Last week Vinay Bhagat, Founder & CEO of TrustRadius, spoke with  Sonya Hansen, Director of Demand Generation at Matillion, about how Matillion has quickly pivoted their strategic and tactical plans in light of current events. The webinar  (which you can watch here)  included an in-depth look into how any business can incorporate customer voice into their demand gen initiatives, including the Do’s and Don’ts of the process.

“Be agile enough to message to buyers where they are. It’s nothing new, it’s just good marketing.”

Here are the top 5 ways you can power demand gen with customer voice, from Sonya herself: 

#1 Feature customers at multiple points in the buyer’s journey

Customer voice should be featured throughout the buyer’s journey. It helps buyers connect to your company, build a consistent story, and feel more confident—especially in times of stress or uncertainty.

With TrustRadius, Demand Gen professionals can source new leads and attribute influence to leads already in the pipeline. Product Marketing and Customer Marketing professionals are able to spread their message in their customers’ words, generating testimonials, customer stories, and references to enable sales. 

Marketers can drive awareness by sharing how their product is different, winning a greater share of voice in the market. Those insights then can be circulated back through your marketing organization and leadership, informing decisions about individual accounts and overall business strategy.

#2 Lift conversion and lower your marketing costs by adding review quotes to landing pages

Now that over 50% of buyers use reviews to help make a technology purchase, providing your buyers with the social proof they’re looking for plays a critical role in increasing conversion.

Adding review quotes to your landing pages will substantially lift conversion and drive down cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL). On average, TrustRadius customers see a 35% lift from adding social proof on their landing pages. One easy way to do this is through dynamic review syndication.

Embedding reviews into your landing pages provides the trust cue you need to increase your conversion rates. Buyers are looking for evidence that your product can deliver on its promises. By adding quotes sourced from TrustRadius reviews to their landing pages, Matillion was able to increase their conversion rate by 70%. This lowered their cost per demo request from $750 to $250, which is huge for their specialized audience. 

#3 Target buyers who are already evaluating you with Category Audience Targeting

Targeting buyers who are already evaluating you with search and display ads is a strong way to optimize your ad spend. Targeting in-market buyers who are evaluating your competitors, but not you, is incredibly powerful as well—you have the opportunity to change the game by getting into their consideration set. You’ll see increased CTR and decreased cost per action. When a buyer reads reviews or runs comparisons on TrustRadius, you know they’re in-market. Those individuals can be added to your audience segments in your ad platforms through Category Audience Targeting. The more traffic you drive to your TrustRadius pages, the larger your audience is for retargeting efforts.

#4 Recruit customer advocates

You can recruit customer advocates through the TrustRadius platform. Customer advocates can speak on your behalf at events, webinars, analyst calls, or even be featured in case studies.

When one of your customers writes a review on TrustRadius, we give them the option to raise their hand to become a reference for you. At Matillion, they’ve moved from 66% live events to 100% virtual events in the past two months.

Digital events are a great opportunity to leverage your customer advocates, now that connecting people from all over the world digitally is a lot more common. Hosting a webinar or virtual round-table discussion with your customer will ensure there’s plenty to talk about at the event, including tips and ideas that will be useful for other practitioners.

#5 Use reviews throughout your funnel–including for Sales

Reviews should be leveraged to drive demand throughout your sales and marketing funnels. Beyond marketing campaign optimization, there are some great ways to enable your sales teams with intent data, references, and content from review sites to help them succeed. 

For example, you can build and target audiences of prospects who are looking at products in your category, so that BDRs and AEs can  get ahead of your competition.

Using TrustRadius data, you can enable account owners to contact reference candidates, matching references by industry, company size, and use case. 

Matillion has seen great success incorporating reviewer quotes into their new sales toolkit – they now have access to 267 tagged quotes for sales and marketing use. One way to make it easy for sales to find social proof is by arming them with the TrustRadius TrustQuotes Chrome Extension. It allows reps to grab marketing-approved customer quotes and pop them into any browser-based application, such as email, Google Slides, Outreach, Salesloft, etc.

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Driving Demand with Reviews eBook

Forget “marketing as usual.” Put the trusted voice of your customers in buyers’ paths. 

In this eBook, we show you how to use TrustRadius reviews to source and influence your pipeline. Read now!