How do you measure the ROI of a case study or testimonial?
It’s the dreaded line of questioning…
- “How many conversions is this case study driving?”
- “We invested $4,000 into this story—what is it doing for us?”
- “What’s the ROI from all of this customer marketing activity?”
These questions aren’t dreaded because customer stories aren’t valuable—they are!
But the truth is, sometimes the “ROI of a case study” is slippery at best, especially for marketing minds more accustomed to measuring impact in a direct, 1:1 way.
The impact of a story is more than views, clicks, likes, and shares—or even just hitting a publishing target.
But then… there’s always the frustrating reality:
The answer to this line of questioning is also a dreaded one: “It depends.”
It depends because there are *so* many ways to deploy and leverage a customer story that your means of measuring impact will vary greatly depending on what exactly you’re doing with the customer proof you have.
There are *so* many ways to deploy and leverage a customer success story, your means of measuring impact depends on what you’re doing with them.
It can be hard as a customer or product marketer to have insight into the myriad ways these stories are being deployed because activity can span teams and departments. Customer stories really play a supporting role in all of these areas.
In an effort to bring clarity and inspire you, I wanted to share some brief ideas for reporting the impact of your customer advocacy work that might help you secure more budget or at least justify leadership’s investment in what you’re doing.
0. Publishing target met
The least convincing (but still valuable) way of measuring impact is simply showing leadership that stories that did not previously exist… now do. Demonstrating that you are hitting your publishing targets (or missing them) can spur some more investment or interest from leadership in giving you the resources you need to continue to amplify your customers.
1. Influenced deals
Put simply: how many conversion paths through your site originated, touched, or ended on a customer story?
Pssst… this is a big reason to have calls to action on every single customer story you share on your site.
Our clients are often surprised at the revenue impact customer stories have.
For example: by their reporting, just 10 stories we created for HubSpot (of 150+ so far) influenced over $1,920,000 in new ARR in under 12 months. Cloudnexa routinely drives deals worth 500x their investment that they are confident customer stories had a hand in driving, influencing, or closing.
Whether through your site, sales conversations, in ads or on social media, how many deals would a success story need to influence to be worth it for you?
Measuring the ROI of a customer story in this way gives you a pretty clear tie-in to revenue generation, which leadership loves.
2. Shortened sales cycles
How much faster do your deals qualify and close with more peer evidence at your sales teams’ fingertips?
Having strong customer stories gives you more opportunities to share relevant proof across the buyer’s journey and accelerate a deal, which can *also* lower the total cost of acquisition.
To track this one, you’re going to need to connect with your sales team and…
- Ask them to benchmark current close rates and timelines without customer stories
- Work to provide them with a specific story for a specific context, and bake that into their communications intentionally over a period (e.g. 30 days, 90 days, etc.)
- Compare close rates and time-to-close over that period to see how it stacks up against the benchmark.
Even anecdotal quotes from sales can carry water when talking to leadership, so don’t be afraid to seek out some positive internal press. Being able to say “Our sales team swears by these and believes they’re seeing faster close rates—here are some quotes from team members about that” is still a compelling conversation to have.
Even anecdotal quotes from sales can carry water when talking to leadership, so don’t be afraid to seek out positive internal press.
3. Marketing campaigns enabled (and their success metrics)
Case studies can be repurposed for SO many sales and marketing initiatives, each with their own sets of KPIs and approach to measurement.
Ad campaigns:
Using case studies as either creative or landing pages in ad campaigns opens some doors to new ways of measuring impact, depending on the ad type:
- Search: Test out ad campaigns that drive leads into a story surrounding a common question, pain point, or ‘how to’ and report on clicks, engagement, downloads, conversions, assisted conversions
- Remarketing: Test out using customer stories as landing pages from remarketing campaigns and report on clicks, downloads, engagement, conversions, assisted conversions
- Social: Try out videos in your LinkedIn ad campaigns to see what engagement is like, measuring clicks, views, traffic to the site, conversions, and assisted conversions
- Banner ads/promoted posts: Use pull quotes or highlight metrics from stories in your banner ads and promoted posts, measuring the same metrics as above.
When using stories in ad campaigns, you don’t want to just measure these in isolation: benchmark and compare their success relative to other ad campaigns you are running to see how they stack up.
Organic social:
Share customer stories, quotes, and videos from both personal and business accounts, wrapping the story in key takeaways, insights, how-tos, or other compelling content. Then, measure growth in engagement, followers, click-thrus, etc. and benchmark against the typical posts from these accounts to see if this kind of storytelling drives engagement on the platforms you care about.
Cold outreach:
One of the best ways to use customer stories is to back up claims or offers in outbound outreach. Deploy customer stories as quotes, one-sheets, or videos in your outreach campaigns and measure open rates, positive response rates, booked meetings, and final sales relative to the typical campaigns you’ve run to see how they perform (or ideally outperform) the status quo.
Nurture campaigns:
Bake customer stories into email nurture campaigns or ongoing sales conversations and measure the impact on upgrades, upsells, re-engagement, or retention. This is another one where you’ll likely need to coordinate with your sales teams/CSMs, but it’s well worth it to start benchmarking and comparing the impact over time.
Onsite proof:
Team up with your copywriters, content marketers, or other internal teams and deploy customer proof throughout the site, whether adding it to key places of friction (e.g. pricing pages), as callouts in blog posts (e.g. sharing a pull quote image that pushes to a demo request/inquiry), or embedded on service/feature pages to validate those claims. If you’re able to, measure conversion and inquiry rates before and after the implementation to get a sense of the lift.
Measure conversion and inquiry rates before and after implementation to get a sense of the lift.
There are also potential benefits in capturing more market share (e.g. competitor comparison stories in search), and freeing your time for high-priority tasks with us as your case study partner.
By our count there are over 100 ways to deploy one story to drive ROI (and thus a ton of ways to measure the impact of a case study or testimonial) — so get creative!