Rancher Labs
Customer Story Overhaul

Customer Stories for Rancher Labs

ABOUT RANCHER LABS

Rancher Labs delivers open source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. With 30,000 active users and greater than 100 million downloads, their flagship product, Rancher, is the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform.

THE PROCESS

Rancher already had a small number of customer stories written and published; however, the format was not conducive for online reading or for the sales team to share with their prospects. Additionally, the customer story designs were not on brand, and the customer information was out of date and inconsistent. Rancher needed to:

  • Update customer stories copy with up to date and consistent copy
  • Redesign story design to showcase the current brand
  • Create a responsive design 
  • Ensure stories are easy to share with sales and prospects
  • Establish a pipeline calendar of stories to publish over nine months
  • Formulate a reporting structure to understand page views and website sessions
  • Understand how customer stories impact sales funnel velocity

We began the overhaul by taking an audit of all the published stories and assessed what was in draft format. This examination allowed us to prioritize initiatives and to create an improvement plan. From there, we worked with the executive and sales team to identify a list of customers and users we could ask for interviews. We built the list by industry, feature use cases, and role/title. (TIP: Go big with adding recipients to the list because there will be a percentage of recipients that will not want to participant and a percentage of stories that will not make it through the approval process).

Next, we formulated a plan for how we were going to lead the interviews, the internal writing process and editing, the external approval process, the hand-off to designer and front-end developer, and the distribution steps for delivery, publishing, and usage. The process steps went into Asana and set up similar to this content marketing funnel

The most time-consuming initiatives were getting the story approved by the customer and finalizing the design and development process. By creating a systematic customer story process, we could work several stories at a time and launch the copy at a steady cadence

BIG WINS

  • Delivered nine new customer stories within two months
  • Created net new sales assets to assist with sales funnel velocity
  • Provided unique SEO keyword opportunity for search 
  • Increased website traffic by 12%+ over 45 day

CUSTOMER STORY STRATEGY TEMPLATE

Use this customer story strategy and content planning template to kick start or improve your customer story process. This template provides you with the best interview questions, as well as the format for writing and launching your stories.

By Michelle Urban

Michelle Urban is the founder of Marketing 261, a digital agency for startups. With a hands-on, get-it-done attitude, she and her team focus on executing measurable plans to get real results. For over 15 years, she’s built scalable marketing programs for demand creation, lead generation, customer advocacy, and engagement. She’s also a wanna-be writer and weekend windsurfer who occasionally binge-watches Netflix. Ask her about the time she danced with Oprah and Beyoncé on live television.