What is customer-centric content and why is it valuable?
Hey, marketers: you know how storytelling is all the rage these days? Everyone’s got a story to tell, and everyone else is just dying to hear it, right?
The reality is that using storytelling in B2B marketing hasn’t turned out to be all cozy campfire conversation with buyers and brands sipping craft beer and listening to each other’s sagas.
For some companies in certain sectors (we’re talking to you, SaaS), the storytelling craze has done the exact opposite. It’s given permission to companies to put themselves in the middle of the plot—to effectively dominate the conversation. Instead of hanging with pals, suddenly there’s a suit behind a podium, dressed in his logo’s colors, giving a presentation to a room full of blank faces.
“Look at what we’ve built. Gaze upon our awesome technology. Check out all our features. Hear about our future plans. Listen with rapt attention to the lengthy history of how we came to be!”
Warning: it’s a brand-centric bore. And they’re everywhere.
As Gartner blogger Todd Berkowitz once summarized it: “The people who create content, and those that review it, spend the majority of their time inside the business, focusing on the product and the company. This leads to the misguided view that telling their story, with themselves as the hero, is the key…versus making the customer the focal point.” (Ellipses mine, for dramatic effect.)
In other words, no matter how shiny and graphic-laden and buzzword-filled and heavily branded the presentation might be, it doesn’t have anything to do with the buyer. It’s your story, not theirs. So why should they care?
The answer is: they shouldn’t. Until your customers can find themselves in the center of the story, they’re much less likely to turn the page.
So…what is customer-centric content?
Customer-centric content speaks in a deep and knowledgeable way to every facet of the customer’s journey.
At a high level, it asks questions like:
What are your prospects’ and customers’ business challenges?
What are their day-to-day pain points?
Where are their industries headed and how is it affecting them?
Who are their stakeholders?
What trends, technologies, or regulations are disrupting their business processes — for better or worse?
Who is making the decisions in their organizations, and upon what criteria are the decisions being made?
Once a prospect becomes a customer, customer-centric content seeks to know what their actual experiences are with your products or services, what problems still aren’t being solved, what was solved beyond all expectation, whether your customers have seen a return on investment, and how to best address their future needs.
So whether the content you produce after your fact-finding mission is a case study, email campaign, eBook, white paper, blog, or the copy on your website, when you put the customer at the center of it — that is, when they can recognize themselves in your world, feel a visceral need for your solutions, and are genuinely fortified by the knowledge you’re sharing — you are providing the kind of real-world value that moves them forward in their journeys.
You can do this by:
Offering useful insight and information that can immediately be adopted and/or acted upon
Speaking to a well-researched target audience who is more likely to resonate with the information
Limiting the self-promotion (remember: it’s not about you)
Leading with quality—no fluff, hype, or endlessly recycled soundbites
Giving a clear next step or call to action
We’ll talk about this more in the next installment, but for now there’s something else you need to understand: the pay-off.
Why is customer-centric content valuable?
Digital content marketing exploded in the early years of our current century with blogs, ebooks, and articles, and later with podcasts, webinars, and video. With every business eager to establish an online presence, it became obvious early on that to stand out from the crowd you had to produce content — and produce a lot of it.
Which is where it quickly went south (you may recall those days of feverish keyword stuffing and all-but-plagiarized blog posts). Companies realized they needed to provide truly relevant (and preferably original) information and perspective—a.k.a. customer-centric content—as part of their inbound content strategy if they were to succeed.
Since then, content marketing that can rise above a company’s own ego and speak directly to the customer has had the greatest impact. While content marketing as a practice brings in five times the conversion rates over other methods, maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys can significantly increase customer satisfaction and, ultimately, revenue.
The message is that customer-centric content doesn’t just convert prospects into leads, it builds brand loyalty and earns more profit. And there are not too many companies who are going to argue with that.
In Part Two of this series, we’ll focus on the trap of brand-centric content and how to transition away from it.
In the meantime, if you’d like to launch a full-scale customer-centric content strategy, we can help. Schedule a consultation.