As I plow through the writing for my tenth book, Be Where They Are. Go Where They’re Going, what I’m most concerned with doing is helping you best understand what customers want these days when it comes to content marketing and customer experience overall. Companies must evolve and adapt from the past few years of lobbing content into various channels and hoping to reach prospective customers. Instead, they have to develop material and touchpoints that show the customer that you’re ready to serve a customer at their point of need.
Part of this involves changing how you build out content marketing.
How to Earn More Customers
Busy customers want to find something that helps them move their story along and they want to know that you’re ready to serve their needs. They also need everything delivered in bite-sized pieces. As most everyone consumes content and marketing materials via a mobile device these days, gone is your opportunity to create rambling and wandering text posts filled to the top with unnecessary words and blather. And finally, every piece of content has to offer the opportunity to connect and/or move forward. Police have the motto “protect and serve.” You need to adopt the motto: “Connect and Serve.”
Story Support
A customer’s first experience with your brand should be what I’ve labeled story support. This means that whatever content you create has to match what they’re seeking along the way. This requires thinking about (or knowing about) your various customer types.
Let’s say you sell digital cameras. Maybe one of your markets are aspiring YouTubers. (If I sold cameras, this would definitely be one customer type I’d pursue.) Build content that helps them improve their game. Here are some sample topics:
- Inexpensive Lighting Solutions for a Starting YouTuber
- Conducting Interviews for Your YouTube Channel
- How to Shoot Fancy Shots with Affordable Cameras
In all cases, the story goes beyond your technology but incorporates it. You’re gently asking for the sale and/or making it clear you’re there. But you’re also providing something of value with or without a purchase.
And where would you put this content? YouTube in this case, silly. And also your site. But this post isn’t about that.
Bite-Sized Engagement Opportunities
This post will top out at around 600 words. That’s not exactly bite-sized. But it’s better than 2000+ words. Plus, if I wanted, I could pull out little tidbits and do something different with them. Like here’s a quick video, for instance:
At every turn, make your content modular, small, dispersed to where people might need it, and ALWAYS with an opportunity to connect.
Be As Specific As Possible
My last piece of advice for today is to speak directly to one group at a time, if at all possible. Build your content and materials such that it reaches out to a very specific group at any given time. If you serve multiple potential customer audiences, that’s fine. Just speak to one group at a time. Obviously, this works better if you speak to your biggest groups first, but don’t be afraid to get very drilled down, too.
Ask for the Sale
Content marketing is marketing, which is part of sales. It’s never a bad time to ask for a next step from the people you hope to serve. Just make sure it fits into the context of the interactions and/or that it matches a potential point of need for your customer base. For instance, if you like this article, it’s a great time to grab my newsletter to get the BEST of what I do weekly.
See? Like that.
Finally, Be Where THEY Are
People ask me about which site, which social platform, which whatever. That’s not the question. The question is: in which context would someone likely take a next step with the material I’m offering, and how does this help the customer? That’s always the mindset. Always.
I hope this was useful. Like I said, feel free to keep this interaction going. And if I can help you in any way, I’m here to customize this process for YOUR business and help you earn more customers.
