Category: Content Marketing

Redefine the Customer Experience with a Right Content Strategy.

Redefine the Customer Experience with a Right Content Strategy.

Customers are the number one priority of every company. There cannot be a business without customers of course. Customer Service and Customer Experience (CX) are two different aspects, often confused to be the same. Customer service is part of CX.

Customer experience is the interaction between the brand and the customers, from the awareness stage, including the purchase cycle and the post engagement phase. According to The Digital Marketing Trends by Econsultancy and Adobe, 22% of companies felt Customer Experience was the single most exciting opportunity for the organization, ahead of even personalization.

59% customers switch brands due to a poor experience, and 40% are will to pay, for better customer experience, according to a study by Oracle. Content marketing is at the top of the trends in 2018. A good content strategy will help the companies know, what to say and when to say it, influencing a resultant good ROI. Every step of the customer experience is crucial, so the need to build a content strategy that helps sustain attention and create a ‘feel good factor’ is a necessity. This, when done right can help companies turn customers into evangelists. According to the Oracle study, 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience can influence the customers to become a loyal brand advocate.

Five Things to keep in mind before building the content strategy:

Customer experience is not focused just on gaining new customers, but also to retain the existing ones. 75.9% of the organizations believe, customer experience (CX) is important and needs due attention. Though a majority of the companies believe customer experience is important, only 8% of customers agreed to have received great customer experience. This is in contrary to, 80% companies who believed they had a great customer experience flow. These statistics, make it essential that companies invest in building a good customer experience and run a periodic survey to know if their CX is working and is good.

The journey to redefine the customer experience with content strategy needs some preparation. The following five things need to be checked off the list, to build an effective content strategy for a great CX.

  1. Create a CX Vision Board

The top-down approach to build customer experience is always advantageous. Create a CX vision board, which outlines the flow and marks the various customer touch points. Creating a vision board will also help you, prioritize the various aspects of CX. For example, the first email to the new customer is critical, and the returning customer UX on the website is also crucial. There is a need to build a connection in one case and retail the relationship in another. Creating a Vision board will help build the bigger picture, without losing focus on the intricacies.

  1. Understand your Customers

An important step in building customer experience is understanding your audience (target group). Data is what comes in handy. Tailor making CX for each of the customers is impossible, so this is where customer personas are the saviors. Grouping or segmenting the customer based on demographics, behaviors etc., can help identify common characteristics and in turn help create customer personas. Customer experience can then be tailored to these customer personas. This does not only help to build CX, but also help customer service teams to deal with customers reaching out to the brand.

  1. It’s all about the emotional connect – Brainstorm ideas

Writing content with an intent to connect with the audience better, will help meet the objective of customer experience. Emotional connect should be a definite goal while building a content strategy. It is not just, what you say but also how you say it. One of the main ingredients of an effective content strategy is to choose the right channels and the medium to deliver it to the customers.

According to research by the Journal of Consumer Research, more than 50% of the experience is based on emotions and in many cases, emotions are the decision drivers. A study shows that organizations that optimize to include emotional connect in their CX strategy outperform their competitors by 85%. Isn’t emotionally connect also the reason, customers become loyal advocates to the brand?

Brainstorm ideas to see how you can, use content to connect with a customer and improve the overall customer experience. This done right can be very advantageous to companies and can even influence a viral effect. For example, the Titan ads that uphold women empowerment connects with the audience and in turn made the ads viral. The emotional connect has also helped the brand retain it’s ‘household name’ status, as one of the leading brands in watches across India.

  1. Include channels to capture real-time customer feedback

The need to capture real-time customer feedbacks has to be at the top of any customer experience strategy. Building a CX blindly with an assumption that it is a great one, is a recipe for disaster. Periodic customer feedbacks can be captured through automated surveys, emails and calls. It could also be part of the customer service KRA, to have a set number of outbound calls for customer feedbacks.

Do not ignore customer feedbacks in your CX strategy; it will only help you understand how you are faring and also highlight the areas you can improve on.

