Customer success stories are rapidly becoming a part and parcel of content marketing on the Internet and advertising in the conventional media.

When people read about your product or service, they not just looking for descriptions or a list of features or a list of problems they can solve (although it is important to know what problems they can solve). They are also looking for real-world examples of how your product or service has solved people’s problems. When you draw real-life examples they become customer success stories.

In terms of content marketing, what’s the difference between customer success stories and testimonials?

Every website has had testimonials. These small paragraphs – mostly a couple of sentences – in which people tell how great your product or service is and why they would recommend the same to others. Testimonials are good. They are quite reassuring. Every website should have them. Testimonials are also an integral part of your content marketing strategy. So gather as many as possible.

Customer success stories on the other hand are more like your case studies. I will give you my example – how my content writing services transformed someone’s business (not using real names and products, but an actual parallel story exists).

There is this customer, John who, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t sell designer napkins from his website. He had good search engine rankings and he had lots of content, but somehow, people weren’t buying from him. He had spent lots of money on advertising and promotion. He had also spent lots of money on building the inventory of designer napkins. He was almost on the verge of financial ruin. He would soon have to shut down his website (or abandon it) and seek employment.

Then one day he came across Credible Content. While going through different webpages and blog posts, he realized that the main problem with his website was his content. What he had written on his own wasn’t very convincing. He thought that he was a good writer and he could communicate the benefits of using designer napkins easily, but since he had assumed that he could write well and he had assumed that he was able to communicate sufficiently, he never thought about that aspect. He couldn’t figure out why people were not buying, but he never thought that it was a content that was the problem, especially when he had gotten good search engine rankings. He didn’t realise that rankings don’t matter unless the traffic converts, unless people buy. If they are not buying, something is missing.

Since he considered himself to be a good writer, it was difficult for him to approach another content writer to write for his website. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to miss this last chance. So he wrote to me.

I did an audit of his existing content and sent him a report. He immediately hired me to revamp his content and also to add new content on an ongoing basis. He is running a profitable business these days.

OK, this is not a full-blown story, but here my intention is not to lay down exactly how I solved his problem. My intention is to present a real problem and then the real solution. This should be done through successive customer success stories.

This Hootsuite blog post elaborately explains how to gather customer success stories that you can publish on your blog or website.