Tapping Customer Insight to Create Compelling Content

Every experienced marketer knows that it’s important to understand how buyers think. Why? Because knowing what motivates them is vital for creating content marketing strategies that are both compelling and relevant.

Makes sense, right? Well apparently, there are still marketers out there who don’t apply this.

There is a tendency to focus only on using different kinds of social media networks, search engines, and e-mails. When creating content, marketers prioritize optimizing keywords that they think will pique customer interest and rake in engagement. A great start, but what they fail to do next is take into account how the customers use these digital channels and why they use them.

The Importance of Customer Motivations in Content Marketing

You’d be right to think that optimizing keywords for maximum content discovery important. However, are you aware that traffic amplification is useless if your customers don’t engage with you due to meaningless or irrelevant content?

It’s high time we take a break from focusing on keywords that are relevant to the customers and find out which digital platform customers use for certain content. Do customers use search engines more than social media? How do they decide which one to use?

After exerting effort on keyword and content optimization, consider the motivations behind how customers use digital platforms. This extra step will make reaching out to your customers more effective in terms of how well your content will resonate with them.

Now that we know how important it is to understand the customer’s behaviour on the web, the next question to ask is, “How can we use this knowledge to improve our content marketing strategy?”

Here are the answers:

Learn about Customer Behaviours and Preferences

The first thing to do is to get to know your customer. You just have to spend a substantial amount of time lurking around different social media platforms and gauging your own customer’s reactions towards your e-mails.

Sounds easy, right?

Well, not exactly.

Customer profiling isn’t very difficult to do, with a little elbow grease, you probably wouldn’t have any problems with it. But it’s also hardly a very easy task.

You need to know what your customers believe in, what influences their decisions, what motivates their actions, and what appeals to them. Knowing these things will help you create strategies that will capture their attention towards your content.

Get Qualitative Answers directly from the Customers

Being able to map out customer behaviours and preferences should always be based on a qualitative basis. There are a lot of ways to get customer insight. You can utilize web analytics, ask a 3^rd part researcher to help you, or you can turn to online survey tools like Qeryz.

By conducting surveys, you will not only get your qualitative data from your customers themselves, but you can also detect patterns in their behaviours and preferences easily. Since you are able to see the previous behaviours of your most recent customers, you can better imagine the behaviours and outcomes you intended them to have. If you are successful in influencing this transition, it means you’re doing something right with your content marketing strategy.

Create Stories Tailored for a Specific Target Audience

Once you’ve analysed customer insight, you can create content that is tailored made for each segment of your audience.

If a certain group that has not transitioned to your desired outcome is worried about the practicality of your product, your story should focus more on how effective your product has proven to be and the numerous creative applications it offers.

Remember that although you have an agenda in your story, the narrative should still follow a structure that will allow your customers to transition to the desired outcome without any objections. Simply put, empathise with your customers; lead the way by providing clear steps for transitioning.

Identify How you can Relay your Content

So now that you know the kind of content your audience deserves, it’s time to find out how you are going to produce it. There are a lot of formats to choose from. Other than text, you can also consider video, audio, and infographs. Basically any medium can be an option, just make sure that it is what your target audience wants.

Not only does your content need to be easily discovered, but it should also engage with the customer. The customer should be able to comprehend the message of your content and be able to internalize it until they realize how useful the content is and decide to share it.

There are a lot of ways you can incorporate customer insight into your content marketing and brand storytelling. Tapping the mind of your customers will help you better understand their motivations and influences and apply what you have learned about them in your marketing strategies.

Remember, customer experience can be a source of persuasive content, the kind of content that sells.