How to move away from brand-centric content and let your customers drive.

In Part One of this series we talked about the trend of storytelling in B2B marketing and how many companies mistakenly put themselves at the center of the content they’re producing, rather than their customers. Instead of listening to, learning, and speaking the language of their customers, marketers still feel the need to lead with “this is what our product does” and “here are all the features” as a means to landing a prospective buyer.

But this kind of marketing is going the way of the dinosaur — in large part because of social media. Your prospects don’t even have to talk to you to know whether or not they want to do business with you. All they have to do is tap their own networks, audiences, and followers and they can get nearly everything they need to know.

This creates an imbalance. The critical trust that needs to develop between buyer and seller is now heavily weighted toward the perspective of the buyer. As Chandler Walker of OOTC Media previously put it: “It is no longer important what the brand says. What’s important is what the customer perceives what the brand says.”

Which is why the opportunity to cultivate and hone buyer perception exists in every word of your marketing content — from your white papers and ebooks to your LinkedIn ads and trade show brochures. Customer-centric content is familiar, useful, generous, and trustworthy; brand-centric content is one-directional, self-centered, and suspicious—not to mention increasingly ineffective.

Let’s discuss how to find out if you’ve fallen into the brand trap, and the steps you can take to get out.

Behold, the brand trap

One of the surefire ways to tell if you’ve adopted too many brand-centric habits is to do a quick audit of your website. Every company has a website, and everyone uses it to bring in new leads and to nurture existing relationships. That’s the idea, anyway. But let’s see how well your site is set up to do that:

• How often do you use the words “we” and “us” in your web copy?

• Does your About page figure prominently in your menu?

• Are your products and services presented in terms of real benefits to businesses, or are they heavy on feature sets and technical details?

• Is your blog geared toward true thought leadership and problem-solving, or does it tend toward self-promotion? (Hint: you can tell by how often your company or brand name appears in the blog copy.)

• On that note, do you even have a blog?

• Are your case studies dull and formulaic, or are they written from the unique perspectives of your existing customers and present viable business outcomes that don’t rely on a recitation of product features?

You can ask these same questions of any of your content pieces. Self-promotion in email campaigns is just as annoying, as are product brochures solely composed of technical specs. And “we” and “us” are dead giveaways when it comes to brand-centric vs. customer-centric content.

It’s OK to have a brand identity, but…

This is not to say that the idea of a brand in general is somehow obsolete. Taking a hint from the B2C world, what would Ben & Jerry’s be without social activism, or Nike without athletes as spokespeople? These are well-known (and loved) brands with powerful, recognizable identities.

B2B businesses — while less visible and dynamic to the general public — still need to establish and maintain a strong identity amongst the competition. But this blog is not an exercise in how to brand yourself so much as it’s a wake-up call to the keepers of your company kingdom: it’s OK to have an identity, but don’t assume it’s more important than those of your customers. Because your customers will feel it and they will quickly lose interest.

It sounds counterintuitive but the more you can put your customers at the center of the story—rather than your company—the more you’ll be able to differentiate your brand in your industry.

3 steps to becoming more customer-centric

“Customer experience” is fast gaining prominence alongside “user experience” (UX), especially when you get out of the cerebral world of software development and into the perilous amygdala terrain of customer engagement. Understanding what your customers experience as they grow and change, make important partnership decisions, use your products and services, and develop trust and loyalty to your brand — or, conversely, decide to take a hike — provides much of what you need to know to become more customer-centric.

Here are some effective steps to begin to understand your customers and reflect their challenges, experiences, and successes in your content:

Step One: Talk to everyone. 

There are subject matter experts inside and outside your company, and they have the dirt on everything your customers are saying. They know what service issues are repeatedly coming up, what frustrations or joys customers are routinely experiencing, the kind of reviews your company is getting, and the level of service or engagement your competitors are offering that may be luring people away. Find out what’s going on, then say it back to your prospects and customers in ways they can relate to and respond to.

Step Two: Engage in a real way. 

Depending on your business, you may be able to set up focus groups, include customers in market research or surveys, or host a good old-fashioned customer forum (in-person when it’s permitted or as a webinar, since we’re all used to that now) that allows your customers to raise questions and concerns. Customers want to know that you care. Capture what they say and listen to the words they use.

Step Three: Let your customers do the selling. 

A customer reference program pairs your existing customers — think of them as “customer advocates” — with prospects and allows them to talk to each other in a positive, genuine, and unfiltered way through direct communication, forums, or other online environments. There are few sales and marketing tools that can surpass the raw value of customer advocacy, or provide the rich fodder for understanding how your customers think about and refer to your company.

In each step, turn what you learn into knowledge-based, service-driven content — be it a blog, your web copy, a customer success story, or something else. When customers can identify themselves in the story, relate to a challenge or success, learn something new, and are validated through your use of their language, voila! You’ve just become customer-centric.

Schedule a free consultation to learn how FFC can help you execute a more customer-centric content strategy.