Mastering Authentic Brand Storytelling and User-Generated Content

0:00There are some people who just want to be on camera. They just they want to be publicized. Right. And there are some people who don't. Right. Part of the reason that I don't like to leave testimonials and I don't like to do this stuff is I don't I don't want to get on camera. I don't want to be in front of a bunch of stuff. But there are some people who love it. Given the option between money and fame, they choose fame. These people are gold. And so we have done campaigns where the subject line to our customers and clients, we've literally said, can I make you famous? question mark. And it's, we're looking to profile five customers, five clients that have had, you know, amazing results with this.

0:35If you have, we'd love to talk to you so that we can feature you in some of our, you know, videos that we're making on all of our channels and all this other stuff.

0:47Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your host, Ryan Dice and myself, Roland Frazier. Ryan, how are you doing today? Oh, so good. So good. I'm getting off like, you know this, we talked about this because we had to reschedule a couple of times, getting over like just a series of colds. Like that's just kind of been the theme so far of the year. It's like different kids getting sick, bringing different things home. And I think I'm over it. And then I get hit with another one. And it's not bad enough that I get any sympathy for it though. You know what I'm saying? Like I want to get like real good and proper sick.

1:20Right. Where like I get some sympathy. It's like, no, you still got to work. And you know, you still got to do all this stuff. And certainly my wife. And you do your chores, your home chores. Exactly. I mean, with four, you know, well, four kids, but one I'm off at college. Like my wife's like, suck it up, buttercup. Like we got work to do around here. So yeah. So it's, it's fun because we get to do this episode where I can hear my own voice echoing in my head because of the congestion. But other than that, I'm awesome. How about you? I'm good. I'm definitely, definitely uh managed to avoid that so uh but i don't have any young kids in the house and the minute that either of our older kids get sick i'm like you were banned you may not enter the the home perimeter yeah i can't do that with mine just yet yeah um i don't know man you got you got kids like 13 years old that's time to be out in the world doing making your own way man you know yeah just shove them out of the nest yeah fly well that that said and speaking of that this is my transition.

2:15Let's talk user generated content. Oh my gosh. What a good segue. Right? Right. Yeah. We were, uh, Ryan and I were talking there, um, there were several campaigns that had kind of caught our eye and we're kind of, you know, looking at what can we do as we go into the, you know, the quarter full on and, um, and find some additional ways to generate revenue and, um, and followers and all of those leads, all of those kinds of things. And so what were we not using? And what we're not using really as much as we would like to, even though we've done a better job than a lot of folks that we consult with, is user-generated content, which is basically just testimonials and brand stories and getting the people who you're working with who like your company to share that because that's so much more authentic.

3:05It resonates with people. They can say, hey, that person's like me. It's more credible because it's not the company telling me they're great. It's somebody that actually is a customer of the company that's telling me that they're great. And it can also kind of personalize the, take away the company-ness of your company and make it more people-like. And so there were a few campaigns that we were looking at. One was, I think it was for hosts, by hosts, where Airbnb had interviews with hosts and customers and put that out all over social media. It was very, very successful. That was a few years ago.

3:41More recently, GoPro did a GoPro Hero campaign. Starbucks had a red cup art campaign where people were drawing on the cups. and there was another one, Blue House Salmon, that got a 1 ,900 % increase in social media followers, which is pretty great. I mean, you know, was that 20X basically? In just 12 months. So we were talking about it and Ryan's like, well, we've done a whole bunch of cool things like that. Why don't we share that with you guys? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. So Ryan, you wanna talk a little bit about, add anything to what I said and then maybe talk about kind of what we're doing?

4:17Oh, I'm just glad that we're talking about it because it is such an overlooked and forgotten strategy, so much so that when we were talking about episode topics, we're like, what can we talk about? Couldn't come up, like had a hard time thinking of something. And you mentioned this, I'm like, oh yeah. Because typically when we, you know, when we're coming up with topics, it's either like what's something, you know, current that's happening out there in the world that we feel like is worth discussing. And it's like, there's 10 things. There's like, it's like, hey, I got 10 things. I got five and I've got five.

