The relationship between customer experience and content marketing
Content and customer experience need to work hand-in-hand to deliver the right message at the right time. This makes sense, of course – you can have incredible insights from the data, but if you don’t have the right message then you’re wasting your time.
The good news: once you have gone through the process of creating your buyer and customer journey maps, you have a framework to deliver content for every stage.
Taking the example below – we start, as always, with our audience or persona, and build it out by creating content ideas for each stage of the buyer journey.
Kelly is a 42-year-old marketing director. She is a seasoned marketer and has experience of working with agencies. The owner of the business she works for wants to add an online shop to the website so people can search for products online and buy them directly. Kelly starts her buyer journey by typing questions into Google.
What else do we know about her?
- She is an active member of LinkedIn and trusts recommendations from her peers.
- Kelly lives and works in Manchester.
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Awareness – what is their challenge? |
Kelly isn’t sure whether her current website can support ecommerce. She’s not sure what integrations are needed. She does have a budget in mind for the work but is open to the average spend. This is the perfect match for the kind of work that Agency 1, a marketing firm near her, can offer. She starts her search by typing into Google. Agency 1 have optimised their content so that it is a match for her queries:
Clear call to action copy means that Kelly enters her email address in exchange for a guide. She now enters the Consideration stage of the journey, and receives content to support this. |
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Consideration – develop interest and answer research questions |
Automations mean that Kelly receives increasingly granular and relevant content the more she engages. The final step of this journey leads her to a case study for Agency 1, which convinces Kelly it’s the one for her.
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Decision – has defined solution and the next step |
A clear contact form allows Kelly to arrange a callback at a time that suits her. The sales agent at the Agency reviews his customer marketing platform to see all the interactions that Kelly has made with the company and sees that she is highly engaged.
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How to enhance your content strategy
- Segmentation: Consider how technology can deliver personalisation at every stage – for example, segmenting downloads of a specific piece of content to a geographical area and following up with a personalised offer or event.
- Measure, test and learn: this applies to content just as it does for paid media, website performance and other traditional marketing metrics. Setting content KPIs from the outset is vital not only to determine the success of your efforts but to convince stakeholders of its value. Article views, number of reads, time spent on page, form fills, social shares – all of these fill that funnel to create an engaged community that is primed to buy. The number of followers and subscribers you have is another important KPI to track brand awareness, and the best thing is that these numbers are easily quantifiable.
- Check engagement: genuine audience engagement such as comments and interactions on your content can help you understand how consumers feel about your brand. Tracking audience engagement can help you analyse which types of content your target audience engages with the most.
- SEO: don’t throw your content efforts down the toilet by failing to optimise your pages for keywords. Ensure that your content writers are armed with their SEO title, H1s and H2s before they type a word. Get them to seek backlink opportunities too – if your content is being referenced from credible sources, it’s a sure sign your content is making its mark.
