On this episode, I was joined by Emily Amos, Founder of Uplift Content, a boutique B2B SaaS content creation studio. She came on the show to share her favorite insights from Uplift’s recent 2023 SaaS case study report, which surveyed over 100 marketers to learn how they’re utilizing case studies. We chat about how companies are measuring the success of their case studies, tips for making the most of your customer interviews and pulling the best metrics, and the essential ingredients that every case study needs to have. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Emily. 

Margot Leong: Hey Emily, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. 

Emily Amos: Thank you for having me, Margot. I’m really excited. 

Margot Leong: Could you just tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in your current role running Uplift Content? 

Emily Amos: As you mentioned, I’m the founder and CEO of Uplift Content. We are a content marketing agency that works solely with B2B SaaS companies, and we write case studies, eBooks, and blog posts for them.

So we have quite a narrow focus which allows us to be really specialized, which I think sets us apart. And how I got here, I studied linguistics at university and I loved it, but it’s one of those degrees that’s really interesting, but doesn’t necessarily lead to an obvious job at the end. From there I became an ESL teacher, so teaching English as a second language or as a foreign language. But I got to a point where I was frustrated with the lack of control I had over my career. It was time to do something different. 

And my parents had been self-employed, they owned a pewter company, so they made jewelry and vases and picture frames out of pewter. I had always said as a kid, I’m never gonna be self-employed, because it takes over your life and you never stop thinking about it. You never stop talking about it.

But of course, after having taught for six years, it looked like something I wanted to do. I wanted to be self-employed. I wanted that control. I knew I could write. So I became a freelance writer and it was really hard. It was really hard to find customers. I had no experience. But through persistence, I managed to build a really good, strong freelance writing career. So I did that for 10 years and then at a certain point about five years ago, I said, you know what? I don’t want my whole income and career based on whether my fingers are moving on the keyboard.

As a one person freelancer, if you’re not creating content, you’re not making money, you’re not paying for your mortgage. And at that point I was ready to change the business model and bring on a team to support me so that I could actually shift towards some other things. I like writing, but I don’t love it.

What I love is running a business and by shifting the business model and creating Uplift Content, I was able to rely on people who love writing to do the writing, and I could pursue running a business. And so that’s where we are today. 

Margot Leong: Currently you’re working solely with B2B SaaS companies. How did you end up focusing on these types of companies? 

Emily Amos: That’s a great question. When I was a solo freelancer, all of my customers were in my city. I live in Nova Scotia, which is a very small province on the east coast of Canada. My city is approximately a hundred thousand people, so very small. And I would say all of my business, for those 10 years, was in my city. I worked with any company that required content for their website. During that time, I networked and I knew a lot of people in my city and one person in particular was doing business with a lot of companies in San Francisco, a lot of tech companies.

And someone that he knew in San Francisco reached out to him to say, we’re looking for a writer for our case studies. Do you happen to know anyone? And so my contact here connected me with this person in San Francisco. They ended up hiring me which was wonderful and amazing and we actually still work with them. Once we got that first customer, it was the light bulb moment for me to say, okay, you know what?

I have one B2B SaaS company. If I have one, I can get two. And if I have two, I can get four. And on and on it goes. And I think part of that entrepreneurial piece is that I just have confidence in my abilities. I might not know the answer, but I know that I can get there eventually with some perseverance and some hard work.

Margot Leong: I am really excited to dive into the main topic for today, which is this report that I know that you and your team spent a lot of time on, the 2023 SaaS Case Studies, Trends and Insights Report that you guys put together. Who did you interview for it and the breakdown of roles, the types of companies. Yeah. Give us that high level understanding. 

Emily Amos: So this is our second annual case study report. We did one last year. As with everything, I think in a career journey or an entrepreneurial journey, I feel like I’ve learned everything the hard way. and I learned a lot last year when we did our first report.

So this one was so nice because I could enjoy the process a lot more and I was able to build on a lot of the ideas from last year, so further flesh out some of those questions and things like that. So for this report, we ended up getting 123 marketers to complete our survey. The marketers needed to be on a team that was responsible for producing case studies and they also needed to work for a SaaS company. 

