One of the quickest ways to alienate customers is to make your content strategy all about you and the products you sell. Taking a more customer-centric approach to content creation gives you more opportunities to build relationships, streamline management and distribution of content, and ultimately grow your revenue.
A content strategy that focuses on your customers’ needs begins with four simple steps:
- Identify the challenges your customers face.
- Modify your content framework to address those challenges.
- Link the proper metrics to the modified framework.
- Audit content to seek and correct any gaps.
Identify customer challenges
Start by taking a look at your sales figures and customer communications. If you notice any patterns or frequent, repeating queries it’s a good chance you’ve identified your customers’ most pressing concerns. Knowing the problem is half the battle, and now you can begin to adjust your content framework to better address those needs.
Modify your framework
Once you’ve identified your customers’ needs, make any necessary changes to your content framework, including metadata and tags. Think beyond just the articles, blog posts or product descriptions you share. Carefully consider the way you organise and label that information, and look for ways you can apply that structure to every piece of content you create going forward.
Link the proper metrics
With an adjusted framework, you can make better use of analytics for a more comprehensive picture of how your content is making an impact. These new insights go deeper than downloads and click rates, giving your sales team a way to target customers and prospects more precisely. It may also help align company-wide messaging for a more overarching marketing approach that can be shared among departments.
Identify and fill gaps
Even if you make significant changes to your content framework, there’s an excellent chance that much of your existing content can still be used. However, you need to know exactly how much and which pieces those are, as well as where the gaps in your structure might be. Review your existing content inventory with a focus on repurposing and reusing what you already have, rather than undertaking the time-consuming task of creating totally new content.
In conclusion, taking a more customer-centric approach to your content has many benefits. You’ll gain valuable insight to help drive purposeful – and profitable – interactions with your customers.
