Customer stories

So even though a PeerPaper is like a white paper, anyone reading it can relate and see themselves traversing the customer journey. So as a white paper it became so much more powerful because it had actual customer quotes that could link to reviews; and it provided so much more credibility as it isn’t the perspective of a product or marketing team, but rather real users of the product.

They work cross functionally in our organization, not just with us specifically. Other review sites don’t do that.

The reason we chose PeerSpot, primarily, is the long form review, something very difficult to find with other review sites. But also, as a marketing organization, when you’re getting 2,000 words per review, you’re getting not just reviews, but poweful customer stories.

Thanks to PeerSpot, we have customers share, in their own words and in an authentic way, what they think about Cisco and Cisco Secure products. The customer voice is very important to Cisco.

I can put a paragraph about my product on ChatGPT and expand it to 3,000 words if I want to; but anyone can do that, right? As we go forward in this new frontier of content, even white papers will lose their usefulness because anyone can create that now. What is difficult for an AI bot to create is user-generated content. We will trust a friend or peer above anything else – the practitioner perspective makes the content trustworthy.

As product marketers, it is our job to share narratives of our product champions. Case studies residing on a company’s website naturally are expected to position products in a favorable light, but on review sites you have an independent source and view. So it’s our job to work with review sites to ensure advocates have a voice on this type of platform.

We use PeerPapers for late stage, middle- or bottom-of-the-tunnel assets when we tell someone, hey, you’re interested and this is how you go about implementing it. And here are real users who have done it, sharing their experiences.

Content is everything in my world. Every time I’m getting a review and this review is talking about, for example, ROI or talking about our solution against another competitor, it’s gold to me.

Before moving forward with PeerSpot, we evaluated G2, the entire Gartner Digital markets arm, which includes GetApp, Capterra, et cetera, and then, Gartner peer insights.

We noticed when there is a customer quote coming from PeerSpot on our free trial page, we have a 36% higher conversion rate compared to unsourced quotes. So it really helps to be recognized as a trusted vendor.

In marketing organizations there has to be a sense of accountability; measuring the impact of content is important. We use our PeerSpot vendor dashboard to get insight into who looks at our information and more importantly, who and what they compare us against – we had a blindsight to that until working with PeerSpot. We then use the PeerPaper as a gated asset to help the demand generation team with leads and we can easily then track pipeline influenced and created.

At events… we collected more impressions in two days than we could in two months online.