3 Steps to Wow Customers with Content Marketing

Leads, leads, leads! You probably focus a lot of your attention on acquiring leads, which is, of course, an important marketing function. But what do you do with those leads once you get them, and how do you keep up the communication once they become customers? Have you ever thought about your customers’ experience with you once they become a lead or a customer? Do you give them tired old generic newsletters and sales emails, or do you provide a unique experience? Here are three steps you can take to ensure that you are building genuinely authentic customer experiences, so your leads and customers know that you sincerely appreciate them and value their business.

If you want to know about your customers’ questions, concerns and pain points, then follow them on social media! There are tools that provide an easy way to do this at scale, such as FullContact, that allow you to input all of their email addresses, phone numbers, or social identifiers in order to receive a report that reveals their related social media accounts. Or, you can gather that info the low-tech way by looking them up online via a Google search. Either way, once you have their social media info, go onto Twitter and follow them to see what they are sharing, what they’re engaged in, and what they are truly interested in. Once again, there are tools such as Nuzzel that can help streamline the process. You can ask Nuzzel something like, “Tell me all the things that the people I follow on social media are sharing and what they’re engaged with." Use what you learn about them to decide what you should be talking about and what kind of content will truly engage your customers, both through social media and email communication. Also, watch what they’re saying about your company and about related unbranded mentions such as “I really hate banks” (if you’re a bank). Such insights can provide great material for developing a targeted content marketing strategy.

We all know it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one, so what are you doing to keep your existing customers? How are you communicating with them? Are you interacting with them enough? Too much? One way to make educated decisions is to create a fake customer that matches a particular type of customer. Next, set up their email address to forward to your personal email address. Then, treat that fake customer like all of your real customers. Send them emails and whatever else you would send a real customer who fits that sales persona. Don’t tell the rest of your organization that this is not a real customer – you don’t want your fake customer to receive preferential treatment. Next, analyze the results. How did you do? Are you sending just the right type of information at the right time, or are do you become annoying? Do you send an invoice and then not reach out to them again until a year later when you’re asking if they’re ready to renew their services? Think: how is the conversation between your company and that customer going, and how can you improve that experience?

Most of us are so focused on creating new content that we ignore existing content. But If you’ve been blogging for a while, think about all the great content you already have . Take a look at previous blog posts that performed well and see if you can somehow reuse them. Maybe they just need to be updated or posted on a different platform. Everyone working within your organization has their own areas of expertise, so why not get them involved in the communication process? For example, if you discover a hot topic that you know Cathy in accounting is an expert on, ask her to write something for your blog; even if she only supplies a rough draft that you'll need to polish, you'll save a lot of time and probably get some truly unique content. If you discover a technical issue that many of your customers are discussing on social media, ask your technical guru if he already has something he can contribute on the topic.

As a marketer, you put a lot of effort into getting new leads. Once you have those leads, you need to continue to nurture them, so they become customers. Once they become customers, you need to maintain that relationship, so they become repeat customers.

At PMI we use an integrated approach that starts by helping you find leads. But we don’t stop there; we also use content marketing to help you turn those leads into customers and to build strong relationships with them. It’s a turnkey approach that allows you to focus on what you do best - running your business! To learn more, give us a call today at (484) 297-6395 or contact us online .

This blog is adapted from “ Building Better Customer Experiences. ”