One of today’s fastest growing enterprise technology companies provides an evergreen data platform that helps organizations turn their data into intelligence. The company’s customer-first culture continues to yield impressive Net Promoter scores in the top 1% of B2B companies globally.
With so many happy customers willing to tell its compelling data platform advantage story, the company had developed a strong collection of customer reference stories. But in the face of ongoing growth, this company needed to scale its international customer reference marketing program with a strategic mindset and an eye toward quality control.
That’s when this client asked Creekside to step-in.
Key Issues:
- The international customer reference program spanned 45 countries supported by 15 agencies, reflecting a diverse spectrum of stakeholders who communicate in multiple languages.
- Balancing content consistency while retaining local style and nuances was a particular challenge.
- Processes and personnel were often quite fluid, with frequent writing agency changes and varying approaches to the creation of customer reference assets.
Top Priorities:
- Aim for a consistent quality, tone and messaging for all customer reference assets, ensuring alignment with the overall customer advocacy narrative.
- Provide support for the global sales teams’ priorities, while minimizing their involvement and carefully stewarding their existing customer relationships.
- Refine and establish scalable program processes to support overall customer advocacy program growth and international assets, in particular.
Solution:
- Applied a high-touch approach and oversight to the program. Established direct relationships with all agencies, including a regular cadence of meetings, check-ins and reporting.
- Conducted orientation sessions with all new agencies as part of the onboarding process.
- Partnered with the U.S. writing agency to provide best-practices editing and counsel.
- Developed a detailed best-practices International Customer Reference Marketing process document and template that was widely shared internally and among external stakeholders.
- Worked with global sales teams to create country and solution targets to proactively prioritize development of new customer reference assets.
Outcome:
- Notable improvement in the overall quality of international customer reference marketing assets, reflected in content clarity and brand consistency.
- Increased the volume of international customer reference assets by nearly 20%.
- Elevated C-suite awareness of customer reference marketing’s business value by communicating strong qualitative and quantitative metrics from the program’s international contributors.
- Increased and broadened the inclusion of customer reference marketing (videos, white papers, press releases, social media activities, analyst reports, speaking engagements, etc.) into the company's integrated marketing strategy and programs.