[Marketing Guru Video Series] Tips to understand your customers to refine your content marketing

How can we understand our customers better in order to refine our content marketing?

Elizabeth Taylor, Senior Trainer at ClickAcademy Asia, shares tips to organise your customer information that you can use to refine your content marketing.

Creating customer personas

These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer, supported by market research and customer data in your consumer database and also from platforms such as your website and social media channels.

This information can be used to develop maybe three to five customer personas per brand and segment your audience and focus the content so you appeal to those customers by answering their questions and adding value for them.

The types of information to include for each persona include:

• Demographics

• Job title and function

• Ambitions

• Dreams

• Pain points

• Preferred communication methods

• How they responded to previous campaigns and ads.

These personas can be used to develop and drive your campaigns like your blogs, landing pages, website design, Facebook posts and advertising campaigns.

Lastly, we need to make sure these customers personas are kept up-to-date with any information you gain over time.

Empathy mapping

Similar to the customer persona, empathy mapping is a way to collect data on customers and to visualize and understand them better.

First, select one customer’s persona to focus on. Then, go through a series of questions about the customer and answer them based on the data that you have.

• What does your customer think and feel? What are their worries or concerns? What makes them happy and sad?
  

• What do your customers hear? What media are they influenced by? What people might have an influence on them, such as friends and coworkers?
  

• What does your customer see? What do they see at home, at work and the activities that they do? What do they see in terms of media?
  

• How does their behaviour change depending on their environment? Would they behave differently with their family than they would with their coworkers?

Have about four or five bullet points for each one of those four questions, then look at your customers’ pains and gains.

Pains are frustrations, things that are stopping your customers from achieving what they want to achieve. Gains are enablers that would solve their problems, add value, and help them to achieve their goals.

Use all of this information together alongside your customer personas to get an in-depth understanding of what customers want, as well as design and deliver much more value-driven and efficient content marketing.

Look at the customer journey

The customer journey allows you to understand the process that customers take before they buy a product or service.

The stages of the journey usually include

• Awareness

• Interest

• Evaluation

• Decision-making

• Retention

And your content needs to achieve is to provide the best quality answers to the questions that our customers are asking at each one of those stages.

If you had a new customer that was looking to understand the products that you offer, you may want to ensure your website FAQs is updated to include all the possible questions such a customer would look for.

If your customer is looking and interested but has not made their decision yet, a video explaining the benefits of your product or service.

If a customer is trying to make a decision, reviews and testimonials can help push them to convert. After purchase, email and social media can be the most effective forms of content to retain that customer and maintain their lifetime value.

Get hands-on guided training on Content Marketing at ClickAcademy Asia's Content Marketing for Web, Mobile & Social Media. The 2-day course covers world-class frameworks, templates and case studies on content marketing strategies. The course is accredited by Skillsfuture Singapore and is Skillsfuture credit-claimable. Find out more here.

If you are experienced in content marketing and would like to align your current content with your brand positioning using a content marketing audit, as well as build a business case for content marketing, check out our Advanced Content Marketing Masterclass.