This article is based on the event panel Infinite Scale: How Coupa's Customer Marketing Team Creates Content & Stories, hosted by Evan Huck, Co-founder & CEO of UserEvidence, and featuring Charlotte Lilley, Head of Global Customer Marketing at Coupa. Check out the full discussion here.
As a customer marketer, I'm passionate about creating engaging content that tells our brand's story and connects with our customers.
In my years of sales and customer marketing experience and time in my current role at Coupa, I've learned the importance of content marketing, brand storytelling, and narrative design in building strong relationships with our customers.
But with the rise of content marketing and the need to stand out in a crowded digital landscape, the importance of narrative design has only grown.
In this article, I want to share my insights on how to use data, brand storytelling, and narrative design to create content that resonates with customers, builds brand loyalty, and ultimately drives business growth.
So let’s dive in!
Here’s how I’ll break it down:
- How to create valuable content
- How to solidify customer relationships
- Final thoughts
How to create valuable content
Content creation is one of the most effective routes for scaling up your customer marketing function, and here I’ll explain how to optimize and maximize your resources to meet growing demand.
Before you even start to plan your storytelling and content creation you need to analyze what you already have and where the gaps are.
At Coupa when I first started, we didn’t have an exact index, so I started by using Tableau, a data visualization software, to look at what we had in terms of open opportunities, to begin prioritization.
Then I went through and looked specifically at which opportunities had high annual contract value (ACV) and their close rates, deciding to prioritize those with high ACV, pushing for quality over quantity.
Looking at the data and specific metrics like ACV can help you to determine a course of action, allowing you to build content for the opportunities that are worth it.
So now you have established your baseline, let’s begin to think about content creation.
Content marketing
Again, one of the most critical components of customer marketing is content creation, you need to create content that is both relevant and valuable to your customers.
It's no longer enough to just write about your products and services; you need to create content that answers your customers' questions and provides them with valuable insights.
At Coupa, we use a variety of content formats to engage with our customers, including case studies, blog posts, webinars, and events.
We understand that different customers have different preferences when it comes to content, so we create a range of content types to appeal to a broader audience and engage all of our customers.
Brand storytelling
Brand storytelling is about crafting a compelling narrative that communicates who we are as a company and what we stand for. It's not just about telling a story; it's about telling the right story.
At Coupa, we focus on telling stories that showcase our customers and how they're using our products and services to achieve their goals. Here we are strategic with how we go about this and we have specific people on the team working on specific segments.
This means context switching is limited and you can really hone in on each specific type of customer and personalize your work.
One of the ways we do this is by using UserEvidence to capture the stories of our customers. It’s a really handy tool for casting a wide net and seeing what stories are out there and what customers are interested in.
This then allows us to pre-qualify these stories to determine which ones are worth pursuing. This approach helps us to create a strong narrative that resonates with our customers.
Narrative design
As a customer marketer, you’ll know that there is a wealth of customer stories that you can tell, so the difficult part is knowing just how to organize it and make it relevant.
Narrative design is about creating a cohesive story that ties all of your content and messaging together, constructing a clear and consistent narrative that communicates your brand's values and vision.
At Coupa, we believe that narrative design is a critical part of creating a strong brand identity.
To achieve this, we focus on creating engagement across the customer journey. I believe that customer marketing is the most integral place where customers can see the full picture, and so it’s our job to lay it out for them.
We create content that is relevant and appropriate for each stage of the customer journey, from pre-sale to post-sale. We also work closely with our sales and customer success teams to ensure that our messaging is consistent across all touchpoints.
We also run a blog called Customer Chronicles, to solve the challenge we had (and one I know a lot of other customer marketers will struggle with) with sales asking us to do a press release on each new customer.
As we all know in marketing, you can’t do a big press release on every customer, there needs to be a strategic reason behind it. So Customer Chronicles allows us to scale storytelling.
We send the same 5 questions to new customers and then promote and share their answers on the blog and social media. This creates the perfect middle ground between a simple social welcome post and an entire press release, making each new customer feel valued whilst also providing content that is engaging and informative for existing customers.
How to solidify customer relationships
Springboarding off of the vital work of narrative design and storytelling in customer marketing content creation, now you’ve hooked your customer, how do you get them to stay and build brand loyalty?
Advocacy programs
One of the ways we build strong relationships with our customers is through advocacy programs. These programs allow us to engage with our customers, nurturing them through their journey and providing them with opportunities to showcase their success.
Content is key here and as a customer marketer, you can strategically create opportunities for advocacy through engaging and interesting content. Opportunity creates advocacy.
One way we’ve already started to do this is in our catalyst event series, which is a series of events for customers primarily to engage them and provide the opportunity for them to connect and network.
At Coupa, we're also launching a new advocacy program later this year, which we believe will be a game-changer for our customer marketing efforts and a foundation for structuring advocacy.
The goal of our advocacy program is to create a community of brand advocates who can help us tell our brand's story. We want to build a structured network of customers who are passionate about our products and services and are willing to share their success stories with others.
All in all, customers need to feel like they’re part of something.
The future of customer marketing
As customer marketing continues to evolve, we need to embrace technology and automation to help us to stay ahead of the curve.
We need to find ways to streamline our processes and make our workflows more efficient that are more user-friendly. This is especially important as we continue to scale our customer marketing efforts.
I believe that there are steps that technology needs to take to fully support the growth of the customer marketing function.
We're looking for tools that will allow us to create content more efficiently and engage with our customers more effectively. We know how to tell the customer story, we know what’s going on with them, and we’re cross-functional, we just need technology to catch up.
Final thoughts
I truly think that it’s a great time to be a customer marketer and it’s exciting to see the field of customer marketing evolve and expand so rapidly.
To be successful however, it's necessary to have a deep understanding of your customers and their stories. Creating a compelling narrative is essential, as it not only showcases your brand but also humanizes it.
By incorporating customer feedback and stories into your content marketing strategy, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and industry expert. This will help to build trust and credibility with your audience and ultimately drive sales.
Additionally, as technology continues to advance, automation and data-driven marketing will become increasingly important.
Overall, the future of customer marketing is bright, and I'm excited to see where it will take us.
