Like any conscientious marketer, you’ve established goals for every product or service promotion, built a framework for delivery, considered the KPIs you’ll track, and pre-planned the reporting you’ll share with stakeholders. Checking those boxes takes care of what you need to deliver for your clients, but the content strategy to get there, however, relies not on what your needs are, but on the needs of the customer.
According to Deloitte and Touche research, customer-driven content is as much as 60% more effective and profitable than that not solely focused on the customer – and why not? Customers have real needs, goals, ambitions, and desires driving purchase decisions. When you help them achieve their goals, you both win and everyone feels grateful.
A question then … If you gathered your customers around your table to share what made them thankful, would a piece of your content make the cut? Likely not! Customers might, however, express gratitude for the way you – through your content – made them feel.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou
Put customer needs at the heart of your content. Customers are hungry for content that addresses their foremost needs and wants and – like a large feast, they want the main dish, side dish and all the trimmings together in one place.
Put your product or service details, benefits, unique value proposition, etc. on the table and let them put on their plate exactly what they are hungry for.
Instead of you telling them what you want them to “consume,” offer them an opportunity to help themselves – by utilizing feedback forms, surveys, social media, and segmentation. Younger generations especially want to play a crucial role in how they are marketed to!
Customers that can freely fill their plates with what they want are more likely to come back for seconds!
Evaluate your content for the unnecessary. Does your family have a running joke about cranberry relish? “It never disappears from the dish … is that last year’s relish?!” You’d never serve year-old relish, but you might be repurposing content that could be replaced with something more appetizing (apologies to cranberry lovers everywhere!). Review the past year for content that’s been repeated – subject lines, preheaders, headlines, body copy, greetings, closings – all the way down to phrasing. Consider how often a single customer or prospect has viewed those words. Like a family member after a large meal, they may have recipients feeling tired. In the upcoming second part of this post, find out how you can serve up the right strategy and be a phenomenal host.
