Content Creation

How to Create Customer-Centric Content

CopyPress

March 27, 2018 (Updated: February 28, 2020)

In today’s consumer-oriented world, you need to do more than just produce well-written content to achieve good marketing results. In order to win over customers, you have to look at content through their eyes. If your content is mainly focused on your brand and products, you’ll miss out on opportunities to build solid customer relationships and grow your long-term revenue. Customer-centric content is created with your customers’ best interests in mind. It relates to their concerns, helps them solve problems, and keeps them coming back to you. Here’s how to create convincing customer-centric content.

Identify Your Customers’ Behaviors and Pain Points

Image via Flickr by miriamberry

Understanding your customers’ behaviors and concerns is the key to creating effective customer-centric content. Your customers are searching for products or services based on their needs and pain points. If you can get into their minds and speak their language, you’ll be able to align your content with their needs.

Take a look at past transactions and identify the paths your customers typically take before making purchases. Observe their behaviors when they’re exploring your website, conducting research, and communicating with your sales representatives. By understanding the paths they follow from initial interest to final purchase, you can create a comprehensive content marketing funnel to carefully guide them toward conversion. You need to take all possibilities into consideration and engage every department in your company to create customer-centric content.

Map Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. It’s essential that you know exactly what your potential customers will be looking for at each stage of the journey so that you can create the appropriate content to meet their needs. If you can fill information gaps with engaging and helpful content, you can help your customers arrive at an informed purchasing decision sooner, resulting in shorter conversion times.

Another benefit of aligning your content to the buyer’s journey is that it can turn all the departments in your company into a cohesive sales force. Each department can be assigned a specific task and use its specialized knowledge and expertise to contribute to your customers’ progression through the buyer’s journey. To get the best results, you need to create content that’s well-crafted, well-organized, easily accessible, and relevant to specific stages of the journey. In addition, it should include SEO-friendly keywords related to your products. Finally, you should monitor the conversion rates of your content marketing efforts.

Create Buyer Personas

The better you know your target consumers, the easier it is to attract and engage them. By looking at past transactions, customer engagement statistics, and current customer data, you can gather enough information to develop buyer personas, which are first-person analyses and depictions of potential customers. They are fictional, but realistic, characters who represent the types of consumers who are most likely to buy your products or services.

Personas built through proper research can give you a clear idea of who your main buyers are, what problems they are facing, how they’ve changed over time, and what they wish to achieve. If you don’t have buyer personas, there’s a chance that your content won’t resonate with your target buyers, which can result in loss of sales opportunities. Therefore, it’s essential that you develop and use buyer personas in every aspect of your content marketing campaign.

Whether you’re creating blog posts, e-books, emails, or advertisements, your content should answer the questions and meet the needs of the personas. If your main buyer persona frequently asks the same question before making a purchase, write a blog post or e-book that answers the question. The main purpose of using buyer personas for content marketing is to create a compelling story that helps build purchasing momentum whenever your customers interact with your company.

Speak Directly to Your Customers

When writing content, you should adopt a “you” mentality instead of a “we” mentality. In content marketing, the “we” mentality has long been regarded as condescending. The word “you,” on the other hand, emphasizes the reader and is more effective in capturing their attention, especially in blog post titles and email subject lines.

Make a point to speak directly to your customers and include them in all your marketing communications. If you need to use “we” or “us” in copy, make sure it’s in the intended context and not meant to include the reader. By addressing your customers in your content, you’re showing them that your company is customer-focused and committed to meeting their needs.

Find Out What Your Customers Prefer

Knowing the preferences of your customers is one of the most important aspects of content engagement. However, it isn’t an easy task, considering that content preferences can vary greatly from one buyer to another. While some people prefer short and straightforward marketing messages, others react more positively to in-depth case studies. Besides content types, consumers also have different preferences for content delivery tools, which can range from email to social media.

To find out your customers’ content preferences, you need to spend some time crunching data and observing your customers. There are a number of ways to identify their preferences, including tracking user data, reading surveys, and getting customer feedback. You should encourage your customers to leave comments and suggestions at the end of every piece of content, so that you’ll know what they think of your content and what you can do to make it more appealing. You can also provide a more personalized content consumption experience by automating the delivery of your content through a content management system.

As information continues to be more abundant and easily available, it’s increasingly challenging for businesses to engage consumers with content marketing. Today’s consumers can find a new source of information with just a few clicks, putting extra pressure on businesses vying for their attention. In order to capture the attention and interest of your customers, you need to offer content that’s much more personalized. Customer-centric content will help you stay ahead in the marketing game.

CopyPress

March 27, 2018 (Updated: February 28, 2020)