Bite-sized customer success stories

Marketing Powerup #40: Joel Kletkke, Founder of Case Study Buddy, shares how he creates snackable customer success stories that sell.

Ramli John

Jul 23, 2023

Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! ⭐️

Today's powerups include:

26 ways to grow your newsletter.
The fastest way to make social media content.
Joel Kletkke’s snackable customer success story framework.

Ready? Let's go! ⭐️

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⭐️ Snackable Customer Success Story Framework

Customer success stories are integral to a company's growth narrative. Yet, their creation process involves more than just scripting success.

Joel Kletkke, an expert in creating compelling narratives and founder of Case Study Buddy, shares his process for creating snackable customer success stories.

Step 1: Gather context for the customer success story. 🔎

A powerful customer success story begins with setting clear expectations and gathering context. Preparing a comprehensive brief, armed with as much context as available, forms the backbone of the story.

"We don't want to get on a call with a client until we have as much context, reasonably as is available for their story. What does a win look like? What KPIs should we be looking at? What coverage gap does this story fit in? Nobody should take the same ten questions, go to every customer you have, and hope you get these wonderful, incredible stories."

Step 2: Get multiple perspectives of the story. 📚

The power of a story increases manifold when it's told from different perspectives. Rather than packing all the perspectives in one story, creating separate narratives for different roles could make the stories more appealing.

For B2B companies with multiple stakeholders in the buying process, making sure you get multiple perspectives is critical because the concerns of a CTO might be different from those of a CMO or CFO.

"If you have the ability to talk to multiple points of contact who are familiar with the story, you don't have to wedge them all into one piece. You can turn that into different pieces of collateral with different emphasis on different aspects of the relationship that help in increasingly more complex B2B buying decisions."

Step 3: Add tension and stakes. 🥊

The most compelling stories revolve around building tension and increasing the stakes. The success story should go beyond just a metric; it should encapsulate the impact it had on the individuals involved and the changes it brought to their world.

"Great customer success stories should have some element of tension and stakes in the story. There has to be some consequence for getting it wrong if no action was taken, something negative looming in the background that needed to be attended to."

Step 4: Tie everything together with a narrative. 🎀

An effective customer success story must have a narrative that takes the audience on a journey—a clear before, during, and after trajectory that amplifies the impact of the solution.

"There has to be a clear narrative, a clear thread to pull, because a collection of nice quotes and bullet points is not a customer success stories. It's not a story at all. It's accolades, it's details."

Step 5: Repurpose the content. 🔪

Most businesses make the mistake of narrating their customer success stories once and moving on. They forget to repurpose and maximize their impact across various channels.

"The biggest mistakes with case studies I see is that companies don't do anything with it, they don't repurpose it, they don't take it to different channels, they don't leverage it. They just kind of put it in a resources section or an index of content and hope that it's passively going to solve all of their problems. And that is such a missed opportunity."

It's essential to cater to your audience's appetite for information. Kletkke proposes a framework - "nibble, bite, snack, meal,” which reflects the readiness of leads, prospects, and clients to absorb the content. By creating content at varying depths, you meet your audience where they are and satisfy their current level of need.

Free powerups cheatsheet 🔖

I’ve created a powerups cheatsheet exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply Joel Kletkke's snackable customer success story method.

You can download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).

In the latest Marketing Powerups episode, Joel further explains his snackable customer success story framework.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.

✨ Mini powerups

Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.

📝 Creasquare (tool): Create content, generate captions, and schedule content for Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms using AI.

🔎 Ahrefs Webmaster Tool (sponsored): This is the only free SEO tool that can go through up to 5,000 of your web pages and find 140 common SEO issues that could cost you valuable traffic.

📈 Why growing an audience feels slow (thread): Jay Clouse, Founder of Creator Science, shares why growing an audience on a platform feels slow. The gist: you’re doing better than you think because success compounds!

💌 26 ways to grow your newsletter (article): Matt McGreary has worked with Sahil Bloom, Codie Sanchez, and The GIST to grow their newsletter lists. He wrote down his favorite tactics for growing newsletters.

If you enjoyed this, you’d love this Marketing Powerups issue from the archives featuring Eddie Shleyner's copywriting process for VeryGoodCopy, which is now over 55k email subscribers and growing: