Spoiler alert: Your content marketing strategy isn’t as customer-centric as it could be
Summary – Learn how to make your content marketing strategy more customer-centric, including common pitfalls and how to rectify them, from TechInformed.
Customer-centric marketing is vital to the success of any advertising campaign. If your customer’s needs and interests aren’t featured in the content you publish, they won’t engage with your brand, especially in competitive market conditions.
All too often, content marketing teams think they have a customer-centric approach nailed. In reality, they’re selling the product or service rather than selling its benefits to the customer. How can marketers break this habit and take a more customer-centric approach to build brand awareness and drive revenue more effectively?
In this article, we explore how to engage your target market effectively via a customer-centric selling strategy. Discover how to plan, create and deliver content that’s optimised for your customers’ needs and drive lead generation easily. We’ll also analyse the common pitfalls of crafting a customer-centric marketing strategy and what you can do to avoid them. Read on to find out more.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing engaging material for your target audience. These materials include articles, emails and social media posts, but can also encompass videos and more editorial content like ebooks and white papers. Savvy brands have even begun using to demonstrate themselves as industry thought leaders and become credible voices on trending topics and pressing issues.
The aim is to take a holistic view of your customer’s lifecycle and build a bank of content that educates them about your products or services at every turn. As a result, you can foster a truly customer-centric marketing strategy that speaks to your customer’s every need.
This marketing style is important because 44% of people say they typically consume three-to-five pieces of content before engaging with a vendor. If done well, a successful content marketing strategy can attract, engage, and (most importantly) retain your target audience. In turn, a customer-centric selling strategy can build a feedback loop that promotes brand awareness and drives long-term revenue growth.
Content marketing is also becoming increasingly popular as a selling strategy. Data from HubSpot shows that searches for ‘what is content marketing’ increased by 22% in 2021 alone. Ironically, the same data shows 40% – a sizable minority – of businesses don’t have a documented strategy for customer-centric marketing. Therefore, brands interested in content marketing stand to make early gains by sharing thoughtful and impactful digital content in the coming months.
How to build a customer-centric marketing campaign
Below are the major pillars of any customer-centric market strategy. When auditing your brand messaging and building a plan for the year ahead, ensure to adhere to these tenets:
Identify your target audience
‘Target audience’, ‘ideal customer profile’, ‘core market’ (however it’s defined in your organisation); make sure you have a clear picture of who you’re speaking to as a business.
Differences in customers’ age, region, interests, and other demographic details can have huge implications on your content marketing strategy. For instance, seemingly small differences can determine whether you’re producing long-form written content or a podcast. Equally, where customers tend to spend time online is also a factor. Advertising on LinkedIn is a common channel for many B2B brands, but partnering with industry publications and news websites can be an equally effective channel to build brand awareness.
Similarly, if you have more than one target audience or want to target a broad market section, try to narrow down their characteristics to hone your messaging. Here, buyer personas (fictional profiles that aggregate key details about your customers) can be a great way to focus on the specifics of ‘who’ your target audience is and what ‘customer-centric’ looks like with them in mind.
Understand their pain points
The next step in any customer-centric selling strategy is to understand their pain points. Specifically, what’s prompting them to look for a solution and what’s holding them back from making a purchase. Doing so will help you grab your audiences’ attention with answers to questions like:
‘What exactly do you offer, and why is it better than your competitors?’
‘How much money or time can you help me save on average?’
‘What features or services will you be adding in the near future?’
A word of caution, however. When planning content, brands must prioritise their customers’ pain points without overwhelming them with details. Customers at earlier stages in the buying process may only need a surface-level understanding of your business, so content needs to be accessible and digestible.
Those closer to purchasing will want a more detailed picture of what you offer, so long-form mediums like articles, ebooks, and webinars will be more relevant. Given this, finding the right mix of content and its distribution channels is vital.
You can survey customers or use insights from market research firms to stay in touch with market trends as they emerge, therefore ensuring your brand stays relevant.
Get your tone of voice right
Although it’s often understated, finding the right tone of voice is crucial within customer-centric selling. To see why, let’s consider an example.
Cybersecurity firms typically avoid informal language. This is because customers can perceive contractions and informal language as careless, which could undermine their brand image as a trusted security partner.
The same is often true for financial services firms. Brands in the wealth management space want to convey confidence and credibility in their communications, so professionalism and attention to detail are paramount.
However, Neobanks and FinTechs have seen huge adoption from younger consumers precisely because they break the industry mould. By speaking in a more relatable manner, brands like Monzo have been able to engage their target audience much more effectively to showcase their innovative banking platforms.
Identifying the right balance of formality (as well as humour and so on) can be difficult. Try to regularly review whether your tone of voice engages customers well and measure how consistent your communications are once you’ve found your voice.
Prioritise benefits over features
Customers aren’t looking to invest in products or services. Instead, they’re looking to find solutions to business problems, like lowering their expenditure or operating more efficiently. Maintaining this focus in your content – explaining how your product/service offers a solution to your customers – is the last essential step in creating a customer-centric selling strategy.
To this end, make sure that key milestones in your business, like product announcements and industry awards, pay heed to customers and why they should take notice. Doing so will help customers understand where your brand sits in the market and how your offerings fit together to deliver a cohesive solution to their problems.
Common pitfalls of content marketing campaigns
Lacklustre marketing campaigns tend to have (at least) one of the following four characteristics in common. While this list is far from exhaustive, it should help ensure your digital content has a secure foundation.
Boring or unclear message
Sharing content that makes the audience lose interest is the cardinal sin of marketing. Customers won’t hesitate to stop reading, listening, or watching if they feel they’re wasting their time, so it’s important to build a clearly defined and engaging narrative for them to follow.
Right message, wrong channel
Unfortunately, even the most customer-centric marketing campaign can fail if it isn’t discoverable by customers. Buyer personas can help inform whether your customer segments are most reachable via LinkedIn, email or leading industry news websites.
Quantity over quality
Semrush research shows that long-form content (3,000+ words) builds brand awareness and lead generation more effectively than shorter pieces. However, content shouldn’t labour the point and ramble just to fill white space.
Industry best practices suggest blogs should be at least 300 words and that a mixed approach is best to educate and encourage customers towards purchasing.
Little to no evidence
Content is made all the more compelling with reputable sources that back up its argument. Although it takes extra time to write, the pay-off is clear: compelling content that effectively guides readers through decision-making processes and instils confidence in your brand.
However, make sure to attribute facts and figures to their original sources, so customers can see that you link to high-quality publications.
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TechInformed is a research-led and proudly independent provider of the latest updates on all things ‘tech’.
We can help brands build their brand awareness and thought leadership via interviews, reports, white papers, newsletters, sponsored social posts, and more. What’s more, we provide 360° campaign success support, from planning to execution so you’re able to save time on generating leads.