Margot Leong: I’m assuming that you probably saw, not just customer marketers, but probably product marketers on there as well, right?

Emily Amos: Great point. So a lot of customer marketers, advocacy professionals, and then product marketers as well. Some of them had job titles of content marketer, for example. But those would be the odd one out. There were a couple digital marketer job titles as well, but primarily in the customer marketing, customer advocacy area or the product marketing area. 

Margot Leong: What was the catalyst behind wanting to do this in the first place?

And I wonder also if your second time around if that goal, right? Or the questions you’re trying to answer, if that changed at all?

Emily Amos: So the goal was really the desire to create our own research so that we could speak with authority on the topic of case studies. And it’s interesting. If you poke around on the internet, there really isn’t research that’s been done on case studies in the way that we have. And I felt like it was a gap. We’re always writing blog posts about case studies, but we never had any actual statistics that we could include in these blog posts because it just didn’t exist. So that was the big driver really, was to have our own research so that we could speak about it and write about it with some more authority and honestly to be as helpful as possible to our own customers as well as our prospects and the people in our network and community. 

Margot Leong: That’s something that struck me right when reading through this report is that case studies are canon at this point. It’s so integral for so many companies, especially in SaaS to have the customer’s page, to have a case studies page even testimonials, right? Something from the customer as validation and something that we take to be so important, but there’s just not that much actual research on why, how, what’s most effective, how does this drive sales, right. All these things which you’re now getting much more of an insight into with doing this kind of research. 

Were there any specific takeaways or learnings that you were particularly intrigued by this year, or surprised by? I’d love to hear about that. 

Emily Amos: There’s three big takeaways for me from this report. The first one is case studies work. For the second year in a row, SaaS marketers have ranked case studies as the number one most effective marketing tactic to increase sales. And this is over and above general website content, SEO, blog posts, social media, and a few other tactics. To me, that’s really reassuring that marketers believe in the power of case studies and they value them as a tool that will speed up sales cycles and close deals faster. 

The second takeaway is that case studies are a growing priority. As I’m talking to different prospects and talking with our customers, I know that they want one case study a month or they want two case studies a month or what have you. But it’s hard to compare how that has increased over time. 

And so with the report, we were able to actually calculate that on average, SaaS companies plan to produce 17 new case studies in 2023 compared with only 12 produced in 2022. And this represents a 42% increase, which is significant. 

The third takeaway that I had is one that hits a little harder for me, and that is that only 12% of SaaS marketers are very satisfied with their case studies overall.

I don’t know why that is. That’s a follow up question for next year’s report, but my guess is, as marketers, we all want to do the very best that we can, and possibly we’re never satisfied. We have high expectations. So perhaps on a scale of one to five marketers aren’t likely to circle five, that they’re very satisfied. We definitely got a lot of threes and fours, so that’s reassuring. But it also means that there’s lots of room for improvement. 

And one of the key areas that marketers want to improve is the metrics or KPIs for the case studies. Marketers rate metrics or KPIs as a very important component for case studies, but they’re rather dissatisfied with them in their current case studies. 

Most SaaS marketers say the number one criterion to consider when deciding which stories to tell is the impact of the results. We all have a finite budget to work with our customer stories and obviously deciding which stories to tell is pretty crucial.

And the number one criterion that they’re using is the impact of the results. And so that I thought was really interesting. And another interesting point was that for SaaS marketers, the biggest challenge in producing a case study is identifying measurable results or metrics. 70% of SaaS marketers find that the biggest challenge and of course I don’t think this is surprising, but more than 75% of companies have metrics in at least half of their case studies, and 29% have them in almost all of their case studies. 

