 Great photo by Grok. We were recently tasked with writing some marketing copy for a B2B client of ours, utilizing real-life success stories from their client files. The goal, not surprisingly, was to lure other prospects into becoming clients, too, when they read about these great successes.
This is so straightforward that it’s boring. Right? Nope. It warrants an entire article. Who wants what? Granted, we need to cloak this story in anonymity—just as we’d needed to cloak this assignment in anonymity. We couldn’t tell the world, for example, that our client’s specific client suffered from broken systems, couldn’t serve their customers, and so on. Similarly, you don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the technical side. And herein lies the gist of this story, and its lesson. Let’s get specific. For our client’s client—the one in the success story—they’d used Systems A, B, and C to do their work. They had problems with Systems A, B, and C, which our client helped them solve. So we could have been very specific, in calling out Systems A, B, and C by name, even when we never mentioned who-the-client-was, by name. That would have been accurate. It wouldn’t have gotten anyone into trouble. And, on the surface, it seemed to be the thrust of this assignment. But you’ve got to take a customer-back approach here. (Yes, you can make a drinking game out of how many times we say “customer-back approach” here at Copel Communications.) Here’s the rub: The goal here, if you really look at it, is not to explain how the client in the success story succeeded. It’s not? Nope. The goal, rather, is to tell a prospective client how they could succeed. Aha. That’s different. Which gets back to Systems A, B, and C. In this world in which our client competes, there’s a lot more than Systems A, B, and C for their clients and their prospects. There are systems which compete with Systems A, B, and C. Put it this way: You don’t want to turn off a prospect just because they’ve opted to use System D. Get it? This gets back to the marketing challenge. It’s subtle, yet important. For this assignment, we didn’t want to call out Systems A, B, and C by name… but rather by function. We wanted to create blanket terms for them, for the exact reason of not alienating a prospect who uses System D. So instead of saying “We helped our client with System A,” we said “We helped our client with their transactional reporting platform” (or whatever). This way, whether you use System A or System D for transactional reporting, you both perceive the value of what the company does. As we’d said, this is a subtle difference—the matter of just a few words here and there—but it really makes the difference between attracting the prospects you want, or having them self-select elsewhere. Remember: This distinction was not spelled out to us in our marching orders. It was incumbent on us to read between the lines, to take that customer-back approach, and do the right thing by our client. Need help with a similar under-the-radar marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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