3 Steps to a More Customer-Centric Content Strategy in 2019

They say content is king.

But in reality, the customer is king; content is simply the medium through which we reach to them.

And customers, or people in general, don’t want to be sold a product. No one wants to be “sold” anything.

People want to be inspired. They want empathy. They want solutions to their problems.

This is why it’s so important for us as marketers to focus on customer-centric content instead of product-centric content.

Here’s what that means and how to do it.

Customer-centric vs. Product-centric

When we understand that people want to be offered information, inspiration, and solutions - instead of just a set of features and technical specs - customer-centric content marketing makes a lot more sense than the alternative.

Nowadays, readers aren’t the only ones who want this type of informational and highly targeted content. Over the past several years, Google’s search results have been increasingly geared towards human-friendly content rather than keyword-stuffed algorithm-targeted content. Basically, to get your marketing content to rank, it needs to be original, unique, and most of all, helpful and relevant to the target audience.

How better to offer highly relevant and engaging content than with a content strategy that revolves around your target audience as people, instead of one that revolves around your product?

A new year is always a great reason to make some changes; for the DashThis marketing team, this means adopting a more customer-centric content strategy!

And for us, developing a more customer-centric content strategy is all about these 3 steps:

1. Analyse your key selling points as a brand

Your customers are how you grow your brand; they’re at the root of your success.

We’ve always known who we were as a brand: we’re a simple yet powerful reporting tool that evolves with customers’ needs, and includes highly personalized, friendly, and efficient customer support.

Truth be told, the importance of the customer has always been at the forefront of everything we do at DashThis. Our product feature development is directly dictated by customer needs and feedback, and our account managers speak personally with every one of their customers instead of relying on automated communications.

Among all the customer feedback and reviews we receive, there’s one statement that is repeated time and time again: our customer service team always goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Therefore, we knew that for our content strategy to be more customer-centric, it needed to be an extension of this same underlying philosophy: putting the service part of our business on the same level as the software part.

We needed our marketing content to talk to our readers in the same way that our account managers talk to their customers every day.

Which brings us to our next step…

2. Identify your customers’ pain-points, challenges, and questions

Epic product development and customer satisfaction are all about putting the customer first, understanding his/her needs, and doing everything in your power to meet them.

Epic content is also all about putting the customer experience, instead of your product, first.

With this in mind, we went straight to the source in order to help us better understand our customers’ business challenges: our customers.

Our account management team has been our greatest asset: they’re on the receiving end of all questions, they know our customers better than anyone, and they understand every detail of the customer journey with us.

With the help of our account management team, our content marketers have been able to look at our content through our customers’ eyes in order to figure out what questions we’re already answering and which ones we should be answering but aren’t.

With this, we’ve identified the type of content we're producing, where our content gaps are, and how we need to address them in order to become a one-stop shop of killer content for our audience.

3. Let your customers speak for themselves

Our last step to creating a customer-centric content strategy is a little different than most, but to us it’s the most crucial: we’re letting our audience also be our writers.

Yes, our account managers know our customers, but not as much as our customers know themselves.

Not only does this method give us ultra-targeted content that’s directly in line with our audience’s interest and content needs, it also offers our current customers visibility within their niche.

Original, unique, relevant content that answers our audience’s most pressing questions AND gives them a platform to make them and their brand shine?

If that isn’t a win-win situation, I really don’t know what is!

Our customers are our biggest assets

You don’t exist without your customers… but they can exist without you. This is true of every single business, including ours.

Putting the customer experience at the center of our product and service has given us a considerable edge over the competition. It's allowed us to build out a product that is 100% in line with customer needs, and it's allowed us to grow our brand awareness by developing real emotional connections with everyone who walks through our figurative doors.

Letting you, our customers and readers, dictate what type of content, what subjects, and what content formats you want to see from us is simply an extension of our already customer-centric way of doing business.

In the next year, you’ll find myriads of new content written by, and for, our customers. Digital agency and marketing tips, straight from the mouths of the marketers themselves!