Margot Leong: You know, you’re saying that they’ve ranked case studies as the number one most effective marketing tactic to increase sales, but at the same time for them in terms of how they think about measurement of the effectiveness of that, that seems potentially a bit more murky. And them also saying a smaller amount are quote unquote “satisfied” right? Is I wonder as well is if it’s not necessarily related to the quality of the writing or the storytelling, but it’s more of that they’re not quite sure how to rank satisfaction if they’re not exactly sure what format or how exactly it then translates into it being effective. Just generally even if you think about things like brand marketing, product marketing, , right? 

It’s harder to translate storytelling into this has increased sales by this percent. This helps speed up the sales process by x percent. We all know customer validation is important, but how do you exactly know how to measure these things? That sounds like something you may dive in for the next survey. 

You actually had mentioned how people are preparing themselves to make the case study interview a success, right? To glean those metrics, that max valuable information because, you only have maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour at the most with this customer. How do you either advise other marketers in this situation to get those metrics with that amount of time that they have? Or how do you and your team think about gleaning these important metrics that is something that marketers say they would like more of in their case studies?

Emily Amos: Great question. And metrics are very challenging, and yet they are seen as extremely important. This was actually one of the questions in the survey, how do SaaS companies get their metrics for case studies? And the overwhelming answer, which I think will be pretty obvious to everyone, is 88% ask the customer during the case study interview itself. And that’s standard practice. 

Of course, during the interview, we are going to talk to the customer about the kinds of results that they saw, and we’re also going to try and help them be creative in how they can think about the results. It’s pretty common that a customer might struggle to give you hard numbers.

It’s our job as the interviewer to think outside of the box and help them circle around it and approach it in a different way so that perhaps they can provide you with a percentage increase or a percentage decrease, for example. So what I like to do personally, and this is what I encourage our team members to do as well, is when you first start working with a new customer, what kinds of metrics are you hoping to get? What does a successful customer look like? How do you talk about those results? 

And the more information we can get from our customer ahead of time, that’s the education and the background that we need so that we can be as creative as possible during the interview itself in helping draw out those numbers from the customer. Other methods, of course, would be to email the customer in advance with some of the metrics related questions so that they can start thinking about it.

And to be honest, a lot of metrics you need to get out a piece of paper and a spreadsheet and actually work out some of those numbers. They’re not just gonna be in the back of your head. So allowing them to have time to prepare that in advance can be really helpful. Sometimes people will ask for the interviewer to provide it afterwards, but it’s not my preference because my feeling is that people are motivated to do the homework ahead of the interview so that they can look professional and smart and pulled together for the interview itself.

The motivation drops significantly after the interview and it just becomes more busy work. Just yet another task on the to-do list. So if possible, prep them for success beforehand by providing those questions by email. 

And another one that I think we need to take more advantage of is getting the account managers or the customer success managers more involved. Often they have really good insights into what the metrics would be or how to get them. And so if we can involve those two people more actively, I think we will get better metrics. 

And then some software can actually calculate metrics for the customers, so if you have access to metrics on the backend, let’s use those because hey that’s an easy win right there.

Margot Leong: One of the last points about getting the CS or the account reps involved, that’s something I really encourage is, prior to having the interview scheduled, we would get on calls with the CS manager or the account manager equivalent and really try and pick their brain in advance. They’re either giving you some of those metrics ahead of time or they’re helping you back into the sort of questions that you can ask to get those answers out of the customer.

You’re sort of showing the customer that you’ve done your research ahead of time, that you are familiar with how things are running on their account. And you can also say, Hey, prior to this call, I chatted with John, your CS manager, he says hi. And also, he had mentioned this specific thing that you had really liked. Can you tell me more about that story? So having specific story beats or points are really emotive. They help people bring out that emotion in their voices, that’s amazing. 

Support is probably one of the most important things in order to keep customers loyal. I mean, that’s something I’m always poking at is if you’re talking to the CS manager or the account rep that sold the software, tell me about what that onboarding process was like with that customer. Did the customer say anything about their experience? Were there any lovely emails that you guys had exchanged? You feed that into questions then to the customer: how was your support experience with John? 

 The time that you have with the customer is super important and so anything that you can do ahead of time to get those answers and get the answers to the questions that you already have to the hardest question, which is the metrics is very important. And I found one more really good way to do that is you hit gold with your account managers or your CS people and they’re actually able to calculate a lot of that stuff for you.

