how to drive your content strategy with those stories in the form of customer experiences.
So I’m super excited to talk to you about that. But before we get into the tactics, can you tell us how you arrived at a strategy that really starts with a story? Was it like you said, you know, your introduction to the company? Did that trigger everything? Or was it a more team-based process? How did that happen?
(Alfredo 5:30) I think that being introduced with that first assignment in that way really did influence that tactic. I am the content person. Although there are other people who make content, I’m the content marketing manager. And it’s how I learned about Perspectium through those customer experiences, through the stories.
Come to think about it, that’s how I learned about life, I guess. But, you know it’s probably too broad to go there, but it’s also true. There’s a reason that storytelling is cliche in marketing. Powerful.
(Alfredo 6:09) It’s human nature. It’s what makes us tick. So, although I want to keep advancing skills beyond storytelling, I also don’t want to get away from storytelling, right? Margaret Atwood said, you’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built in the human plan we come with. But I say that I learned about Perspectium through stories.
You know, when I got hired, and Perspectium personnel told me about what customers do with our services, I understood it. But it’s when I heard customers in their own voices telling their own stories that I understood it deeply. Their landscape, their pain, the alternatives that they considered, what they liked about us, why they chose us, what their results were with us, and where they see themselves going.
So, when I go to the website of another SAS company, perhaps it’s because of the kind of work I do and the strategy that I have of looking at customer experiences on those other websites, I often seek out the case studies or even the customer testimonial videos. It’s through the customer stories that it really clicks.
(Laura 7:34) Yeah, it makes it so much more concrete, you know, it’s not just describing these nebulous solutions. It’s like you can see, okay, this is how this person is using it, and what they’re doing with it. And I think it really allows people to envision how they’re going to use it or how they could use them.
It’s the same like you mentioned with life. You might be reading a novel, and you’re like, oh, wow, this person came to this amazing conclusion. And did you know, XYZ? I could do that, you know?
(Alfredo 8:05) Yeah, I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
(Laura 8:08) Yeah. So I know that listeners are going to be really interested to hear how you’re using customer webinars as the backbone, so to speak, of your content plan. And then repurposing those stories and audio snippets for marketing content for use by your sales team, like you had shared. So can you tell us about the actual process? How do you go about doing that?
(Alfredo 8:39) Yeah. What I love about doing this is that it’s so organic and authentic. You know, we’re not manufacturing pain. We’re not promising solutions that can be imagined. The success is real. And you can hear from the customers themselves.
As far as the process goes, originally, when we pursue a topic for a piece of content, I’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that. Jonathan from Accenture, or Barry from Zurich Insurance, a couple of our customers talked about that challenge. Let’s use that.’
(Alfredo 9:16) But as time went on and we recorded more customer webinars, I started hearing more patterns and new themes kept emerging. Multiple customers talked about this pain point or that Perspectium benefit. If multiple customers are talking about this, we should be talking about it too. And maybe talking about it even more than we already are.
For example, when Matt from Fortiva talked on our customer webinar about hours of troubleshooting over lost data when an integration failed or would regularly fail. And Naveed from PayPal talked about that kind of thing too, when they were talking about their previous integrations. We totally needed a piece on data integrity and keeping data from being lost.
So eventually, I created a spreadsheet for myself with tags for certain sections of the customer webinars for my own reference. And I also organized our 70-plus video clips from customer webinars into categories so that our sales team can find them quickly and pass them along for very targeted needs that they have.
So, for the customer experiences, those customer experiences reveal our solutions. They do so for our internal team, not just for the marketing purpose, but also for the internal team. And, it makes me think of how stories are helpful for the bonding of a tribe, you know.
So, beyond the customer webinars, that ends up inspiring a bunch of different content like case studies, and blog posts, and white papers. And this kind of content keeps showing up in so much of the other, I would say, most of the other content.
