Can CI Supercharge A Brand’s Content Strategy?
There is a high possibility that you have a treasure trove of unearthed insights in your customer data… Impactful marketing begins with helping clients wherever they are in their journey. Customer intelligence (CI) enables marketers to segment and understand their clients using this unmined data. CI draws upon internal and external customer activity data to […]
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There is a high possibility that you have a treasure trove of unearthed insights in your customer data…
Impactful marketing begins with helping clients wherever they are in their journey.
Customer intelligence (CI) enables marketers to segment and understand their clients using this unmined data. CI draws upon internal and external customer activity data to showcase insights into their needs, motivations, and behaviours. Marketers use these insights to create more powerful and personalised customer journeys.
Segmenting and understanding customer journeys from the vantage point of industries and personas helps deliver a great customer experience. Given that 66 per cent of buyers expect personalisation, customer intelligence is needed to improve conversion rates and grow revenue sustainably.
With much of the buyer journey now online, interactions with sales occur at a later stage. Successful marketing leverages customer needs to create content and thought leadership that educates and excites buyers. Start by understanding your audience.
Analyse your CRM data: Your CRM is a goldmine of customer intelligence. It lets you segment the information in many ways and find out what works for who. For example, you can see which channels are bringing in the top revenue-generating leads, who your top customers are by industry or title, and see engagement by the client. Having this data available is the first step to deeply understanding your customer’s needs to supercharge your content strategy.
Segment your clients: With CRM analytics, you can segment clients by both industry and title. Segmentation is essential because the nuanced needs of the market and buyers could be different. Being able to build thought leadership around a detailed level of domain expertise can be a massive differentiator for your brand.
Suppose your product or service appeals to many industries. In that case, segmentation can help you determine where to focus based on which drives are the most profitable for your company (I.e., lowest CAC, highest LCV, top NPS scores, highest margins, etc.). Not only will this help you build a content strategy to drive more high-quality business, but it can show you how to prioritise promotion budgets and find content partners based on their audience.
Check out competitors: When building your content strategy, look at what competitors publish. It’s best practice to both subscribe to their newsletters and follow their social channels. Considering their publishing frequency, consider investing in a tool that monitors all competitive publications. These tools can pull out emerging trends, enabling you to add your voice or find white space to participate in the conversation.
Look at social analytics: Social analytics is an essential part of building a customer-centric content strategy. Social monitoring shows metrics such as share of voice, brand sentiment, engagement compared to competitors, and interacting audience. As you build and experiment with your content strategy, social analytics will show your impact as an early indicator.
Interview clients: Customer intelligence wouldn’t be complete without talking to your clients to understand their needs, drivers, and challenges. Talking to your top three to seven customers in strategic markets will show the key themes they care about. Depending on the number and type of clients, these could be direct 1:1 interviews or surveys for your clients. During these conversations, listen to their language (especially if they’re in a specialised industry such as pharma) and the words they use to express emotions. Using this exact language will help you relate and build trust with your audience.
Now it’s time to build your content strategy.
With all the gathered customer intelligence in hand, it’s time for the fun part of putting together the content plan based on how you can best educate and help your audience. Consider ways to scale your ideas across different mediums like blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, and more when creating your content plan. Given that everyone has a unique learning style, the same topics should be presented in different formats to captivate your audience both in topic and style. So, get creative, explore ideas, and have some fun!
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