And then what you can do is back into that during the interview process to get validation and say, we’re trying to understand specifically the time savings or the money savings, the benefits with the software. We talked to John ahead of time and he’d mentioned previously you were saying you spent maybe this much time on it. And now you’re spending this much time. Does that track with you? Does that sound about right? And usually they always said yeah, that sounds great.

I’d love to get into it a little bit understanding about if there’s any types of metrics that you’ve found to be particularly compelling to the people that are reading these case studies, to these prospects or understanding what metrics decision makers care about. This can inspire other people in this space to be like, oh, I didn’t think about that as a potential metric. Or maybe I can better translate these metrics that are at this level and try to bring them up to a higher level. 

I guess my own understanding having done this for a while is the top level ones seem to boil down to does it save money? Does it make money? And then another level below that, if I can’t exactly translate money, then maybe I can translate time into money. So does it save me time? That’s also very important. 

Emily Amos: You hit the nail on the head. It’s all about time and money. So it’s saving money, making money, saving time. With each customer, it’s going to be a little bit different. It depends on the business goals. 

I think what we need to really keep top of mind is, what are the overarching business strategies and business goals?

And we need to try and relate the story. Depending on who you’re interviewing, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds, but I think for the most part, most case studies, we need to take them up a few notches so that they are more about the business challenges and the business solutions and the business results.

Margot Leong: We’re talking about customer marketers or people that are creating case studies wanting more metrics, more ways to show impact of their software for their customers so that they can then show that to prospects. What are the ways that you’re seeing companies are measuring how and if their case studies are successful? 

Emily Amos: This is my favorite question, and this is something that I will talk to anybody about. So if you wanna talk about this, get in touch with me. I cannot wait to have a conversation about it. It plagues me. I think about it all the time. I don’t have the answer. I don’t think anyone has the answer, and I think that’s why it’s so interesting. 

In the survey, we found that 30% of SaaS marketers say that they don’t measure case study performance at all. They don’t because they either lack the time, the resources, or the know-how to do so. 

If we look at the rest of the respondents, they use a wide variety of tactics. The top three being landing page traffic, anecdotal feedback from sales reps and clicks from social. 

Now landing page traffic, I personally have a bit of an issue with, and the reason for that is because case studies are not SEO assets. They’re not assets that you can really optimize for search. So the only way that a case study is going to get traffic is if you’re promoting it and you might promote one case study more than you promote another case study. So the metrics aren’t really going to show you whether the case study is working, it will only show you whether your promotion of the case study is working. 

And the second one, anecdotal feedback from sales reps. I think everyone uses this to some extent. It’s always nice to hear from people that they really liked this case study and they’re using this one all the time. But it’s qualitative rather than quantitative. So it’s tricky to know how those case studies are influencing pipeline.

Clicks from social, again, it comes back to the promotion, right? So how often are you promoting a case study on social? How good is the post that promotes the case study on social? So a lot of the metrics are measuring the promotion rather than the case study itself. 

Margot Leong: You could have the best written case study about the most interesting thing in the world, right? And you could drive a ton of traffic from non-relevant sources. Basically you could be driving a lot of traffic, but you actually don’t know if that traffic converted ultimately into a sale or help speed up the sale cycle or whatnot, right? 

And so think about it a little bit similar to content. Why create any content at all? It is hard to measure. 

I think something that I’m starting to hear about a bit more is post sales or basically like onboarding surveys for individual customers. Sometimes you can do this quantitatively where you send them a survey and say, Hey, like which of these things influenced you through your purchasing experience or something, right? Or you can have someone do this qualitatively where you jump on an onboarding call with the CS person and maybe that’s like part of their call is by the way, I’ll run you through a list of potential marketing assets, right? And just let me know if any of these things like you read or that helped you along the way, right? That seems to be the closest I’m hearing about. 

Emily Amos: I love that. I love that. I don’t know how many folks or companies are doing it, but I think it’s a great idea.

