Content Marketing World 2018 isn’t technically over yet, but I’ve already caught my flight back to Tampa after a grueling, yet fun four days in Cleveland. I attended #CMWorld this year as a former paid social, media and advertising manager now moving into a role geared on content and experience documentation, looking for ideas, tactics and strategy inspiration to move forward. What I found? A lot of opportunity.
To start, don’t let yourself get confused: Customer-First content is the ticket of entry into the conversation, not the best practice.
Full disclosure: I work at Sprinklr and we are internally (and I’m assuming, externally) notorious for pushing a customer-first agenda for a number of years, and rightfully so. Social media has brought us to a society where any and all bad press will follow a brand everywhere their customers are. Brands are expected to deliver great experiences on top of baseline customer service – and we live in a world where Twitter rants aren’t just fodder, but covered on every primetime news channel if deemed interesting enough.
To take a nod from Maya Angelou, I think “people never forget how you made them feel” should be everyone’s personal mantra, not just a quote thrown on a screen covering best practices. Personally or professionally, take your pick, but I strive to remember that in both situations, and most successful marketers, salespeople and professionals follow this credo as well.
I come from the world of Retail and Healthcare, two industries that thrive and hinge on customer service and experience, and I can tell you hands down as a B2B marketer (that is also hammered by SaaS companies in my inbox), your customers want more than just a whitepaper when they give you the consent to contact them, they want to feel something.
They have to need the information, we no longer live in a world where “want” will get you by.
My advice – and no, I’m not going to be the 100th person to tell you to make content that speaks to your customer – take a good hard look at how your customers feel about their experience with your brand or product before you start developing content for them. If you’ve already got a robust library and no budget for new assets, you can still go back and do this, but afterward, you should take a good look at how you could restructure the content you already have available to better suit your audience. Sometimes this can be done for little investment with high payoff.
A good starting point?
- If you aren’t already, evaluate the current customer journey and user experience before you decide what their problems are and how you can help them – this will also help you diagnose and solve CX problems for your care teams too.
- If you haven’t read The Challenger Sale, you’re going to find yourself at a strong disadvantage going into the next few years of marketing – it was a popular highlight in the sales track – check out Matt Heinz, he’s got some great ideas and strategy in the space.
Strategy > tech, but don’t count out tech’s ability to scale your content marketing strategy to enable more human to human experiences.
It seems pretty obvious here, but you’ve got to have a plan before you implement the tech. Technology solutions and tactics are available to everyone, but your marketing strategy is not. Taking the time to understand the actual habits of your customer (not the assumptions marketers like to make to justify the shiny tool they want to use) and developing a strategy that keeps their experience at the top priority over generating a cold lead that goes dead in the email is the difference between wasted spend and actual engagement.
Jay Acunzo did a fantastic session on re-thinking the way you develop content around the actual needs of your customer and not the standard assumptions, although I must warn you for those that purchased the recording, it gets a little awkward when he starts talking about poop. (It definitely recovers, though!)
However – for brands that have this completed, technology solutions provide the ability to automate, scale, deploy and revise (commonly known as an agile method, more on this below) your strategy more efficiently than relying on humans to carry every step of the process manually. Beyond basic marketing automation, combining functionalities like social automation and listening, content publishing and deployment in a single environment can integrate your content marketing strategy directly into the pulse of your organization.
Let’s be real – content reaches everyone in the company, not just prospects and leads. The more you can do to make everything a seamless engine behind the scenes, the more your brand will be able to give the customers the content they need more efficiently, paving the way for more human to human conversations to happen sooner. (I may or may not have said this, but I totally know a place that does this at scale if you ever want to talk shop.)
Speaking of: Why are Agile execution methodologies just working their way into content marketing?
Have I been out of the loop too long? Mathew Sweezey lead a great conversation on the Executive track that didn’t focus on tactics, but more on creating a high-performance marketing organization. Unfortunately, the session fell flat for me when everyone in the room lifted up their iPhones in a way that suggests this is a completely new idea for them, the “Willy Wonka golden ticket they’ve been searching for”.
I hate to be the one to say this, but the marketers that paid attention to this for the last 4-5+ years are already ahead of you. It’s not dire straits, but they will have an advantage for a time. For newer marketers or those not quite there yet – I suggest you get up to speed, and quick – your career will thank you.
Closing thoughts: Content marketers have a huge opportunity here to really pause and think about the way they deliver their content and how that relates to the state of media in the world today.
Maybe not the biggest takeaway, but I hope that content marketers start to take inspiration from every experience they have; whether you need to draw inspiration in the position of a B2C or B2B customer, pay attention to things like your checkout experience at Whole Foods (by Amazon) vs your local grocery store. Take note of the differences of how your hometown restaurant treats you vs your experience at a fast food chain, or the service you receive in a different city for instance. Taking cues from your personal human to human interactions combined with relevant data on how your customer experiences your brand will serve as a huge benefit at any level, and will naturally influence better content.
Also – Tina Fey, am I right? Goodbye, Cleveland! ✌️ So long, and hope you all enjoyed the beer cheese and pretzels.