  1. Measure ROI influence due to the delivery of customer experience

It is important to observe and study the influence of customer experience on ROI. Content strategies are built with an objective to bring in revenue, increase customer engagement and for customer retention. As the customer experience evolves, keep a keen eye to observe and monitor its influence on the ROI.

How to define the road map?

Content strategies are built, mainly with a focus on improving customer engagement, brand communications and to play an indirect influence on revenue generation. Content strategy can help you redefine the customer experience, ensuring both customer and brand-centric goals are met. Optimizing customer experience throughout the customer journey can be done with content. The beauty of it is, content can be customized to suit customer personas (as discussed previously). Content gives you an upper hand, at being relatable in your customer experience.

Content strategy needs to include two main customer category – new and existing customers. The customer experience should then be tailor-made to suit these customers. Returning customers are a priority as, according to BIA/Kelsey and Manta report, returning customers spend about 67% more than new customers. It is important to build a new customer base, but it is critical to retain the existing customers.

Redefine customer experience with content strategy by incorporating the following tactics and plans:

Create Content that is relatable, social and shareable.

Once you have understood your customers and built customer personas, build content around these personas to make it more relatable. In this way, it won’t end up being a ‘One-size fit all’ kind of content. When the content is relatable, it will also have a shareable factor to it. Meaning, the customer may share this content on their social media or talk about it to others. Personalizing content through the customer experience – may it be for websites, emails or any engagement, will lead to building better connections between customers and companies.

Storytelling is one of the best content strategies adopted by companies, making brands seem more human and approachable. Customer experience strongly lies in this connection companies make emotionally with their customers. CX, as it says clearly, is an experience and not just an automated flowchart. When you build a content strategy, create content that is more conversational than sales. You can influence purchases indirectly, by showing value rather than flashing just the ‘Buy here’ communication.

Stay clear and don’t complicate the experience.

Content copyright that is simple yet relatable clicks right away with the audience. There is no point in writing complex content, as at the end of it if customers don’t have a valuable takeaway, the content campaign is in vain. Many content and marketing gurus stress on the need for content creation to be simple and have something valuable as a takeaway for the audience. This does not imply that complex content will not work, but it emphasizes the fact that everything solely rests on the customer personas. Simple formats can work much better than complex ones that take time to build and execute as compared to simple ones. Focus on valuable and meaningful content, then trying to make a show of complexity.

Create content that is fast and appealing.

Content auditing is a great way to remain relevant. Website content specifically needs to be straightforward and have scheduled periodic updates. Website content audits, help repair broken links and realign content to be fast. A major chunk of customer experience now lies in website load time and user interface. Blend the content in it to give the best customer experience. All the elements of the website – images, content, videos, and design, etc., should be responsive and be able to realign to a desktop, mobile and other devices.

Make the content you create appealing. Video contents are in demand now, with over 53% of the audience wanting more video formats of content than any other. Leverage the trend wave and blend it into your customer experience. Use infographics, videos to tell the brand story and make the customer experience more visual.

Optimize periodically based on feedback.

Smart marketer and organizations always listen to their customers. Keenly. No matter how good the content creation is and the company strongly believes it is of the highest standards, neither of it can be considered true until it has the seal of approval from the customer end. Customer experience is solely based on and for customers, so ensure customer feedbacks are taken into consideration seriously. Optimizing the content, through audits and surveys will help remain relevant and have increased engagement. No wonder, successful businesses optimize, revamp their customer experience and continuously invest to better the customer experience.

Conclusion:

Content strategies are one of the easiest ways to redefine the customer experience. It gives you the opportunity to interact more with the audience, understand the target group better and in turn build a good customer experience. Content marketing also creates an opportunity to innovate at fixed intervals and bring in newer experiences for the customers.

It is imperative to keep in mind that the consumers today are bombarded with a lot of marketing media. Businesses need to stand out from the many and make a connection. Content strategies can help you ace it, by making a relevant, personal connection with the customers and leading them to a memorable experience. When the customer experience is great and satisfactory, customers will transform to be brand advocates who will not only bring in new customers but will also stick around longer. Redefine the customer experience with a content strategy using the above simple methods. The conclusion of it all is to listen to your customer and incorporate their feedback into your content strategy.

Use content in the right way and at the right time, with varied formats to continuously engage with the audience and build a customer experience that makes your brand, a part of their lives.

Disclaimer: This blog was originally published in website: Digital Doughnut

Content Marketing – The Game Changer for your Brand.

Content Marketing – The Game Changer for your Brand.

The term ‘Content Marketing’ though relatively fresh, has elevated marketing to a whole new plateau. Thoughts and methods to reach a concerned target market have evolved, leading to the grand inception of this concept. Simply put, content marketing is the creation and distribution of posts, videos, blogs and such to stimulate a pre-existing need among potential customers. It is the stimulant which drives them to purchase products or services that meet their needs. Content marketing is essentially a psychological game, which often benefits the most preceptive marketers.

This may seem vague, but don’t worry, you aren’t alone. In fact, according to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 55% of B2B marketers said they were unclear about the structure of a good content marketing campaign, despite stats which showed that they allocate 28% of their budget to content marketing. Such is the intricacy and thought that needs to go into content marketing. The next time you think the job of a content strategist is easy, think again!

A content strategist needs to analyze each piece of content, to ensure that the following facets are touched upon:

Social media engagement: Traditional marketing methods have given way to digital channels. The old marketing methods of postal letters and phone directory optimization are dead. Today, everything is online. Without an online presence, no brand would be as grand. With every passing day, the evolution of content marketing brings in newer methods to engage potential customers on social media.

Engagement is not confined to a certain stage in the marketing life-cycle. Before creating content, a content strategist needs to outline engagement objectives and goals to map out a content marketing strategy. After establishing the desired result, it is relatively easy to work backward and create content. However, it does take a good amount of thought to create content that gets clicked and initiates conversations. Content is crucial, as a survey conducted by Demand Gen Report showed that 47% of buyers viewed at least 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

Without innovation, it is impossible to attract online interest. Custom URL shortener solution is the latest in innovative content. They are eye-catching and receptive to branding. mylnk.is/MeaningfulLinks is more click-worthy than uvw12xyz90.com/sjddh009. In an age where 76% of people use their Facebook feed to find something interesting, custom URLs are too novel to go unnoticed.

Gain trust with relevant content: Brand loyalty is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Though initial content will surely not get any customer close to the sort of devotion that can be classified under brand loyalty, trustworthy information can go a long way in sowing seeds for a long-lasting relationship. In keeping with this notion, the importance of blogs has steadily risen over the past few years. According to a survey conducted by Hubspot, 53% of marketers stated that blog content creation was their top inbound marketing priority.

It is not easy to initiate a relationship, but it is equally hard to cut ties once a relationship is established. For the purpose of illustration, consider Nike. Though the sweatshop ordeal was widely publicized, brand loyal customers hardly budged to give other sporting brands a second glance.

Create curiosity: Human beings are curious by nature. As we progress in years, we learn to disguise our curiosity, which gives “keen observers” the impression that kids are more curious than adults. But, this is far from the truth.

Content strategists have used shrewd content to pique the curiosity of audiences for ages. Consider the Yamaha advertisement from yesteryear, which began with numerous questions on a blank screen. The questions were very mundane in nature, such as “what should I eat” and “what should I wear.”

When the screen was inundated with questions, a rider shattered it with a Yamaha motorbike, and the text read, “It may not be the answer to everything, but at least it doesn’t raise more questions.” Curious to know the answers to the first set of questions? Well, there are no answers, but Yamaha’s shrewd content strategists ensured that people saw the motorbike and were left, not with questions, but the thought of riding to forget the many pedestrian questions that life throws at us on a daily basis.

