Reference Success | Boulder Logic

In this economic downturn our budgets are shrinking and we are all trying to stretch each dollar. It seems that all this really takes is a little creativity, a few hours, and a very small budget. Today’s post is written by Anika Lehde of Projectline. Anika gives us some really simple (and inexpensive!) ideas on how to get the most bang for our B2B marketing buck.  Enjoy!

Think Small

The bad news is that marketing budgets are tight. Surprise. The good news is that if you have a great product, you still have your most influential sales and marketing crew: your happy customers.

You don’t have to delay or shrink your customer reference and testimonial program because you can’t afford $30k videos, or a collection of expensive deep-dive analyst papers. Even in the business-to-business world, you can let your customers tell their story naturally and unproduced. You’ll end up with genuine messages for a fraction of the cost. Here are some examples of small formats with big impact:

Handheld Videos: Send your customers a Flip camera or other small camera with a list of questions, and ask them to film their offices and interview their employees. They can send you the footage on a memory stick, and keep the camera as a “Thank You” gift. Then you only need to edit the pieces into a 1 minute snippet and publish both to your external site and your internal reference database. Be sure to publish in a format that one can easily pass along. Ask your customer to publish it on their site too. Make it a fun storytelling event.

Solo Quotes: Create a simple place on your website to allow customers to write reviews of your products and services or use a tool like TechValidate. You can take the best quotes and integrate them into your marketing content repository, internal reference database, and CRM database. Then share these quotes via Twitter, Facebook, customer communities, direct mail, and other targeted locations unique to your audience. Be sure to package your quotes in an easily shared format. Some of the strongest quotes submitted by your customers can easily segue into more formal case studies.

Phone Audio: If you are going to interview your customers for case studies, splurge for a high quality recorder to record phone interviews. Then have your customer approve 3 or 4 audio quotes per interview. You can integrate these into online documents, presentations, community sites, your reference database, and podcasts and radio content, all for much less than sending a high-end production team to record onsite. The quality of the sound recording over the phone will add to the authenticity of the content. Hire a local photographer to take a few professional photos of your interviewees to accompany the audio quotes and bring the story to life. Just make sure to keep it short. 3-4 sentences max.

Each of the items above will cost less than $1000 in productions costs, and if you already have a reference program in place, about 10 extra hours of time devoted to the project each week. This relatively small investment can produce dozens or even hundreds of unique pieces of customer evidence required to sell in this economic environment, and add serious heft to your word-of-mouth marketing and corporate reputation efforts.

About Projectline
Anika Lehde is one of the principals at Projectline Services, Inc.  Founded in 2003, Projectline is a global consulting firm dedicated to helping clients expand customer relationships and get the insights needed to make operations efficient and marketing effective. Through our expertise in Customer Engagement, Business Intelligence, and Marketing and Consulting Services, we connect customers—to our clients’ technology, to their marketing efforts, and to each other. We also connect information, bringing together comprehensive data and deep industry knowledge to deliver actionable insights that help drive technology adoption. Each of our consultants has the talent to deliver effective (and measurable) results and the commitment to share wholeheartedly in clients’ missions.