How to write user stories for more customer-focused marketing results

Borrowing from agile development in the world of inbound marketing

I’m going to throw another acronym at ya: INVEST. (Check out my last blog post on setting goals using the SMART framework for more acronym goodness). INVEST is a device used to write clear user stories that provide value to your customer. In agile software development, user stories help translate customer benefit into working software, but Marketing teams can use the same process to provide the clarity in value of marketing efforts.

Marketing teams don’t write user stories. Most likely you’re using a project management tool like Basecamp or Asana, or maybe just a notebook. These tools are great for keeping track of the work that you need to do for your company, but they don’t capture the reasons why you’re doing those things to begin with — your customer. Being customer-focused means you’re able to weave customer need into everything you do, while continuing to provide business value.

Think about your buyer persona. Do they want a general “product/service email” or do they want you to solve a problem for them? Delight them? Educate them? As marketers, we go through the trouble of creating buyer personas to help us understand our customer but once that exercise is done, we can forget that everything we do should be of their benefit. So why is it that when we break down our work for a marketing campaign or activity, we often use our inside voices? Well for one, it’s easier. Beyond that, we’re just not used to it.

Let’s re-wire our brains a bit by employing user stories to express marketing tasks in a customer-centric tone.

How do I write a user story?

The format for writing user stories bakes this customer value right into it.

As a [customer], I want to [feature/activity] so that [value/benefit].

For organizations with a clear understanding of their buyer personas, it’s easy to drop that information into this formula and use the rest to outline the what and the why of the activity. We’re trying to answer “who is your customer and what’s in it for them?”.

For those that don’t already use personas, the process of creating user stories may actually help drive some of your own discovery about your customer and help challenge your assumptions about them. If you’re completely unfamiliar with personas, I recommend this free resource from the Hubspot blog.

In software development, you’re primarily trying to create value to justify a piece of functionality you’ve yet to build. Putting the value at the center of your user story in this way makes it very clear why you’re building something. Though important, value isn’t the only thing a user story should have. In development, you might include testing requirements, architecture, success criteria, and any additional feature documentation that might be relevant. User stories should be more or less the same size, well understood by the team, and allow some degree of freedom in execution (they are not a prescription for how the work should be done).

You can apply this thinking almost universally to marketing tasks for both external and internal customers.

Employing user stories in marketing

So how do we go about translating the idea of user stories for marketing campaign tasks? We use the user story format to better understand why we’re doing the thing we’re about to do. Think of the activities involved in your next campaign and their KPIs. Make a list of those at a high level. I’ll use some of the activities from a recent small campaign I did as an example.

• Email campaign — 3 touch points, 3 audience segments
• Social posts
• Landing page with sign up form
• Paid search campaign to landing page
• Outbound sales campaign

Let’s zoom in on that first bullet. For many, email marketing is a primary channel for reaching engaged customers or potential customers. We want to get it right but often times get caught in what can be a murky and subjective world of segmentation and messaging or worse — the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality.

Let’s start by breaking down the task a little further to understand its constituent parts and goals:

Email campaign — 3 touch points with 3 audience segments

• General Newsletter list
• Potential Customers (MQLs)
• Current Customers

KPIs

• 15% open rate
• 3% click rate
• 15% of campaign conversion to purchase on customer email
• X number of visits to landing page from MQL segment

Let’s try validating our plan with a user story. Keep in mind the KPIs you’re trying to hit AND where in the buyer journey you expect your audience to be. Targeting a hard sell to a general newsletter list will not be as successful as a targeted cross-sell to customers or hard sell to qualified leads. Make sure you know what you’re trying to do, beyond your KPIs.

Here’s the template again, this time with marketing placeholders:

As a [Segment Name/ Buyer Persona] I want to [benefit of the activity] so that [value to customer].

Now let’s plug in our email campaign segments with their stage in the buyer journey:

For Current Customers that are in the DECISION stage:

• As a [Customer of product A] I want [a better deal on new products] so that [I can save money and still have access to the products I like to use].

For Potential Customers that are in the CONSIDERATION stage:

• As a [potential customer of product A] I want [to better understand how your product compares to other similar products] so that [I don’t make the wrong purchasing decision and regret it later].

For General Newsletter readers that are in the AWARENESS stage:

• As a [Newsletter Reader] I want [interesting content that’s relevant to my profession or hobby] so that [I can keep up to date on industry trends/learn more about my industry/be entertained by things I’m interested in.]

Seems like a breeze right? You’re mostly correct. Remember way back at the beginning of this when I mentioned I’d hit you with another acronym? We’re finally there.

Let’s look at a concept called INVEST.

Investing in great user stories

Writing a user story is easy. Writing a great one is not. User stories have nuance and although they should leave room for exploration, you don’t want there to be a ton of room for misinterpretation. Just like any well-thought-out marketing activity, your goals should be clear, the scope should be defined, and you should have room to experiment where needed.

Here’s a fun way to make sure your user stories are bullet proof.

• Independent — The story can stand on its own as a valuable offer to a customer.
• Negotiable — The story has some room for interpretation and experimentation to better reach the goal. (i.e.- Not having hangups about “the way we do things.”).
• Valuable — The story clearly provides value to the persona its written for (on their terms, not yours).
• Estimable — The story has a clear cost to weigh against value (cost is dollars and resources).
• Small — The story is as small as you can make it to optimize value. Optimize the amount of time and effort you put in against the value of your activities.
• Testable — The story has clear KPIs such that it allows inspection and adaptation during the campaign and for post mortem.

Using INVEST can help guide your creation of user stories to make sure you’re not only providing value to your customer with your marketing offerings, but getting the most out of the efforts you put in. User stories allow you to take an objective, customer-first look at your marketing spend (money, time, and people resources) and make better business decisions.

Now you’re ready to start using user stories to outline the value of your marketing activities! Let me know how you’ve employed user stories in the comments. Have you used them in Marketing? Sales? Agile Development? Where have they been helpful? Where were you right about the customer’s needs?