The goal of content marketing is grabbed customer’s attention and turn them into loyal customers. Effective content marketing includes strategies like search engine optimization and writing to the specific stages in the buyer journey. However, beyond these technical strategies, it is important for customers to have a great experience with the content being marketed.
Today’s customers are empowered. They interact with marketing tools like online content for purposes like entertainment, connecting with others, and adding value to their lives.
Enhance the customer experience with content marketing by:
1. Rewarding Interaction
Customers are most likely to engage with content when they will receive a reward for doing so. Many companies offer incentives like eBooks, free guides, discounts, and more to customers who subscribe to their media accounts or share their posts.
Rewards like these offer marketers the opportunity to both incentivize customers and offer additional information about their company through the free materials. A realtor, for instance, might offer an eBook on types of mortgages to new subscribers. The eBook should be useful but also direct customers back to the mortgage services of the realtor.
2. Making It Shareable
In the age of the empowered customer, marketers count on customers to share their branding materials, like social media posts, with their own personal networks. To encourage this practice, make marketing materials shareable. Create social media content offering information that is informative, intriguing, and relevant for sharing.
3. Optimizing for Ease of Use
With so much content to interact with, customers are picky about what they do or don’t engage with. Even if customers like your marketing content, they won’t be willing to jump through hoops to engage with it or share it. Make content accessible and easy to share by properly linking it, checking load times, and making it easy to exit associated pop-ups.
4. Focusing on The Customer
One of the major shifts resulting from customer empowerment is that marketing focused on what a company has to offer is no longer effective. Customers want content that is all about them. Every piece of content must be relatable and relevant to customers in an obvious way. It should clearly offer something that puts the customers’ attention on his or her own needs and desires.
5. Supporting a Cause
Even though empowered customers are self-involved, they also tend to value charity and good causes. To make your marketing stand out as memorable and meaningful, connect with a cause. Make a point of at least occasionally hosting campaigns in which purchases with your company result in donations to a cause customers’ love. Share content that highlights how the business you are marketing is about more than making a profit.
6. Supplementing with Video Marketing
Accustomed to commercials, video ads, and access to information through YouTube, customers also place value on video marketing. Many marketers are also finding the video to be a dynamic and wide-reaching content marketing tool. James Wood the founder of CNB Safe explains the benefits: “With YouTube being essentially a free online service, it really allows a business like CNBSafe safety speakers to get our message to a wider audience.”
7. Offering Good Looks
The role of visuals in content marketing cannot be overstated. For content to be catchy, shareable, rewarding, and inviting, it must look good. Empowered customers fill their days with graphics. They create them, share them, edit them, and critique images. With free photo editing resources and quality cameras built into phones, customers just don’t see any excuse for not featuring brilliant images as part of any type of media.
Due to the obsession with and expectation of quality graphics, effective content marketing must find ways to make images part of their design scheme. Everything from custom infographics to a well-designed site can make a difference. Social media posts, in particular, should feature clear, intriguing graphics to gain clicks and shares.
8. Using Best and Worst of Lists
A favorite form of content for many customers is a list. Clear, concise, easy to skim and glean from, customers find lists helpful. They tend to click on them and share them regularly. One example of a popular type of list is the best and worst list. This informative list offers clear guidance to customers.
9. Remaining Consistent
Customers tend to maintain an online presence on a regular basis. They expect modern, connected companies to do the same. Marketers should consistently be interacting with customers online and regularly posting content there. When consistency is broken in content marketing, customers tend to forget about companies or suspect that companies are not thriving.
10. Conversation Online
Interacting with customers for the purpose of marketing is all about online conversation. Prioritize the conversations wisely, so that’s why it might be worth taking a look at special productivity tools. Marketers should reply to a number of customer comments, thank customers for sharing content, and otherwise converse publicly. This improves the ranking of content, encourages customers to share it, and makes the brand more memorable.
11. Being Loyal To
Nobody likes to support greedy institutions and empowered customers are no exceptions. Content marketing designed only for bringing in new customers does not appeal to customers who expect the companies they support to be supportive of them. Besides just offering rewards to customers who interact with content, make content exclusively for subscribers and followers.
Customers are more likely to interact with and share content from companies who they feel are loyal to them. On the other hand, customers who feel used by marketers tend to switch brands or ignore content, believing it to be “spam.”
The Overall Customer Content Experience
Modern customers are bombarded with marketing media just about everywhere they go. To stand out, marketing content must reach the customer with a memorable, personal experience. For marketers, this means incorporating both technical and strategic elements of content marketing.
Whether it’s by making content shareable and accessible or by branching out into video marketing or list making, improving the customer experience is all about reaching customers where they already are, according to their expectations and desires.
Hey Hassan, great article! To make your content marketing efforts easier, I would also recommend DrumUp – https://drumup.io/. It is a social media manager and content marketing app that mines web content in real time to recommend fresh and relevant content to your audience, reducing your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter management time by upto 90%. It provides you with relevant content based on keywords provided by you. You also have the option of setting up RSS feeds or manually save links to your library. Once this is done, you can schedule your favorite posts across your social media channels easily with their 1 Click Add feature. Give it a look, and if you like it, please include it in any future lists. Thanks!
Amazing post! There needs to be a good customer experience strategy in order to adhere to a satisfied and happy customer which is surely going to benefit you in future. I would also like to add another point to the customer experience strategy. Businesses can provide customers with personalized proximity experiences depending on their location at the store or restaurant. These types of experiences can be created using beacon technology and proximity technology platform. For example, when a customer walks into a store, he will receive a welcome message from the store and suggest him to buy things based on his last recorded purchase. The store can also send customer’s messages based on the customer’s immediate surrounding. This technology will also give the business a competitive edge along with brand loyalty as customers will return to the store for the great experience.
Hi Joquim,
Thanks for appreciating! Yes, you’ve pointed out rightly about smart technology. Any business that will implement the technology for the customers will stand out in the competition.