Customer stories can be effective for marketing your business across the social web. By creating new content marketing and conversations based on these success stories, your brand and business can get free word-of-mouth marketing that extends further than traditional marketing tactics such as advertising can deliver.
1. Publish customer stories on your business blog. It’s a perfect place to bring a personal feel to your website.
2. Create a special section on your website just for customer stories. Many businesses have top-level navigation links to case studies and testimonials. You can do the same thing with your customer stories.
3. Publish customer stories on your Facebook page. You could even create a special tab on your business Facebook page for customer stories.
4. Tweet about your customer stories and direct people to your business blog or Facebook page for more details.
5. Create videos about your customer stories and publish them on your business YouTube channel.
6. Incorporate customer stories into ebooks related to your business.
7. Tell your customer stories through pictures and publish those images in a special Flickr album.
8. Include customer stories in presentations you deliver then upload those presentations to SlideShare to get extra mileage from them.
9. Use customer stories as teasers in online display ads. AOL does this very effectively. Just create banner ads and place them on relevant sites.
10. Use customer stories in email newsletters and hype those emails on your website, blog and other social media destinations.
11. Pitch your best customer stories to journalists using a resource like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) at www.helpareporter.com where journalists publish requests for stories.
12. Offer to write guest posts for blogs that your target audience. Write a useful post for the blog and try to weave your customer story into your post as appropriate.
Remember, the purpose of social media and content marketing is not to self-promote and market directly. Instead, your goal is to demonstrate your expertise and offer useful information that is meaningful to the audience. Content marketing indirectly promotes your business but more importantly, it enables you to develop relationships with people that can turn into brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and word-of-mouth marketing.