Margot Leong: Yeah, absolutely. It gets harder when you go into specific case studies. But just generally that gets you one step closer and that can maybe help you think about it overall in terms of attribution versus specifically in terms of content. And that’s valuable if you’re thinking about, let’s say, like budgeting. Definitely not an exact science for sure. 

Emily Amos: Yeah. I was chatting with one of my customers the other day and their company has roughly a thousand employees, so it’s a large company. And we were chatting about how they measure the performance of their case studies and the simple answer is they don’t. And so my follow up question, how do you justify the budget for case studies if you’re trying to get more budget? How do you justify that if you don’t measure the performance of them? It was really interesting because she said essentially, we don’t have to. We don’t have to justify case studies because everyone understands how important they are, and the budget for them is so small in comparison to other marketing initiatives that it’s just never an issue. 

Margot Leong: Yeah, customer marketing is in a really interesting place where no one will dispute the value of a customer story. I’d rather hear it from another customer’s mouth than hear it from your marketing or sales team directly. Everybody talks about that, right? 

It’s important to be able to do some sort of attribution because for one, maybe they don’t fully understand it, or maybe they just keep putting customer marketing in a corner of yeah, you guys just create content and that’s it. Or you may necessarily not be as lucky to be at a company where they really see the value of it, . Being in a good place where executives understand it is great. If you’re able to figure out some attribution, do it. And then you can, get more basis for budgeting and asking for budget. 

What are you seeing in terms of case study formats? Any interesting trends that you’re seeing there? 

Emily Amos: Great question. I think the answer is going to underwhelm you. Most companies currently publish their case studies in multiple formats, but the most popular is what you would guess it would be, which is text, meaning HTML text on the company website. So that makes up 74%. Text in a PDF on the company website, that’s 73%, and then social media is the next in line at 63%. So those are pretty much what you would expect. 

Now in terms of what marketers want to try to do more of in 2023, this is where it gets interesting. Video is growing in popularity. That’s not a surprise. It is the format that most SaaS marketers said they want to do more of in 2023. So 56% of the survey respondents said that they want to do more video in 2023 and more than one third of respondents want to do more infographics. They want to do more text, video combos, and they want to do more case study compilations or case study collections.

Margot Leong: There’s the actual content itself, the written content, right? And then there’s the remixing of it or the repurposing of it in a way that’s valuable and is important for the reader. So some of this strikes me as ways of making it more, let’s say, attractive on social, right? I’m assuming text/ video combos or infographics. Those are probably more eye-catching on something like social, but at the same time, may not necessarily be exactly what someone wants to see at a different point along the funnel or depending on who the person is that’s reading that. 

Part of it sounds like there needs to be maybe some understanding of, okay, who’s the audience? How did they prefer to consume their content versus jumping on any sort of bandwagon of yeah, let’s just do more video. 

It’s also like meeting the customer where they are and understanding what are the ways that they would prefer to consume that information that then gets them to the next step or the answers that they’re looking for. And I think a lot of that has to do with are you doing audits of the customer or prospect journey? Part of that is getting that information during that onboarding survey that we talked about. 

But a lot of that is digging in, asking your reps about their experience of how these people find out about you, doing more in-depth interviews with your customers, not about the product, but how are they typically consuming information. What do they research? What do they do when they are looking into a new product online that they’re particularly interested in maybe buying? So I think a lot of that has to do really with the audience and how they consume content. And then thinking about, how do I then package that up in a way that’s particularly attractive?

I know for me personally, when it comes to video, I get a little bit disappointed if I’m on a case study page and they only just show me the video, but there’s no summary of basically the case study in addition to the video. I want to just quickly consume something. I don’t really wanna watch a video and try to glean stuff from there. To me that feels more emotion based versus answer based. But I’m curious if you have any thoughts on this as well?

Emily Amos: I’m nodding my head the whole time as we’re talking. A hundred percent. We all want to consume content in different ways at different times at different places in the journey. There’s no doubt about that. I enjoy a video from time to time, but I want to see the companion written piece so that I can scan it if I’m not prepared to sit down for three minutes and watch a video.

