Evidencing advocacy and extending reach – a Burning Pine case study
When you do a great job for a customer, the story needs to be more than three bullets on a PowerPoint slide. Numbers are important but narrative is key to persuasion. As psychologist and behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman said,
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
Building a library of stories
Our client was a leading global provider of cloud services. Its UK marketing director and PR lead shared a belief in the power of customer evidence that delivered persuasive stories. They engaged Burning Pine to create a body of evidence that reached across geography, vertical, segment and use-case.
Initially, the programme was focused on UK customers but soon expanded, based on results, to include customers in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. In each case, Burning Pine combined desk research, briefing interviews and end-customer interviews to create the case study.
The result was a rich library of stories where individuals described, in their own words, the challenges they resolved using our client’s technology – authentic, credible, persuasive.
Evidencing advocacy
In total, Burning Pine produced one third (32%) of the client’s globally published stories.
Those stories generated over ¾ (78%) of all social shares for the client’s global stories, demonstrating increased customer advocacy and greater reach.
In fact, the client’s six most shared stories were written by Burning Pine.
- 1/3 of client’s stories globally
- 3/4 of all social shares
- Top 6 most-shared stories
Feeding future content
The sharing of stories by the end-customer and their teams helped drive mind-share and reach. But, the library of authentic and engaging stories also fed sales engagements and additional, more in-depth, content.
Sales teams shared and summarised relevant stories in their proposals.
Burning Pine also created ebooks, blog posts and other long-form content that focused on specific technologies or verticals. Leveraging the library of stories each article was underpinned and underlined by real-world examples, solid data points and end-customer quotes that helped demonstrate the breadth and depth of our client’s expertise.
In this way, the client’s investment in customer evidence not only increased customer advocacy but also improved its power to persuade across different content and channels.
“Burning Pine has a natural ability to glean strong stories from customers and can quickly get under the skin of a business.”
– Client PR Director
