How are you going to address the needs you have found in your customers? The answer is more complex than “create content that answers questions”, though that is certainly a big part of it.
What kind of content are they going to find most valuable? Are they blog readers? FAQ searchers? Video watchers? Podcast listeners? Social media chatters? A mix of multiple (the most likely scenario)?
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
You want to go to your customers where they are and give them what they want, how they want it. Any customer-driven strategy is going to take this approach.
Here are a few tips!
Make It Easy To Find Content
Once you have created your content, you need to make it easy for your customers to find that information. That includes the content you already have published that might go towards providing for those needs.
Try analyzing all of your content / planned content, then making it searchable and listable based off of the struggle your customer is facing. This gives them a direct line of sight into the content that they want to find.
Put it in places they are also going to find more accessible. For example, having a video embedded in your site is fine. But having it on a YouTube channel as well is going to make it easier because the customer can look there, or even subscribe to get all of your videos.
Try looking at your customers’ puzzles when it comes to your brand. Are there brand-related queries you can address? Or are there keywords that can signal of a problem you can solve? Look at Google Suggest results that show which phrases users tend to type into a search box after your brand name. Is there anything you see missing on your site? Or os there anything that you need more accessible on your site?
Discover The Best Way(s) To Present Your Content
Now you should know what content you are providing, why and where you hope it takes you. All of this should have been decided based off of the customer’s needs and experiences, making it a very customer centric plan. But what about how you provide that content?
The media you choose is very important, because different people react to different forms and styles. What does your audience prefer? Blogs? Infographics? Social media savvy posts? Videos? Podcasts?
Chances are the answer will be a combination of everything above, so be careful with your selections and how you implement your publishing schedule to take advantage of them all. Use Cyfe for monitoring multiple content assets on social media and beyond. This will give you a clutter-free way to monitor what’s a preferable format for your customers:
Become The Customer
One way to help you as you move forward from here is to become the customer. This process can help you in two primary ways: on one hand it gives you a chance to see everything from the side of the customer and so get a better view of what they need, on the other it gives you a clear view of the coming journey, which is going to help you as you move into the next step.
As marketers we can often see things based only on data and demographics, what the charts tell us. But that doesn’t show us the actual experience the customer is going through, which could be completely antithetical to what the data might suggest.
Try being the customer so you can be a better promoter. Once your content is made it is critical that it is easy to access. So many FAQ sections, for instance, are clunky, hard to navigate, don’t provide relevant search results and are too generic. Blog posts and video searches are often the same.
Make your content easy to find, search, see and use. Otherwise what good is it doing the customer?
An example from my own life happened just the other day. I was trying to find out how to access a feature on my bank’s website. Their official FAW had a video to show me… great! Until I watched it and realized it was a year out of date, based on the design before they re-did the website. It was a useless video and I didn’t get what I needed. Had their content team known that they could have fixed it.
Additionally, use (local and business) directories like DirJournal to discover related companies and try to become their actual customer. This will give you lots of ideas as to how others organize their knowledge bases, guides and FAQs to help customers at every step of their journeys:
Make Customers’ Needs Your #1 Focus!
Customer-centric content should be your number one goal in 2018. The process of creating it isn’t nearly as difficult as you may be fearing, it is just important to shift your focus from data to direct customer needs.
Have a tip for making your content more customer-centric? Let us know in the comments!
