This article is based on the event panel Infinite Scale: How Coupa's Customer Marketing Team Creates Content & Stories, hosted by Evan Huck, Co-founder & CEO of UserEvidence, and featuring Charlotte Lilley, Head of Global Customer Marketing at Coupa. Check out the full discussion here.

As a customer marketer, I'm passionate about creating engaging content that tells our brand's story and connects with our customers.

In my years of sales and customer marketing experience and time in my current role at Coupa, I've learned the importance of content marketing, brand storytelling, and narrative design in building strong relationships with our customers.

But with the rise of content marketing and the need to stand out in a crowded digital landscape, the importance of narrative design has only grown.

In this article, I want to share my insights on how to use data, brand storytelling, and narrative design to create content that resonates with customers, builds brand loyalty, and ultimately drives business growth.

So let’s dive in!

Here’s how I’ll break it down:

  • How to create valuable content
  • How to solidify customer relationships
  • Final thoughts

How to create valuable content

Content creation is one of the most effective routes for scaling up your customer marketing function, and here I’ll explain how to optimize and maximize your resources to meet growing demand.

Before you even start to plan your storytelling and content creation you need to analyze what you already have and where the gaps are.

At Coupa when I first started, we didn’t have an exact index, so I started by using Tableau, a data visualization software, to look at what we had in terms of open opportunities, to begin prioritization.

Then I went through and looked specifically at which opportunities had high annual contract value (ACV) and their close rates, deciding to prioritize those with high ACV, pushing for quality over quantity.

Looking at the data and specific metrics like ACV can help you to determine a course of action, allowing you to build content for the opportunities that are worth it.

So now you have established your baseline, let’s begin to think about content creation.

Content marketing

Again, one of the most critical components of customer marketing is content creation, you need to create content that is both relevant and valuable to your customers.

It's no longer enough to just write about your products and services; you need to create content that answers your customers' questions and provides them with valuable insights.

At Coupa, we use a variety of content formats to engage with our customers, including case studies, blog posts, webinars, and events.

We understand that different customers have different preferences when it comes to content, so we create a range of content types to appeal to a broader audience and engage all of our customers.

Brand storytelling

Brand storytelling is about crafting a compelling narrative that communicates who we are as a company and what we stand for. It's not just about telling a story; it's about telling the right story.

At Coupa, we focus on telling stories that showcase our customers and how they're using our products and services to achieve their goals. Here we are strategic with how we go about this and we have specific people on the team working on specific segments.

This means context switching is limited and you can really hone in on each specific type of customer and personalize your work.

One of the ways we do this is by using UserEvidence to capture the stories of our customers. It’s a really handy tool for casting a wide net and seeing what stories are out there and what customers are interested in.

This then allows us to pre-qualify these stories to determine which ones are worth pursuing. This approach helps us to create a strong narrative that resonates with our customers.