Captivate Your Audience With Customer-Centric Content
Today, top marketers are putting content on their websites not just to persuade, but to engage with their customers, meeting buyers where they live and providing information that they want.
With a great experience, customers are 5X more likely to make a purchase. From visiting your website to learn about your brand, making a purchase and getting a response from customer service, to staying up to-date on with what’s going on with your business, every interaction should be seamless, fluid, and positive and friendly for the customer.
How can you put your customer front-and-center in your marketing communications? How can you ensure that your messaging is going to evoke those feelings of being included, understood, appreciated, and inspired that you want your customer to feel when they visit your site or open an email? You need to create the content that your audience wants, and they want what interests and benefits them. It’s all about them, not about you
Centering on Your Customers Instead of Your Brand
Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than those that are still driving their brand-focused strategies. In order to remain competitive today, providing value-driven content is essential. When your inbound marketing is done brilliantly, it won’t just generate more leads. It will establish lasting relationships with your buyers.
This is the gold key of marketing. Repeat customers spend 67% more than new ones, on average.
So what can you do to ensure that all your digital content resonates with your customers?
Change all your WE’s to YOUs
Don’t have a WE-WE website, full of copy like “We do this…We do that …We have…We are…
That’s self-centric, the opposite of customer-centric. More importantly, nobody believes it anymore or even cares. It’s a sure turn-off. Change all those WE’s to YOU’s and YOUR’s. Write about what your customers care about, what they worry about, what they want to learn and what they hope to achieve. How do you find that out? The old-fashioned way: Research
Know Your Buyers as Well as Your Best Friend
Get into their world. Listen, watch, observe – and dig deep. Read what your customers are saying on social media to discover pain points. Put out customer surveys when someone visits your website or makes a purchase. Read customer reviews for your business – and your competitors’. Talk to your customers at conferences and trade shows. Ask a lot of questions. Ask them what they need, what they want, what they like.
You need to get to know your buyers like an old friend, becoming able to anticipate their needs, recognize their style preferences, and understand the best ways to communicate with them. You also want to know their goals ( in relation to your brand) and what they value the most (quality, usability, customer support.)
In B2B communications you need to do this for all the people who influence your customer’s buying decisions. For example, engineers want design specs and performance data; end users care about usability and customer support; purchasing agents will inquire about your business reputation and warranties; CFOs will focus on ROI and financing options. They are all on your customer’s buying team, and any one of them can kill a deal. You want all of them to know, like and trust your brand and prefer it to your competitor’s. Your content must recognize and appeal to multiple audiences.
The more deeply you know your buyer personas, the better you will be able to write content perfectly suited to them. The more your content speaks to them, the more they’ll respond by signing up for your newsletter, following your brand on social media, engaging with your sales reps, and making repeat purchases. Customer-centric content works.
Make Customer-Centric Communication a Priority
To move from brand-centric to customer-centric communication, transform your customer relationship paradigm from “WE” and “OUR” to “YOU” and YOUR”. Not only should this be reflected in all of your marketing and sales copy. it should be embodied in how your marketing and sales people think and talk about your customers. The more you can make your customers feel like you live in, understand and care about their immediate world, the more likely they are to stay engaged with your brand and continue being loyal customers.This is an abridged and revised version of an article originally posted by Michael Brenner on Content Marketing in 2017. titled If Your Content Isn’t Customer-Centric it Isn’t Working. Credit to Michael Brenner and Content Marketing is gratefujlly acknowledged
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