Keep your eye on the ball, er, your customer

Every time I create a piece of content, put together a marketing plan, tweet or post, I remind myself to focus on my customer, solely on my customer. I ask myself three key questions: 1. Who are they? And where are they? 2. What do they want? What does their journey look like? 3. How can my content solve their needs and make life easier for them on their journey? Between rocking your social media channels, analyzing what visitors are doing on your website and creating fabulous content, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the “what” and lose sight of the “who.” You’re busy thinking about the right image for your Facebook post and the product video you are creating for the website. But what if your customers don’t care about that image or the video? To be an effective marketer you have to be selfless. You have to keep laser focused on your customers. What they want, not what the sales team wants. What they want, not what your boss wants. What they want, not what the VP or the CEO wants. And, that’s not always easy to do. But, to really do our jobs well, we need to be the champion for our customers, to be their voices inside our organization. I used to work for a startup that sold subscriptions to a global marketing platform. They positioned their subscriptions as a way for real estate agents to network with other real estate agents around the world. After taking customer service calls and interviewing numerous customers, I realized that what the agents really wanted was not to network with other agents but to be viewed as an international agent, even if they never, ever sold a property to an international client. By repositioning the subscriptions to appeal to the aspiration to be an international real estate agents, we saw a 20% increase in subscriptions. So, the next time you go to create a blog post or an eBook or a webinar, answer these three questions about your customers first: 1. Who are they? And where are they? 2. What do they want? What does their journey look like? 3. How can my content solve their needs and make life easier for them on their journey? Of course, the best way to learn the answers to these questions about our customers is to listen to them. Face-to-face at events, over the phone on customer service calls and online through social media, email, and the web. We have to listen all the time, whenever we have the opportunity. It is crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. How do you stay focused on your customer? Picture by Nicola Perantoni

#content #marketing #customers #customer