4:46And today I was like, eh? Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, our favorite is when it's like, oh, we figured something out that's cool. Like we got this cool result. There's this thing that's working now. Like that's our favorite kind of episode to do. Yes. And we actually just did that. We did get a really cool result. We had had a really big win last month at one of our companies. And it was in this area. And again, this strategy is so overlooked and it is so forgotten that I myself forgot about that. And so I was really glad when you mentioned it because, yeah, I mean, last month in one of our companies, We got 10 customer stories.

5:21And these aren't just like random kind of one-off testimonials or reviews. Like these are in depth. A client who has gotten a result agreeing to essentially be interviewed by somebody who is, you know, they're literally being filmed and it's being cut up into a customer story for us to, you know, to utilize. And we got 10 of them last month. And in a given month, we're only bringing on, call it 20 to 30 new clients. So I mean, that's pretty good. It's the first month we've ever broken into double digits. And it's not that we only all of a sudden just started doing good work. It's like we finally perfected the ask.

6:02And so I think that's kind of what I thought would be worth talking about today. Okay. Let's, um, let's start to just, um, so everybody that that's, you know, hearing or seeing this can say, see how it will help their business. So is this like, it doesn't sound like this is something that you would do if you were a coffee shop. It doesn't sound like it's something that you would do maybe if you're a, uh, an architect or you're, uh, you know, running a gas station or any of those kinds of more traditional businesses. Sounds like initially, Maybe this is just something or, you know, or let's say you're, you know, bigger, you've got, you're a cabinet manufacturer, you know, selling wholesale to wholesalers, or you're an affiliate based model.

6:46How does this help those guys? Because I think a lot of people might tune out and say, I don't think that I don't see myself doing that. Yeah, that's a good point. I think a lot of times when people think about it, when they think about these things like testimonials and reviews, they think about the Amazon review or like the Google review or something like that. And that's all they think. So if you have a consumer driven product, then you probably think about it in terms of reviews. And if you don't, then you probably don't think about this at all. Or you might think about it just kind of like as a one-off like case study or something like that.

7:20What we're talking about here is less the volume of reviews. I think that that can be important, again, especially in consumer. You want to get those five stars. You want to get your average star rating up. You want a lot of people talking, saying nice things about you. That social proof is important. But really what we're talking about here is lower in volume, but greater in quality. Like somebody saying something in a much bigger, fluid way. And the reason it applies to all those businesses you mentioned is for all the reasons that you mentioned at the start of this. It does better personalize a brand.

7:57So like if you are that coffee shop, you know, it's not just somebody to be like their coffee is good, but it's them telling a story about their life and how, you know, how this is just the ultimate start to their day. And when they don't get, you know, this coffee, how their day is totally miserable. And they're telling like the story about the one day that they didn't get their coffee. That was the worst day ever. Right. And really beginning to bring some narrative into what very often is a lifeless brand. I mean, oftentimes we're taught as marketers and as business leaders that we need to speak with more emotion, that we need to tell more stories.

8:32And the stories we tell all too often are our own stories. It's actually way more interesting if we tell stories about our customers, if we tell stories about our clients. not only do they resonate more with our audience, but they're better received because we're not always talking about us all the time. So yeah, there's literally not a business on earth that this doesn't apply to. Yeah, yeah. And just to kind of bring home what you said too, so you've got reviews out there, like trust pilot reviews that you have to pay a ridiculous amount to subscribe to or Google reviews and things like that.

9:02And then you've got testimonials, which are typically more often than not print, like a little picture of the person and a statement like a quote or something like that. And neither of those are particularly convincing. Obviously, overwhelming positive five-star reviews. People are going to look at that and go, oh, that's great. But it's not usually going to cause them to make a buying decision. It's more confirming a decision that they're trying to just not get taken advantage of and be sure they're going to get what they're bargaining for when they do business with you. I don't think it actually drives customers.

