Liz Greer
Hi, everyone! In this article, you’ll learn how to turn your customers into brand storytellers and how to leverage customer success stories to attract, engage, and convert prospects into raving fans – or in Salesforce’s case, Trailblazers. Jaz and I will be your trail guides.
My name is Liz and I'm a Customer Marketing Manager at Salesforce. I’ve been in customer marketing for three years and currently lead the team that focuses on customer storytelling for Salesforce Professional Services – our business of certified Salesforce experts that help our Trailblazers to continuously innovate and maximize their value on our platform.
Jazmyne Dodd
And I'm Jazmyne Dodd. I've been at Salesforce now for seven years – the past three within customer marketing, where I’m currently responsible for highlighting our most innovative manufacturing and automotive customers in joint marketing.
There are three stops on today's trail:
- Customer marketing at Salesforce – What it is, the value of customer storytelling, and the impact it has on our brand and our business
- The how behind the wow – How we position joint marketing journeys that excite our Trailblazers and deliver customer stories that wow our audiences
- Top tips and best practices to consider as a customer marketer
Let’s dive in.
Customer marketing at Salesforce
Liz Greer
Simply put, customer stories are the heart of Salesforce and our brand. Our customer marketing team cultivates strategic integrated marketing partnerships with our customers. We celebrate and elevate them to become world-class advocates that we call Trailblazers, who tell authentic, inspiring, and relevant customer success stories that fuel our marketing strategy and campaigns and supercharge sales.
When we talk to prospects and customers, we want to speak their language. That means instead of leading with our technology, we want them to hear about our success at NBC Universal, whose marketing teams can now reach new audiences 50% faster. We want them to see how e.l.f. Cosmetics is driving brand loyalty in a highly competitive market by deepening its digital customer experience.
We do this through the voices of our customers across all of our platforms, channels, and stages. Whether you visit our website, tune into a Salesforce class, or attend one of our world-class events, our customer stories are front and center.
Through joint marketing partnerships, our customer marketing team engages with our most innovative customers like Starbucks, Honeywell, PayPal, and AT&T. We amplify their brands and spotlight their thought leadership through opportunities that may include events, studio films, demos, PR, digital content, and even more.
We have a menu of joint marketing opportunities that our customers can order from. Each partnership is tailored to that customer's interests, preferences, and goals for telling their story, so no two are exactly alike.
What all of these options have in common is that they’re focused on getting the most juice out of our marketing squeeze. We also repurpose and maximize customer interviews and content by scaling each customer story across our platforms for the widest reach and impact.
We do all of this because we know that customer stories are our most powerful assets. According to the Salesforce B2B Content Marketing Trends Report, customer testimonials and case studies are considered the most effective content marketing tactic. And according to Wyzowl, a leading marketing video company, nine out of 10 people say they trust what a customer says about a business more than what a business says about itself.
At Salesforce, it's our customers who are the real stars of our events, our marketing, and even our sales conversations. This isn't surprising because technology marketing research firm Dimensional Research found that 90% of buyers claim that positive customer success content was influential in their purchasing decisions.
Now that you've heard all about customer marketing at Salesforce, I’ll hand it over to Jazmyne to share more about how we bring the wow to our customer stories.