 I am a reader and a writer at heart, so of course I wanna be able to scan. I wanna be able to skip sections if I don’t think they’re relevant to me. And it’s really hard to do that in a video. I think that case studies are beautiful pieces of content because they are so flexible and so adaptable, and you can repurpose them in so many different ways. And so I think it is important for all of us in the case study world to keep pushing the boundaries of how we can make these assets better. How can we show them to the world in different ways? 

Margot Leong: Something that I also saw in the report that I personally was very happy to see is a huge increase in the amount of people who don’t get their case studies. Can you share a little bit about that as well? 

Emily Amos: In this year’s survey, we found that 76% of respondents say that they don’t gate any of their case studies and this was actually a sharp increase from 49% last year. So last year, essentially half of SaaS companies gated their case studies and this year, only 25% of SaaS companies are gating their case studies. So that’s a significant difference. And of course it begs the question why. 

There’s a big move towards not gating much of anything, to be honest. It’s not just case studies that fall into this debate. And while gated content can obviously produce leads and leads can be great, the downside is that the content will have a smaller audience and it will have less exposure than the ungated equivalent. And the ungated equivalent will benefit from people more openly sharing this content and of course from SEO. 

And we also know that, think about yourself. You’re probably pretty hesitant these days to hand over your email address for a piece of content. Now, of course, ironically, I am asking people to hand over their email address for this report.

But nonetheless, we do know people aren’t super keen to hand over their email addresses anymore for content, and if they are forced to, sometimes they’ll just put in a fake name or a random email address. So the quality of those leads is possibly not quite as high as you would like. So those are a few reasons why I think marketers are moving towards not gating the majority of their content. 

Margot Leong: Yeah, absolutely. I do see this trend. I think that’s been underway for a while now. Just generally increasing the goodwill of prospects towards you by not having to gate that, I think is fantastic.

Emily Amos: We don’t wanna put any barriers in front of case studies. We want people to read them freely. 

Margot Leong: We’ve been talking a lot about case studies, right? The formats and the metrics and all of that. In your opinion, what do you think are those elemental ingredients that a case study needs to have in order to be as effective as possible?

Emily Amos: So a case study needs to be a true story, and it needs to be a story about the customer. It’s not about you. I know we’ve all heard that, right? The customer needs to be the hero of the story and I can’t emphasize that enough. As much as possible, we want to be simply the conduit to allowing the customer to tell their story.

I’ve seen some debates online recently about even writing the story in the first person. So as if the customer is saying, I or we do this. We feel this was our challenge. And I think that’s something interesting to explore. Obviously we need to make sure that we are weaving the customer’s own words throughout the story. Make use of those quotes from the interview to really tie the story together.

 In terms of a couple of components that I see that aren’t used enough, I’m really surprised at how many companies aren’t including a call to action in their case study, and I think this is a really big missed opportunity. What is the action you want people to take once they’ve read your case study? Most of the time what I’m seeing is simply links to other case studies, which I think is okay. I think there needs to be a bigger, more important call to action. 

So whether it’s booking a demo or starting a free trial or hopping on a call with a salesperson, I think that this is the ideal place for a call to action like that. And too many companies are missing out on that. Add a call to action. Really think it through though. What is that action that you want people to take when they finished reading it?

As you mentioned, it’s really important also to have a nice little summary at the top. I think sometimes companies forget to do that for their scanners and I think first we need to satisfy the scan before we tell the full story. If they don’t like what they see when they scan, they’re not gonna read the full story. If they like what they see when they scan, they may read the full story. So we need to make sure we have a nice little summary. And the summary is the title, the subtitle the three big metrics and a few bullet points for the challenge, solution and result. I think that is really important. 