9:35Testimonials are designed to actually drive conversions, but they're very suspect because they're, they've been abused by marketers and, you know, and other people. And then, um, you have, uh, you, you have these kind of brand story type things, which I think is what we're talking about here, which are probably the next step up, like the, the bridge between the, the testimonial that I talked about and these, would you call these brand stories or, or what would you call these? Customer stories, client stories, customer stories. customer stories. They are kind of between those two would be, well, how do I tell that the testimonial is real?

10:16So what a lot of companies do is they'll snapshot social media posts by their customers saying good things about them and then put that up so you can see it was from social media. But these go much deeper. And I think these actually create, like Brian said, we know stories sell. One of the best ways to convert is to tell through something through a story and having the customer tell the story is really, really powerful. So, um, so whoever you are, even like our prime corporate services that does entity formation for people and stuff like that, you would think, and we drive that business. We don't go get customers directly.

10:53Usually we go to affiliates. So they're kind of like our wholesalers, if you will. So if you have a wholesale business or an affiliate driven business, our stories are about our affiliates because our customer that we're trying to get is an affiliate. And so if we have an affiliate tell a story about, or if we tell that story about the affiliate and how working with us was good for them, then that is powerfully convincing to other affiliates. So don't think it's just the end customer either. It is anybody who is sending you business. I just wanted to kind of clarify those couple of things. So that being said, yeah, I agree.

11:31It applies whoever you are, whether you're a professional, you know, service provider, a locksmith, an HVAC person, a, you know, coffee shop, a wholesaler, retailer, manufacturer, whatever it is, your customers should be elevated. And I was just talking to our mutual friend, John Kronstadt, J Kron, about his revenue and recognition program. And I want to say that he said that still, about 40 % of their$2 billion valued business is driven by elevating customers and recognizing them. And then they make those customers affiliates. And that was pretty powerful. That's something that he and his founding partner put into place years before the super smart, giant private equity people came in with all their professional managers and everything.

12:23And that still drives more revenue than anything else that any of them have done since then. So just like, if you need to believe what we're saying works, I mean, it really, really does. So let's assume that you guys believe that this will apply to you and that it can work. What the heck is it? How do I do it? Let's talk about that. Yeah, so I'll tell you what not to do because this is what we did in the beginning. When we would finish with, we'd get to the end of an engagement with a client, right? and we'd be like, great, we're done. This is so good. Would you be willing to do a customer story?

13:01Would you be willing to give us a testimonial? And it was always like, uh, yeah, sure. I mean, even the happy ones, right? We would just go straight in and like ask for the testimonial, ask for the customer story. And we got some, but in general, it was like, meh. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense because what you're basically doing is saying, this was really great. Now I've given you homework. Okay. So two things that we changed that made all the difference in the world. Number one, the timing of the ask. Instead of waiting until the end, we asked as soon as there was any clear, obvious, measurable exchange of value.

13:42And that's important, right? Because that's when they're most excited. So the second that somebody expresses that like, ah, I'm happy about something, right? You've got a brief glowing moment where they're kind of in that ether, where they're in that state that you can make an ask. And if you wait a day, they're going to come out of that state. They're going to be focused on something else. They're going to forget about you. Okay. So just changing the ask from the end of the engagement till, you know, right afterwards, that was the first big change. And again, you know, we're talking about more of a B2B kind of professional services type application here, but this does apply if you're, you know, a coffee shop.

14:25This does apply if you're a dentist. You know, this does apply if you're a custom cabinet maker, right? There's always some moment in the delivery where, you know, there's like an aha revelation, you know, and it comes at different times, but it's usually not at the very, very end, right? It's usually going to be some time, And yet we wait until the very end to do the ask. Don't do that ask like at the exact moment. So the timing was the first big change. The second big change that we made is we changed the nature of the ask. So instead of saying, can we have this big testimonial customer story?

