E89 – Customer First View and Content Balance

Customer First View and Content Balance – Getting the Share, Click, or Sale

Kristy’s tweet was caught by Dave (see the tweet below) that spurred an idea for this show. Often people create content to get the click, spur debate, encite some type of reaction or engagement but also think about who someone might WANT to share the content with.

Your cutesy puns and cheeky illustrations might be fun to use in your thought leadership – but guess what? It means I probably won’t share it with my execs. Think about desired use case for your readers as well when you’re creating content – not just your own.

What is the goal of your content? Is it shareable?

Kristy was faced with the following options, when creating content and supporting materials think of how someone reading your content may also ask these questions (and why they may think these things):

1. Not share it and move on with her day.
2. Share it and apologize for the immature or not work appropriate aspects
3. Summarize the article in an email, say what she wanted to say regarding the topic and content and then source it

In the end she went with option #1 and wasn’t able to share the great content with other team members and executives. Could you be missing opportunities for your content to be shared on social platforms or within your target audiences company?

This episode was sponsored by MarTech® West (April 3-5) in San Jose, CA and MarTech® East (September 16-18) takes place in Boston, MA. To save 15% use MarTech® Conference promo code BIZPODCAST when you register.

Do You have a Customer First View for Digital & Content?

Are you creating content for everyone or no one? Is there a disconnect between Headline -> Persona -> Business Goal -> Content and maybe take a step back and see if all the things work together or if there is that disconnect.

Know your audience and know the possible and even more the likely use case for the content you are creating for that person and their role. Think about the following things when creating content:

• Where along the customer journey is your audience?
• What is their role?
• What problems are they trying to solve?
• How is this piece of content going to help them?
• How do they plan on using it? Or how might you inspire them to use it?

If there is ever a question as you go through the process just go back to “What was the objective” for a piece of content. In terms of ways to go about doing all of this, here are some ways to dig into if you are doing a great or poor job:

• Support Site
• Site Search
• Navigation – is your navigation aligned with business or customer. Your site search data will support this.
• Why hide answers in the FAQ, why isn’t it on the key pages people are looking for?

Episodes 89 Mentioned Tools & Resources

• Kristy’s Tweet
• Best B2B Content: Analysis and Insights from Over 50,000 Articles