(Alfredo 11:12) But, I also ended up creating a customer ebook that has a series of stories of more customers than just the ones that did customer webinars for us. This is really useful for the sales team. In fact, for a while, there was a certain part of the sales team that this was kind of required reading for them so that they get a better understanding of not just customer stories, but the story of Perspectium.
When someone’s coming into the organization, they want to know, “What do we do? What are our products? What is the Perspectium story?” They can look at that customer ebook, that collection of customer stories. It’s through that collection of customer stories that they really learned the Perspectium story.
(Laura 12:07) I’m curious. You mentioned integrating them into white papers. Are you doing that as examples of whatever you’re talking about, or exactly what does that look like? How does the customer experience show up in a white paper?
(Alfredo 12:22) It shows up as examples, but I think also the customer experience, even if I’m not referring to it specifically and explicitly, it’s naturally going to influence what I write about. There are echoes of what the customers have said in the customer webinar as I’m creating my own content.
Because this is the way that I learned about Perspectium when I came in, and this is the way I continue learning about customer needs and common customer challenges. So what I write is, in a sense, going to echo what customers have said during customer webinars.
(Laura 13:06) Right. And then you mentioned the audio snippets and the video snippets. Are you sharing those on social media? Or where are those getting out?
(Alfredo 13:17) Yes. So originally, it was meant as a way of having the sales team take specific, very specific videos and say, this applies to this prospect over here and this lead over there. Let’s have them hear from a customer themself and get that social proof.
But then, I put that on social media as well. So I manage the LinkedIn account and the Twitter account. Actually, just today, a couple of hours ago, I posted one.
(Laura 13:58) Nice. So I know you’re mining these customer webinars for blog cluster themes, as well. I would love to hear about your process for that.
(Alfredo 14:13) Sure. So, in the spreadsheet I referred to earlier, certain topics kept coming up, and themes emerged from these customer webinars. And naturally, people are searching online for these as well.
So, the themes coming up were a customer trying to merge their ServiceNow data with data across the organization in a data warehouse, or switching their integration from bulk transfer to a real-time transfer, or preserving the ServiceNow performance. I would see these things and see patterns, you know, mentioned multiple times. Well, if they’re saying this multiple times, then let’s make sure that we’ve got some great messaging on this.
So, I then ask some questions. First, can I collect everything that our customers have said about this topic? Then I might actually in the content link to it, even embed that one-minute video into that blog post for that instant proof.
I also ask, do we have existing messaging on these topics on a product page or elsewhere in our content? We want to have a message that’s consistent with what our customers say. And thankfully, it turns out that our messaging does align with what the customers say. So that’s a good thing.
And another question, is there formal research that speaks to this? And then, what is the informal chatter online? All those help to contribute to the overall message that we’re delivering when we speak on one of those topics. I think that when marketing or sales talk about customer challenges and our solutions behind that explanation, the stories are the customer stories, and so our explanations are authentic because they’re driven by real stories.
(Laura 16:29) Yeah, and you can also make sure that you’re using the language they use. Because a lot of times in every single industry, company to company or market segment to market segment, they talk about things in different ways. So making sure you’re aligned on that is super smart.
Awesome. So I know that a common challenge with customer stories is getting the customer to actually participate, either because they have time constraints or sometimes because they’re hesitant to share what a mess they were in before they started using your solution. So how are you incentivizing customers or selling them on the idea of participating in these webinars?
(Alfredo 17:20) I’ll mention first off that I’m not the one who actually does the interviewing in the webinars. I’m not the one who’s arranging to see whether a customer would agree to do a customer webinar. But, I have talked with our director of marketing, Andrew, who does the interviewing for most of the webinars, and I think it really is just that we have a good relationship with those customers.
I will say; also, it can be a challenge, because especially in larger organizations, you know we’re dealing with these large enterprises as customers. Large organizations often have more restrictive policies.
(Laura 18:05) There’s a lot of red tape to go through today.