This advertisement was way ahead of its time. It probably paved the way for the strategic content, which today is vital to the success of any business. A recent study by Adobe showed that 51.9% of marketing professionals trusted videos to deliver the best ROI. It is not just written content, but how it is delivered that truly makes a difference.

The role of content has moved from being product-centric to customer-centric. Extensive studies on this topic have shown that stellar content revolving around a product does not affect sales if a customer cannot relate to it. Potential customers must embark upon a journey of awareness, consideration and decision making, all of which is fundamentally facilitated by strategic content.

Story telling: People love stories! When a brand has a story to tell, people take notice. It is one of the most powerful marketing tools, not only for its ability to attract listeners, but its potential to turn into a juicy piece of conversation. While telling your story, you create compelling marketing content and stimulate word of mouth.

It is like hitting two birds with one stone. This is a competent strategy to gain the attention of your audience. You may need a raconteur to turn your story into engaging content, but it is definitely worth the investment.

A raconteur can turn a dull story into a fascinating fairy-tale, but if your viewers are not stimulated to read it, the effort is wasted. As the adage goes – You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t force it to drink… unless it is thirsty. Visual effects create that thirst in viewers to read your content. In fact, research by Xerox has shown that people are 80% more willing to read content that is accompanied by striking visuals.

Search engine optimization: Years ago, brands vied for top stop in telephone directories. Similarly, but with the use of different practices, brands compete for the top spot in search engines, simply because potential customers hardly ever visit the second page when hunting for anything online. The single most important driver of SEO is content.

The research-based marketing firm, Ascend2, noted that 72% of marketers felt that relevant content was the most effective SEO tactic. Google has tacitly monopolised the term search engine, so much so that ‘online search’ has become synonymous with Google. The fight for Google’s top spot is so intense, that though Google regularly changes its algorithms to make its search more relevant for customers, businesses find a way to beat the algorithm.

E.g., if you look for the synonym of any English word on Google, the first three search items will show www.thesaurus.com, which logically doesn’t make sense. But the people writing content for that website have so flooded it with keywords that other synonyms generating websites don’t stand a chance of finding a spot in the top three. This increases their chance of getting more visitors to their website. It is to nullify these illogical search results that Google regularly revises its back-end algorithms.

It goes without saying that businesses have to keep up with Google and its whims and fancies to get noticed by potential customers. Though this is essential for success, there are other simpler ways to get noticed. The use of custom short link generators, is a novel method to get more clicks, views, and shares.

Create brand reputation: With educative and trustworthy content, brands can become reputed sources of information. Once established as the go-to source for information, the reputation itself can create a legacy that will be hard to come undone.

Though this may seem like a tedious way to acquire brand loyalty, it is tried, tested and trusted. Great products create brand royalty, but great content drives brand loyalty. Royalty does not last forever, but loyalty does!

Subtle advertising: Hard selling is a thing of yesterday. Try hard selling to today’s savant customer base, and you’ll ruin your chances of ever making a sale. Therefore, it is of immense importance to keep away from “in your face” advertising. That being said, divulging information without a go-to-destination can lead your customers to your competitors.

Won’t that make your competitors glad!

Nuances of content marketing and intuition play a vital role in judging where the line must be drawn between marketing aggression and customer consideration when advertising a product or service. You don’t want to be too passive, and yet being aggressive can implode instantly.

Product manual: It is imperative to provide customers with an easy to read and understand “product manual.” Customers who can’t use products that they purchase are likely to be so ticked off that their negative opinion can not only keep them away from your brand but stop others who hear their opinion from venturing to try your products or services in future.

This is reinforced by stats, which show that 53% of smartphone users prefer companies whose mobile sites and apps provide instructional video content.

Now you know why it is of vital importance to have the right content specialist on your team. Without a content anchor, your marketing campaign will sail the stormiest of seas and eventually capsize, though the sea maybe full of potential customers who are waiting for the right sort of bait. Get that game-changing anchor on your team, and your brand will certainly flourish.

This blog was originally published in website: Customer Think