Ensuring customer stories are a PR holy grail rather than holy fail

Alex By Alex

For PR and marketing professionals, customer stories are gold dust and remain one of the most effective ways to showcase a company’s product and services. SPOILER ALERT – our upcoming Spark research highlights that almost half of tech buyers use customer case studies to educate themselves and to define their organisation’s technology requirements.

Customer stories should play a key part of any PR programme (although we should not be reliant on them). When that client email arrives in your inbox saying a customer is happy to support PR, the focus should be very much on maximising the opportunity.

For the client, customer stories in the media are a great third-party endorsement. But let’s not forget for the customer they are also a fantastic way to build their personal/company profile and demonstrate industry leadership.

What’s the story?

Evaluating the customer story at the offset is vital, as it will define your strategy and set expectations. Some of the questions you should be asking at this stage are:

  • Who is the customer? Are they well known?
  • Is the customer doing something innovative?
  • How could our tech story link to the customer’s wider business strategy?
  • Is this a customer win or go live story?
  • Has the customer realised any tangible benefits?
  • Will the customer speak to media?

Based on answers to the above, you will be in a much better position to ask the customer the right questions and evaluate how best to pitch the story to media.

Prepping the customer

If the customer is on board with speaking to the media, ensuring they are prepped is essential. After all, we wouldn’t send a client to a media interview without prepping them. This is especially important in B2B tech. Many of the customers interviewees we work with haven’t had formal media training, so having a pre-briefing can really help them when it comes to telling their story to a media audience. You should also use this as the opportunity to coach the customer to incorporate your client’s message into their narrative – after all the aim is to get your client included in the media write up!

Name in lights

The above can go a long way to setting you up for success, but having strong journalist relationships is essential too! Understanding who covers customer stories and who to pitch may sound obvious, but taking a targeted rather than scattergun approach should be the norm.

Here at Spark, we’ve had some cracking customer story coverage recently including American Airlines deploying software 75% quicker using DevOps, Danish law firm NJORD enhancing collaboration with cloud-based document management and Leeds Building Society improving service performance with AIOPs.

If you think your customer PR needs a bit more Spark, get in touch.