Get off the kick that your customers are going to be “Wowed” by what you are doing of offering. It’s safe to say they will not. There is too much stuff out there and we are dodging it all day like spaceships and asteroids. Understand what your customers want, need and most importantly, are looking for. Answer their questions, sometimes before they even know they have them.
1. Imaginary Customers: Pretend to be your ideal customers, identify their preferences for content discovery, consumption and sharing. What is their pain, what situations are they in that they need to buy your solution? Use those answers as guides for creating a Social & Content Marketing strategy.
2. Audit your existing content: Reconcile it with the information customers really need to: buy, use & recommend your products/services.
3. Tap into Customer Service and Sales: Participate in discussions with customers to find out what the most common questions are. Develop a creative strategy to answer those questions with content and media online, on an ongoing basis. Make a topic matrix in your editorial plan that will help you manage planned creation, optimization, promotion and measurement of this customer-centric content.
4. Use real-time and social media monitoring tools: Identify questions being asked about topics of interest for your target audience and products/services mix. Something as simple as a persistent query on search.twitter.com can reveal topics to cover in your content plan as well as engagement opportunities. Quora and Facebook are also useful in this way.
5. Crowd-source content from active customers and fans. Present challenges or requests for opinion and information on relevant topics from your social networks and customers to create new content shared with the community. Topics could range from the reasons why the category of products/services is important to innovative uses by current customers. Recognize contributions publicly to reinforce participation and sharing behaviors. Find ways for fans to participate in a way that meets their needs and in doing so, help meet your brand’s objectives.
There are many other angles you can take once the door of thinking like a customer is opened. There’s a time and place for brands to decide what information is best for customers but the days of using that egocentric approach as the driver for content is over. Tap into what’s important to your customers, build trust and engage them to create a more sustainable approach to content marketing success.
We have many, many smart marketers reading this blog, so how have you helped your organization think about content with more empathy towards customer needs? Are there creative examples you can share?
