Toronto-based B2B marketing firm Influitive wants to help your customers write testimonials for you.
Last week the company released Upshot, a new content generation tool/online publishing platform that leverages Influitive’s multi-channel online presence and deep pool of writing, editing, and advocate marketing expertise to help companies find satisfied customers willing to advocate for their product or service, and enlist them to write compelling, authentic stories about their experiences.
“Customer stories are the best content a company can produce, but the corporate case studies put out by companies today are missing a crucial component — the customer voice,” Influitive CEO Mark Organ wrote in a Jan. 19 blog post. “[They’re] bland, stale, formulaic. They don’t inspire or draw the reader in. They’re just part of the broken content marketing machine that has your buyers drowning in mediocre, self-serving content that only 9 per cent of them trust.”
With Upshot, Organ wrote, marketers can take advantage of what they have always known to be a great idea in theory – happy customers telling their stories about using a product – and apply a professional touch.
“Unfortunately for most marketers, getting advocates to produce high-quality content on a regular basis is actually pretty challenging,” he wrote. “Your advocates are not professional storytellers. They’re IT experts, salespeople, educators, administrators, or accountants,” and so until now, “it has been easier for everyone if marketing teams just keep pumping out those boring, corporate case studies.”
Upshot appears to automate the process, helping marketers identify the satisfied users most likely to become brand advocates, then using professionals behind the scenes to help them tell their stories. Marketers can then track the story’s progress and approve the finished product before it’s published, with Influitive promising a conception to completion period of approximately two weeks.
To illustrate Upshot’s effectiveness, Influitive accompanied the tool’s release with a series of 25 stories on its blog-like landing page, which thus far includes such testimonials as a freelance photographer attributing part of her success to cloud-based accounting platform Freshbooks; a business information systems director explaining why he chose cloud-based solutions provider BMC Software Inc. as an IT partner over IBM Corp.; and, of course, a product marketing manager explaining how he converted $1000 to $1 million using the Influitive platform.
In addition to releasing Upshot on Jan. 19, Influitive announced significant improvements to its flagship platform, AdvocateHub, including:
- Peer-to-peer messaging and personalized profiles;
- New workflow management and reporting enhancements, which make it easier to scale programs to thousands of advocates;
- Comparative benchmark reporting which measures how certain communities are performing compared to others on the platform;
- Email deliverability reports, which measure open and click rates.
“As companies like yours and mine push inbound marketing to the extreme and its effectiveness continues to decrease, user-generated content becomes the key to rising above the noise,” Organ wrote. “In 2017, the messenger is the message. Now, with Upshot, you can get more of your messengers telling their unique, authentic stories everywhere.”
For more information, check out the blog post announcing Upshot here.