Something else that we don’t spend enough time on in general is images. Often we have a design and it’s pretty plain. Maybe there’s a headshot. I would say every single case study should have a headshot of the person that you’re interviewing. There should be no exceptions to that. It makes it personal, it makes it easier to relate to this person, but I think we also want to try and get photos from that person’s workspace or workplace. Anything that we can do to help put the reader in the shoes of the customer is worthwhile. And of course, by having a nice blend between text and images and video, we’re encouraging people to read through the whole thing and not tap out after 10 seconds.

Margot Leong: I don’t know how you feel about this personally, because there’s always that delicate dance between don’t make it too long or make it as long as it needs to be. But I’ve always been intrigued by this idea of can the content be valuable enough or interesting enough to where the prospect feels like it’s something that they would get useful information about solving the problem that’s not only pertinent to the product, if that makes sense.

And to the point where they would be like this is actually super helpful. And I would share this with someone outside of my organization maybe that’s having the same problem at their company. 

So something that I did previously at another company is, I said, basically in addition to the problem that you’re trying to solve, would there be any other tips that you would have if you were to run into this issue again? And then I would try to incorporate those at the very end of the case study as a way to try and see, would a prospect find this valuable even if they don’t end up using the software? Would they find it so valuable that they would share it with someone else? 

Because I feel like in that situation, you are really lifting up the brand, right? You’re really encouraging that goodwill of the brand where if they ever think about it again, they move to another company or whatever, right? This is maybe one of the first things they think about as a new software to solve a problem. I really like this concept of thinking about ways to amplify the content beyond just the direct purpose that it’s trying to serve.

Emily Amos: I love that idea. And to be honest, I hadn’t heard of it before. You have got my brain ticking, and I will probably start thinking about that and how we could incorporate that. In fact, in a way you’re bringing the educational blog content and marrying it up with the customer’s story. I think it’s brilliant. 

Margot Leong: I’m sure you see this too, is when you are interviewing the customer, so much of what they tell you is gold, but a lot of it ends up on the cutting room floor. And so it’s always like, that’s really good too, but I can’t fit this in. It doesn’t have a place.

Are there ways to take that really good stuff that normally no one would ever see that still would add value at maybe a different point in the funnel and repackage that, whether it’s tips, education, all of that. Like I would encourage people to think more out of the box in terms of how they can reuse that content.

In addition to repurposing a case study in different formats, take the raw content of the interview itself, there’s so many good gems in there that you could turn into content and then you can parse that back out to product marketing, content marketing. There’s so many ways you could use that. So I love thinking about it like that. 

Emily Amos: What would be really interesting is taking this cutting room floor scraps from three or five customers and if they’re on the same topic, merging them together to have almost a discussion in this piece of content, an educational discussion. Three to five different perspectives, for example, on the same topic. 

Margot Leong: Yeah, absolutely. And this is where if you are on the customer marketing side, having that partnership, that hand in hand, for example, with content marketing, right? Let’s say that they’re putting together an ebook on a specific topic and you happen to have a bunch of customer interviews you’re doing. If you know that’s coming up and they’re looking for content actively, you can say, Hey, what’s the question that you would like to get answered? I’m going to insert this at the end of my interview. Get a quote that we can get approved quickly and then we can throw that in. 

That’s where having those cross-functional relationships and those partnerships are so valuable, so you can do this preemptively versus after the fact, where it’s a lot harder. I love this idea of merging things together for more content and helping people be more aware of the brand as a result. 

If people want to learn more about the report and wanna connect with you, what’s the best place for them to do that? 

Emily Amos: You can find us on our website, upliftcontent.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Emily Amos and you can find our company, Uplift Content, on LinkedIn as well. And for the report, if you go to our website, you’ll find it as well. 

Margot Leong: Okay, fantastic. I will be linking to all of that in the show notes as well as the report. Emily, thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed the conversation. 

Emily Amos: Thank you for having me, Margot. This was really fun. 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of Beating The Drum. For more interviews with advocacy leaders and tips on creating customers that will sing your praises, head on over to our website, beatingthedrum.com. If you enjoyed today’s show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and don’t forget to rate and review us. If you know someone that would be a great fit for the show, I would love to hear about it. You can reach out at beatingthedrum.com. Take care, everybody.