How To Drive Growth With Winning Customer-Centric Content?
The reality is that customer-centric companies stand out more and fare better with their target audience. When the customer is at the centre of every business decision, the end result is a product that customers love and adore. Building a customer-centric content strategy is an opportunity for companies to form a solid following, generate high-quality leads, and increase the efficiency of sales and marketing campaigns. Successful companies understand that a customer-centric approach is not only to drive sales but to drive business growth by showing customers how their products or services can help the customer overcome their challenges. In an oversaturated marketplace, customer-centric content has the ability to allow businesses to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and attract prospects.
Customer-centric content marketing requires companies to know their customers, their areas of interest, dislike, and preferable channels of communication. The ideal way to guarantee success is to think from the customers’ perspective, not the company’s perspective. The content must relate to the buyers’ concerns, their daily obstacles, and the best solutions to address those obstacles. According to McKinsey, a customer-centric, data-driven marketing and sales strategy can improve marketing ROI by 15-20% or more. So, businesses must create relevant content that engages customers at every phase of the buyer journey and optimise their marketing and sales efforts. If the content is mainly focused on the brand and the products, there is a possibility of missing out on opportunities to build solid customer relationships and grow long-term revenue.
How can companies build a customer-centric content marketing strategy?
A unique brand voice
A definitive brand voice that is unique to your company and its products is a must-have ingredient for success. A brand voice sets you apart from the competition and makes you instantly discernible to your customers. Whether your tone is professional or conversational, it’s important to recognise what will resonate well with the target audience. Brands like Wendy’s and Old Spice have amassed a cult-like following with their funny social media banter. The success of these brands lies in their ability to understand their consumers and supplement online conversations with humour to create a narrative of a ‘woke’ brand that their customers revel. If you are a B2B company, a more professional tone of voice might work in your favour. As a business, you must aim to delight your customers with information and articles that they find most worthwhile.
Converse with the customers
It’s not enough to just create and publish customer-centric content. You need to engage your customers with a conversation. Today’s consumer expects businesses to reply or get back to them with answers within a span of 24 hours; the faster the response, the higher the customer satisfaction. Most companies today employ some form of AI chatbots to handle customer service issues. While chatbots are really helpful, it’s essential to include a human touch in your interactions. Every conversation must be personalised to ensure that your customers feel like their problems or worries are being heard. When writing content, brands should adopt a “you” mentality instead of a “we” mentality because the “we” mentality has been widely regarded as condescending. By addressing your customers in your content, you’re showing them that your company is customer-focused and committed to meeting their needs in every way possible.
Personalised content
The content must be personalised to reflect the stage the customer is in their life cycle. The three stages of a buyer’s journey are awareness, consideration, and decision. To drive higher conversions, companies need to craft their content based on the customer’s individual experience and the stage of the journey. Instead of bombarding the customer with an overload of information, segment the audience based on their timeline and target them with a ‘what’s next’ message to guide them through the sales funnel with efficiency.
Listen to the customer
To get the message right, you need to understand who your customers are and what they want from you. Extensive data collection can help you gain customer insights. Using technologies like IoT and big data can help your marketing team to gain access to customer behaviour and trends. There are several ways to identify their preferences, including tracking user data, reading surveys, and getting customer feedback. Knowing customers’ preferences and delivering them to them through the right platform is vital to gaining customer loyalty. Engaging the customers consistently will strengthen their affliction to the brand and enhance customer retention and repeat purchases. Customers should be encouraged to leave comments and suggestions at the end of every piece of content so that you’ll know what they think of your content and how it can be modified to make it more engaging.
Final Thoughts
Customer-centricity is the focus of every business today. Engaging with your target audience with customer-centric content is beneficial for long-term growth and brand loyalty. At Alkye, we provide clients with content marketing strategies that enable them to upgrade their content with well thought out pieces that their customers would love to read and share.
