In today’s crowded online space, creating Customer-centric content that truly resonates with your audience is key for cutting through the noise.
Customer-centric content that addresses the pain points, interests, and motivations of your target audience will connect with readers far better than self-promotional content that focuses squarely on your company.
But what does it mean to take a Customer-centric content approach ? And how can you shift your strategy to fully utilize customer-focused content to achieve better marketing results?
This guide will walk you through key steps for putting your customer at the heart of your content development.
Understand Your Buyer Personas Deeply
The foundation of customer-centric content is buyer personas – detailed profiles of your different audience segments.
While most companies have basic personas, truly effective customer content relies on deep insights into persona behaviors, challenges, values, and priorities.
Rather than making assumptions about your audience, conduct customer research by:
- Interviewing both new and long-standing customers about what resonates
- Running online surveys asking about interests, problems needing solving
- Finding communities your personas engage in to understand their discussions
- Look beyond demographics to what motivates each persona, their background, and their role-specific responsibilities and objectives. The more deeply you can empathize and connect with your audience at a human level, the better positioned you’ll be to create relevant, valuable content.
Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey
Customer-centric marketing requires matching content to the customer journey. After all, a first-time website visitor has far different questions and needs than a qualified sales prospect ready to close.
Work backward from the end goals of key personas – where they want to be versus where they are now. Then map content to each buyer’s journey stage – from awareness and consideration through evaluation and purchase – to move personas toward their goals.
For example, tutorials and product comparisons may serve early-stage researchers, while case studies speak better to mid-funnel evaluators.
Review your existing content and create new assets as needed to address persona questions and requirements at each stage.
Adopt a Customer’s Mindset and Language
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to consider what questions they need to be answered, what problems they want to be solved, or what outcomes they desire. Then address these directly with relevant, empathetic content.
A customer mindset also means mirroring the language and terminology your audience uses versus industry jargon only insiders would know.
For example, tech customers don’t think in terms of “solutions” – they describe concrete needs like better collaboration, scalability, or user experiences.
Listening to customer conversations in community forums and social media marketing provides great insight into how your audience really talks about relevant topics.
Pay attention to the words and phrases they use when crafting your own content.
Lead with Relevance Over Promotion
Refrain from plugging your company or product right out of the gate. Savvy customers quickly discard obvious sales pitches in favor of truly useful information.
While you should keep business goals in mind, take an outside-in view focused on serving audience needs at every step.
For example, an article on accelerating campaign performance could start with data on typical challenges around conversions, multichannel coordination, or targeting before introducing your tools as proven solutions later on. This establishes relevance upfront before logically connecting the dots to support the consideration of your brand.
Get Feedback Straight From Customers
There is no better barometer for customer-centric content than getting feedback directly from audience members themselves.
Set up customer panels that can periodically review a sample of completed content across channels and stages of the buyer’s journey to weigh in on what resonates or misses the mark.
Be ready to iterate based on constructive user input – your customers effectively become partners in shaping content to motivate purchasing decisions.
Continue Assessing Relevance and Performance
Stay closely attuned to metrics demonstrating how customers actually engage with your content across channels from call-to-actions clicked to time on page to content shares.
Are certain topics falling flat while others see greater traction? Use these insights to double down on popular subjects and adjust tone or format elsewhere.
Are Kit conversion rates from particular pieces short of expectations? A negative response may indicate a disconnect between content and underlying customer priorities or questions at that decision stage.
Review and rework content systematically to test what content combinations best prompt desired actions.