(written in early 2020, published in 2021)
I’ve built and hired, and been managing our developer advocate and product marketing team for about a year. One critical job responsibilities we carry is to develop content of use cases and customer success stories for marketing to promote product and brand awareness and generate leads.
Writing customer success stories isn’t as easy as you imagine without trying to do one yourself, especially if you are an engineer. Writing a story is not easier than writing a big feature.
It first requires extraordinary skills of story telling. Listening and reading stories is one of humans’ instincts. A use case or customer success story is first a story, then a marketing piece. Readers usually make a decision whether to continue reading or not, by just browsing the first few paragraphs and making an intuitive decision on how good, smooth, and rational the story would be — and pass it if it’s not.
Note that I’m not emphasizing on skills of writing, but story telling. To me, the words and phrases in a writing do not need to be gorgeous, especially for non-English-native writers. As long as the terminologies are correct and the structure of the blog is well planned, other words usually don’t matter that much. By the way, you can always hire some native English speakers on contracting platform like Upwork to help polish the wordage, but they cannot help with structure of your story.
Second, collaboration and communication. The story is usually first drafted by customers, and reviewed by the writer, it’s a loop with many iterations that needs collaboration and guidance. Many times I found that customers don’t really write about what we really care in their first few iterations — they may get too narrow-focused on a specific feature; or they don’t explain well what their previous pain points were; or they don’t demonstrate what the amazing outcomes are after adopting our technology.
Third, writing an attractive customer story requires deep understanding of the vertical field your product is in, and extensive knowledge of your product. You can’t just hire someone as advocate and ask for a customer success story within a week or a month.
Of course there are still many best practices, and I’m just writing some simple but crucial thoughts now.
