The idea behind sharing valuable content is that your potential customers will take you seriously and make repeated visits to your digital marketing platforms to seek more information. This, ultimately, will drive sales and revenue for your company. It helps you to explore individual customer interest and follow their passion. Furthermore, it increases customer engagement by efficiently delivering relevant content to every customer.
Understanding the concept of content marketing personalization
Following are the initiatives that help you to personalize your content:
1. Understand your customers
Understanding the customers is crucial for your content marketing campaign as it helps you to break the ice. A flat marketing approach will lead you nowhere but spam box. There are umpteen ways in which customers make a contact with your organization.
While speaking on the phone, listen to them carefully; asking them why they purchased your product will get you closer to them. Empathize with them when they offer a feedback about your product or service. Let them compare your company with the competitors. Do you notice anything incongruous and anachronous about your company? Mend your strategy to offer a more personalized service.
Make an effort to call, write or visit them personally to find out more about their needs and expectations. When your business is operating in a B2B setting, your contact could be a CFO, CEO, sales or a production manager. Accordingly, you need to understand their approach and influence they have over the organization before you design the content.
2. Monitor customers’ interest
Initially, you might not be sure what your customers like. When you send a newsletter to your subscribers, you try to share information most relevant to them. Do not forget to add a link to your website for more information. Monitor what section of your website attracts them. Are they trying to delve deeper into your research and development initiatives? Are they seeking more information about your product?
Keep a track of their movement and you’ll know what intrigues them. This will help you to fine-tune your content. Moreover, you can store this information in your company’s CRM or share it with your company’s marketing manager and sales force to help them in pitching their marketing & sales effort. Imagine, how surprised your customers will get, when you share information they have been desperately seeking.
Adding to that, you give them more interesting facts and statistics. That’s the power of content marketing. Your customers will automatically pick up the receiver and give you a call. If not that, they will definitely share their opinion via. a reply e-mail.
3. Do not push too much content
You might think that the more content you share with your customers, the more you are educating them or the more you impress them. Unfortunately, pushing too much content becomes counter-productive and you again risk yourself of landing in the spam folder.
Think of your customers as busy people who have no time for your e-mails, leave apart junk e-mails. Content marketing can work without anything but quality and valuable content. Keep the frequency of your e-mail weekly or fortnightly or until you have truly significant reason to share. Choose your day carefully as you don’t want your content-rich e-mail go unread sent on a Monday morning.
Many marketers start sending e-mails with a hope of getting a quick response from the customers; and when that does not happen, they turn aggressive and start sending off multiple e-mails in a week. Such a strategy proves a disaster and you start losing your customers. So, one thing is for sure, you need a lot of patience initially to pursue content marketing.
4. Proceed step-by-step
It is an inveterate practice among marketers to seek personal information about their customers to know them better. For a B2C company, such information might include name, age, sex, marital status, number of children etc. while for a B2B company, it might include company turnover, list of other customers and their quotation or any other trade secret.
Though this information looks good from a marketing perspective, if your customers realize that you hold too much information about them, they are likely to take you cautiously. So, make it a point not to use too much personal information while sharing content as it might scare them away altogether.
Use a try-and-test method to understand what your customers like. When you pick up something interesting, take it from there gradually. In content marketing, you take your customers as a long-term asset; reduce or nullify your ambitions of short-term gain.
5. Be specific
Segregate your content based upon your audience. Share specific and to-the-point information, which is just relevant to your recipient. Share intriguing information with your customers, information which is based on your personal experience, well-supported by facts and figures. Share information that raises questions and concerns.
If your customer starts interacting with you, don’t use that opportunity to pitch your products or price until you understand what they are looking for. You don’t want to sound frantic at first place. Answer their queries aptly. If your company maintains a blog, share the link to the specific article in your blog which you consider relevant to the customer.
This will consolidate your standing among the customers as a genuine marketer. If there is any other blog, which you find interesting and contains relevant information for your customer, share the link to that blog. Going an extra mile patiently, will help you to build trust among your customers and beat the frenzied marketing communication from others.
6. Give a personal touch
There are various mediums of digital marketing like e-mail marketing (sending bulk e-mails to customers), explainer videos, subscription to blogs, RSS feeds, various social media platforms etc. Content marketing might use e-mails as one of the mediums to share content; there are many other ways of sharing digital content as mentioned above.
Writing customized e-mails to customers might sound tiring but it’s definitely worth the effort. However, personal touch does not only mean that you address them with their last name or write customized e-mails, it also means that you clearly understand their personal or business needs. Apart from that, you need to leave no stone unturned to debunk the myths about your company.
A lot of negative publicity happens online when some customers are unhappy with your product or service. Many a times, your competitors set upon maligning your brand. To handle this problem, many large companies engage in online reputation management. Keep posting articles and videos on your blog or website that clarifies any misunderstanding about your product.
Conclusion
Content marketing personalization is the new way to connect with the customers. Though there are privacy concerns related with it but if the marketers are able to convince the customers by sharing equally relevant content through prediction and understanding, such concerns can be alleviated. Moreover, content marketing gives you a chance to innovate content as opposed to mass marketing platforms that treat all the customers alike.