15:03What we said and what we asked instead was we asked for a little ask, a tiny ask. We said, hey, that is so great. Thank you so much for that feedback. Quick question for you. from time to time, people will ask us if, and this does apply more to services. I'll give another example for consumer. From time to time, people will ask us if there's anybody that, like a reference client that we could send, that they could talk to. If they've got questions about our services, given that you've obviously had a good experience, would you be willing to just be one of those reference clients? I promise not to send you people every day or every week or anything like that.

15:43And I'll give you a heads up before I send anybody your way, but just, would you be willing to be on kind of our reference client list? Now that's a small ask because you're not, they don't have to do anything today. You're not asking for a testimonial. You're not asking for a customer story. You're not asking for a referral. Okay. You're simply asking if there'll be a reference client? Can I put your name on a list to maybe send somebody your way sometime in the future? It is an easy yes today because they won't have to do anything until maybe sometime in the future. Now, once you've got that little yes, then it's very simple to say, amazing.

16:24I'm gonna add you on there. Just we're on the same page, like I would love to do a customer story with you as well so that we can get on the same page. Like if I did send somebody to you, what you would say, And frankly, if I had a customer story, I wouldn't even have to send people your way. I could just send them your story. Now the customer story shifts from being me, us giving them work to us taking future work off their plate. Yeah, that's pretty clever. I like that. And that shift that I was thinking when you talked about asking for the reference list, I'm like, I don't want to be on your reference list.

16:59I'd rather give you a testimony. Right. But it's easy to say yes to today because it doesn't require anything. And what you're saying is I don't have anybody today. That's the important thing. You don't say, oh, there's somebody I'd love for you to talk to. Can it be in a reference list? I'm not going to say anybody to today or tomorrow. Like, I don't know. But like, ah. It's an easy yes. But then you now are going to completely remove the burden by having them do that. Changing up the ask made all the difference in the world. In more of a B2B type context, I would flip it a little bit. I'm sorry, B2C.

17:31In this case, because you're dealing with more volume, you likely, hopefully, you're just trying to get people to leave reviews. What you're looking for in these cases are the love letters. So every now and then, most of the reviews are like, great service, amazing food, love the coffee, Jan was nice, right? That's most of them. But every now and then, you get a love letter. And it's just like the long, it's paragraphs. graphs. When those happen, pay attention to those and see if you can't reach out to those folks proactively. Most review things you can respond to and, hey, thanks so much. We'd like to thank you for this kind of review.

18:11Please send me an email here. We've got a gift for you. I'd love to have you come in, buy you lunch on us or something like that. When that happens, then because they've already taken the first step, you can ask them for a more in-depth customer story that can be turned into user-generated content. The key is the timing of the ask and the extent of the ask. Nice. So if you are thinking about the people to ask and you've got, let's say, a lot of customers and there's not really like a love letter format that is currently available, should you have some tool that you put in place to capture that or indicate that like i'm thinking if you're measuring net promoter score or csat customer satisfaction if you're using something like that if somebody comes back all tens then that would seem to be indicative that they had a pretty exceptional experience so you could reach out to them um and and i'm guessing are we using any tools to gather testimonials now where that that we might be able to use to identify the love letter coming in?

19:24So yeah, it depends on the business. I mean, some businesses are using just your basic like trust pilot type review services. There's another tool called like testimonial.to that we use a little bit, not an affiliate link, you know, pre-plug. But I'll tell you, none of those have been quite as effective. We do also run NPS surveys, you know, fairly regularly. And yeah, when we get an obvious promoter, so somebody giving us a nine or a 10, And there is the software, and this is just run through our CRM, it's just run through HubSpot. It automatically, if somebody gives you a nine or a 10, and most NPS net promoter score tools will do this, will then give you an opportunity to leave a review.

20:06So if you're not doing that now, I'm asking, obviously, we know the answers to these questions we ask each other usually. But I'm asking you guys, like if you're thinking, but I don't have that right now. It's like, well, you definitely should consider having something to get feedback from your customers so that you can see when you're doing things well and when you're doing things that could be improved. So that's, you know, they're out there probably anyway on Google reviews. And so I can tell you a lot of businesses when we go consult have never looked at their reviews. Yeah. They're running their business.