(Alfredo 18:11) Yeah, but there is still an incentive in customers talking about their own success. And, I know you and I have talked before about the fact that it’s the customer who’s the champion, and the vendor is the ally. We’re the sidekick when we’re telling the story of the customer. So, if we have a customer webinar, it’s a chance to feature that customer and that organization’s success, and that department’s success, and then the success in particular of the person who’s speaking. So, there is incentive there.
There’s not really gifts or other kinds of incentives. Not to say that that will never happen, but to my knowledge, that hasn’t. It really has been just a matter of we have a good relationship with these customers. And yes, it’s beneficial to us, but it’s beneficial to them too. Featuring them as a successful organization, here’s a rising star among the MSPs, or here is a powerful name in such-and-such an industry.
(Laura 19:40) Right, yeah. Because then you’re really setting them up as leaders in their field, right? They’re tackling this problem and solving it with your solution. Yeah, very cool.
So, what would your advice be to other SAS marketing teams who are trying to integrate customer experiences more fully into their marketing content? Maybe they do case studies now, but they’re trying to integrate it into all of their content. Like you were sharing with social media, and audio and video and white papers and all of that.
(Alfredo 20:23) Yeah, I’d say primarily, listen to the customers. The customer experiences will naturally integrate into the marketing content. One way of listening to the customers is to listen to conversations between sales and customers. Another way is to read forums where they hang out and talk about the challenges that your solution deals with. If you have recorded customer webinars, listen to them. I’ve listened to all of our customer webinars multiple times. I have transcripts for all of them. Sometimes, if I go for a walk or a drive, I’ll re-listen to a customer webinar.
If you marinate in the stories of the customer experience, all of your content will taste like authentic experiences. Whether or not you explicitly state that companies X, Y, and Z did this to your audience, what they’re reading will taste like their experience.
So, my answer to your question is, I guess, still more general, about if they want to integrate customer experiences more fully into their marketing content. And I guess that’s the big thing, is listening to the customers.
There are all kinds of tactics beyond that that you can follow to repurpose content. So for ours, the content starts out as the recording of the customer webinar. From that, we can make a case study. We can make blog posts. It can influence some of the content that’s in the white papers. You know that I ended up repackaging a lot of content and repurposed it into a booklet and unrivaled guide – an alternative title to Ultimate Guide.
Although, many times, we don’t explicitly mention customers. As I’m writing this content, I’m thinking; yeah, that’s what customer X, Y, and Z dealt with. And here I am writing about it, but just in general terms because it’s applied to multiple customers. So yeah, there are all kinds of tactics that you can find online for repurposing your content into an infographic, or here’s this little video, or email templates that your salespeople can use as well. And yeah, I’ve done all that.
(Laura 23:17) You know, I love the emphasis too, because it’s so much more organic. When you’re living the customer story, and you’re so immersed in it, it does just come out, and it shows up. And I really like that approach. Because, so often, we’re out there looking at what are our competitors doing? And that can be valuable to a certain degree. Or even seeing what other companies and other industries are doing. But at the end of the day, it really does all come back down to the customer. So, if that’s your source of inspiration, and themes and topics and language even; everything coming from that. You know it’s going to be effective. So, very cool.
(Laura 24:15) So, the last question I have for you the question that I always ask is, is there anything else that you would like to share with the listeners that I haven’t given you the opportunity to talk about?
(Alfredo 24:27) Yeah, I’d say stay curious. Stories helped our ancestors survive and succeed. Stories are how tribes communicated threats and opportunities. They’re how the tribe bonded. And you know, the ones, our ancestors who actually listened to those stories and shared those stories are the ones who survived. And keep sharing stories. Keep listening to stories and stay curious in order to learn more through those stories.
(Laura 25:02) Well, thank you so much for sharing! This has been really great. I know people are going to really enjoy this one. Thanks so much!
(Alfredo 25:11) Thank you. It’s been an honor. Really appreciate it.
(Laura 25:46) I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Alfredo. Now, I’m taking a break from recording for the summer, but I’m excited about the new conversations I’ll share with you on Season 2! Have a wonderful summer.
For more on Perspectium, check out their website at perspectium.com.