Now that you’ve produced your customer story, it’s time to use it.
For most brands, this means chopping up the story into quotes, sound bites and key stats, then distributing them on different mediums—e.g. sales slides, social media, the company blog, etc.
That’s all good. And I’ll provide several examples and ideas of this in this post.
But there’s another way you can use customer stories that nobody’s talking about. And it requires a bit of a paradigm shift. So before we get into the task of repurposing case studies, let’s talk a little strategy.
Capturing demand versus building your brand
Sales leaders and product marketers are typically driving the push for customer success stories.
Their goal is to shorten the sales cycle, reduce customer acquisition cost, and capture a greater portion of existing buyer demand.
Their audience is in-market buyers—people who are actively considering buying.
This audience wants to understand the functional value of the product. So key stats and customer quotes that speak to that value are gold.
But for buyers who aren’t in the market, key stats and customer quotes are less relevant.
This is why brand marketers focus on messages that cause future buyers to associate the brand with their buying triggers.
Brand is the reason that when I think about buying wireless earbuds, I think of Apple. I only start thinking about their product’s features when I enter the store, because now those things matter.
The takeaway is that when it comes to repurposing your case study:
Level 1: Using different formats to tell the story
Level 2: Using the story to tell different messages
Level 3: Doing both
How to repurpose your case study to build your brand
Using your case study to build your brand is less about the story’s events and more about how those events relate to:
- Your buyers
- Your brand point of view
- Your industry
It’s not about—for example—how automated prospect nurturing increases application rates. But it is about how automation might change:
- The relationship between property owners and managers in a tech-driven landscape.
- The day-to-day tasks of leasing managers.
- How leasing professionals measure success and performance in their roles.
- The balance between efficiency and personalization in the leasing process.
- How companies can scale operations without scaling headcount.
This approach to repurposing your case study is ideal for:
- Thought leadership and branded content on social media.
- Injecting blog and other top-of-funnel website content with real-life examples.
In practice, this looks like highlight video or audio clips from your customer interview and shareable text-based anecdotes posted on social media and weaved into blog, email, and website content.
Here are three ways to mine your case study for brand-building meaning:
- Look for the pain
Mine your story for pain points. Search the transcript, your notes, or draft for the moments when problems and pain are shown.
Then, frame the problem to show you understand how the problem shows up for your buyers and the ramifications of not solving it.
To do this: Connect the problem your product solves to a tangible reason why the problem exists → Consequence of not solving the problem → Ultimate negative outcome if the problem goes unsolved.
(H/T to Nick Bennett at Harness and Hone)
Here is an example: Leasing managers struggling to track leads and schedule showings in a timely manner → they’re tracking leads manually instead of automating it → they’re buried in admin work → they’ll never maximize their asset value without working insane hours.
Now take the generic problem framing you’ve created and overlay the details of your customer story to bring it to life.
Try this problem-framing prompt which will get you 90% of the way there.
- Find the lesson
Presumably, your case study is a story about how a customer overcame a problem. And there’s a lesson in that. So use the story to teach that lesson.
A smart way to find these lessons is to analyze your educational content and connect your customer’s story to whatever lesson(s) your educational content is trying to teach.
- Search for examples of industry trends
Sharp insights on industry trends are great fodder for social media. Sharp insights with real-world examples are even better.
If you have hot takes, look for anecdotes from your case study that support those takes.
Then pair the two in social media posts.
To systematize this, make a copy of my Customer Story Sheet and list your audience’s pain points, your company’s beliefs, and your industry’s trends in the “Pain points and beliefs” tab.
Then when you have a case study draft, you can mine it for anecdotes using this prompt.
The prompt will give you a great starting point for creating a series of posts that don’t require the reader to read the full case study to get value.
How to repurpose your case study to capture demand
Traditional repurposing is a lot simpler from a messaging perspective. It’s just chopping up the most compelling bits of your case study into different formats. Though that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Here are 7 different formats (with examples) you can repurpose your case study into.
1. Infographics
2. Interview clips
Interview clips are a great way to give you case study more legs. Use these on social media, embed them into webpages, or even throw one into a sales deck.
Here is an interview clip one of my clients, Copilot Publishing, used to promote their story:
3. LinkedIn Carousels
Create a few visually appealing slides and save them as a .pdf. Then upload it to a post on LinkedIn and you can share your case study as a slideshow.
4. Sales slides
Integrate your case study into sales slide when and where it’s relevant. Source
5. Quotes
Quotes are ideal for integrating into your website design and sharing on social media.
6. One pagers
A one-pager makes a great leave-behind and works as tradeshow collateral.
The logistics of repurposing
Unfortunately, there’s no cut-and-paste process for repurposing your B2B case studies. Infographics may work for one brand and not for another. Sales slides might be useful, or not.
The two anchors you can always come back to is 1) what story you’re trying to tell and 2) why you’re telling that story i.e. your goals.
If you’re telling the story primarily to improve short-term sales metrics, focus on the channels that are closest to the sale. And if the story you want to tell relates to your customers’ ROI, focus on formats that most effectively communicate that message.
Once you decide on the channels and formats, systematize the process for turning your customer’s story into each format as much as possible. Use templates to make things like quote posts or metric highlights easy to share on social media and add to sales decks.
Establish roles and responsibilities and document processes for distributing these assets internally and externally.
Identify champions who will help you distribute assets internally. Create databases—organized by use case, industry, and any other relevant details so it’s easy for creators and salespeople to find your case studies.
Periodically, revisit your process and make improvements and/or expand your efforts.
And finally, follow me on LinkedIn where I share the prompts I create for collecting, creating, publishing, and repurposing customer stories.