Customer success stories? Stories about how your customer won their battle using your product. Articles? A story about how a technology approach is solving real industry problems. White papers? A persuasive story about serious issues and how your product will solve them. (By the way, don’t believe “The white paper is dead” folks. Here’s why.)
These marketing pieces generate leads and shorten sales cycles because they tell a story that readers want to hear: a story about a big obstacle to success, how you can help them overcome that obstacle, and why they should trust that you can and will do what you said. No matter how complex the technology is or how technical the paper must be, good marketing pieces still get the story told.
Yeah, but Stories?
I’m not talking about Peter Pan. I’m talking about your customers’ needs, the needs that you can solve; and the brand story you tell to make that happen.
Because there are work stories they want and need to hear. What if their story is that their backup software is jamming them up every night? The story they want to hear is about how another IT department at another company was able to install a different backup that worked right away, that integrated with their scripts, that slashed backup times from 14 hours to 14 minutes, and that let them send their older backups to the cloud. That IT department is smelling like roses. That is the story this company wants to hear. Are they going to hear it from you?
What if an IT administrator have put in so many SharePoint systems that she can barely manage to keep them running optimally, let alone help users with advanced features? The story is that a very large investment is turning bad and people are blaming her and her team. She wants to hear a story about she can turn their problems into business gold by deploying an external storage grid, and how she can do it did it quickly and at a reasonable price. That’s a story that she and her team wants and needs to hear. Are you telling that story?