Consumers now expect education, inspiration, and entertainment from brands. So content has become an important part of ensuring a delightful customer experience.
Isn’t it a norm for beauty brands today to put out makeup tutorials? Or for a SaaS business to have a knowledge base showing around their products’ features?
Relentlessly focusing on the audience — adding value and helping them through content is the key to providing a great experience. It also builds trust, generates leads, and sometimes converts into direct sales. Here’s how you can create a content marketing strategy to improve the experience of the customers.
Craft relatable content for your audience
Forget about advertising what your company has to offer — because it’s no longer effective. Think about how your products affect your customer’s life, serving their needs and desires. Write content that’s relevant in an obvious way to your customers — else you’ll lose their interest.
Talk to them directly to find out their pain points and the subjects they might be interested in reading about. Schedule phone calls and offer gifts in exchange for their time. Also, dissect the content strategy of your competitors. Use SEO tools such as Ahrefs to find the exact phrases your customers are searching for in Google.
Ensure that all of your content — blog posts, social media, and content at other touchpoints — is focused on your customers. Preferably, use the kind of language that your audience uses to earn and retain their attention.
Brands are now experimenting with scripted shows and docu-series as they get audiences to tune in week after week. Mailchimp, a marketing automation platform, has launched its dedicated programming network: Presents. On it, they launch original shows for their audience of small business owners.
Another great example I shared in one of my recent articles is Onboarding Joei by 360Learning, a collaborative learning program. The first season of the docu-series was a resounding success — mainly because of the challenges and situations Joei got into as a new content professional who was relatable for their audience. No wonder, they launched the second season this February!
If you don’t have the resources for creating a video series, you can also consider launching a podcast. A multimedia experience will engage your audience more than pure text. Indeed there are even free podcast hosting platforms to test the waters before you commit to your show.
Make it easy to consume and interactive
A lot of content is produced by brands every day. Two specific data points indicate the kind of competition you can expect in almost every format and marketing channel:
- Millions of blog posts are published every day on WordPress,
- Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
After ensuring that your content is high-quality and relatable, it’s also important to make it widely accessible.
Reading on a screen is harder than paper. For your text articles, provide an easy reading experience with simple words, short sentences, and small paragraphs. Make them scannable by providing breathing space to the audience, using visuals, and the like. The kind of language and vocabulary you use should also reflect your brand’s identity.
Your website should also be well-designed for a mobile audience. If it takes longer than 3 seconds for your website to load, then users might start dropping off your site.
Another emerging trend owing to the current world situation is — going beyond static content. YouTube trends report found that audiences craved social connection and preferred interactive content experiences last year. If you’re using WordPress as your CMS, here’s how you can add interactive content to it.
If you’re solely relying on text articles, a tool like InVideo can come in handy to create quick videos for you from it. Using it, was able to create a 20-second video for the current article based on the headlines alone with merely 15 minutes of work:
This could be handy, especially if a lot of your audience hangs out on social media and you want to share your textual stories with them.
You can also consider going live to engage with your audience and help them. You can set up office hours, answer your viewers’ questions, or even invite them to work out with you. Here are a few of the best streaming software you can consider using when going live.
Serve the complete funnel
Many brands forget that content is a marketing channel. They hire writers and let them take over their content program to express creativity in their blog posts. Topics they tend to write on are mostly “top of the funnel”, discussing the pain points of the audience, thereby helping the brand generate brand awareness.
However, most marketers invest little in the middle and bottom of the funnel content — examples of which include case studies, user guides, and product documentation. As these kinds of content play a key role in directly generating sales or helping existing customers, they need your attention.
A couple of reasons for ignoring such bottom of the funnel content creation are:
- It feels salesly and unsexy to purist writers to write about a product — it goes against the content marketing adage of not promoting your brand in your content,
- It’s boring to create such articles — the topics might require interaction with integral stakeholders (such as the sales team).
However, remember that marketing teams are built to help sales — so improve your content team’s communication with the sales teams. Also, focus on using content marketing lower in your funnel. There would be ample keywords to target through blog posts and numerous opportunities to use content marketing more profitably.
If you create content resources for an audience that is more likely to convert into customers, you’ll also improve their experience with your brand.
Making content instantly relatable, easy to consume, and incorporating it in all the stages of your funnel could help you deliver a better branded experience. After all, you’re helping consumers have a memorable outing with you.
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