20:38They're just so they don't know what people are complaining about or not complaining about. Or, you know, maybe they've got a terrible Better Business Bureau, which, you know, I have a whole agenda, a whole agenda. I have a whole, you know, opinion about that that I won't share with you guys, but you can probably guess what it is. But but like those those review things are out there already. And so if you like if you're saying, I don't know, I don't I don't know how to do this. Probably a place to start would be and it'd be difficult for you to find who they are because it's usually like, you know, RF or, you know, or RD.

21:12you know, that's out there. Um, but, or Ryan D like they're, they're not, you don't have their contact information, but it would give you the ability to see maybe things that you could improve and, and, and start generating those love letters. And then I'd say, think about putting something in that allows you to capture the customer contact information. So whether it's testimonial TOs, thank you. The one that I was thinking of, I can't ever remember the name of it. I think it's the TO at the end. Um, and there are others as well, but, um, uh, HubSpot, uh, has that functionality. Um, so if your CRM, you know, your customer relationship manager, if you're using one of those, uh, software allows you to do it, then start, start doing that.

21:56And do you have any other tips, Ryan, for, for what people might do if they're trying, if they're a little like, I just don't know where to start with gathering this. Yeah. So there are some people who just want to be on camera. They just want to be publicized, right? And there are some people who don't. Part of the reason that I don't like to leave testimonials and I don't like to do this stuff is I don't want to get on camera. I don't want to be in front of a bunch of stuff. But there are some people who love it. Given the option between money and fame, they choose fame. These people are gold.

22:27And so we have done campaigns where the subject line to our customers and clients, We literally said, can I make you famous? And it's, we're looking to profile five customers, five clients that have had amazing results with this. If you have, we'd love to talk to you so that we can feature you in some of our videos that we're making on all of our channels and all this other stuff. It's especially powerful if you're B2B because then people don't just feature themselves, but they get their companies featured as well. I know people who've been featured on like Shopify commercials and stuff like that and have generated business for it.

23:02So an email campaign, a social media campaign, or if you don't have either of those, then a sign at the cash register that says, can we make you famous? What is that about, right? So wherever you are in your sophistication level, you can do this. I guess that's my point. And what I'll tell you, though, is, you know, prior to about 60 days ago, we were frustrated because we didn't have the business that we got. We didn't have any of these. No good ones. At like events and meetings and like that, we would collect some and they were always just sort of OK. You know, we didn't have a good process around it.

23:41It was very just sort of willy nilly. And so the biggest change that we made is we started measuring it. Now on our scorecard, our account managers were held accountable to a goal of they had to generate a certain number of client stories every week. And so once that was measurable and trackable, it was how many did we get this week? None. Okay, well, that's not good because the goal is, you know, I think the goal last month was eight. And going into the last week, they only had four. And so they did a big push and wound up getting six. So beat the goal in the last week. That's great. And so measuring it is big.

24:21Incentivizing it is, you know, is important. But if you don't have any right now, yep, go back and tap the list that you have, ask them. But the best thing that you can do is just to fix it moving forward. Do the things that I talked about before. Time your ask right. You know, kind of meter, measure your ask following the process that I described. Because you just don't need that many. You know, the campaigns that you're talking about. I mean, how many customers do they really feature? Like a half a dozen maybe at most, two or three sometimes? Yeah. You just don't need that many. You don't. You don't.

25:00Okay. So let's talk about, um, before we talk about how you use them, once you've got them, um, a little bit more specifics. So somebody says, yeah, I'll do it. Uh, you've got the person, they love you. They're ready. They're committed. They've said, okay, what do you want to capture? What is the ideal thing going to look like? Is it a video? And I'll tell you, yeah. Um, the best thing that you need to do, you got to get them on video. If you can do it, you got to get them on video. And depending on your business and how you want to use it, you know, if you're like a Shopify or something like that, I mean, I know they're flying, you know, people out to them or they're flying video crews.