Aaron Agius is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning global marketing agency Louder.Online.
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Content marketing is hugely important for companies today. If you want to grow your business online, creating great content is a necessity. But there is more to content marketing than its name might suggest. In fact, it’s best to think of your content marketing team as an extension of your customer service department.
Here’s why your content marketing team needs to be customer service rock stars:
Customer Service Is Crucial for Buyer Journeys
Understanding your customer journey is Content Marketing 101. But you need to go deeper than simply mapping the journey to different content pieces. That’s because 70% of a customer’s journey depends on how they feel they are being treated — in other words, quality of service.
Therefore, your content marketing team needs to ensure that the content itself provides a pleasant experience with characteristics like:
• Helpful Navigation: Don’t trap customers into one “funnel.” Provide links to other relevant content that reinforces the content without being distracting.
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• Appropriate Brand Tone: A big part of customer service is how you speak to someone. If your brand promise is “fun, helpful and informal,” then don’t betray that with pages full of dull-sounding corporate speak.
• Proper Levels of Awareness: Great service is meeting people where they are. Content marketers need to speak in terms that customers understand. For instance, top-of-the-funnel content should avoid using abbreviations for lesser-known terms, instead of explaining them at the most basic level.
Being Service Focused Leads to Better Content
Instead of focusing on your brand goals, customer service starts with the customers’ goals. With this customer-service-based approach, you can create the exact kind of content that your market is looking for, at the exact right time in their journey.
For instance, let’s say you sell complex B2B software. Which of the following content types is more helpful to a website visitor who knows nothing about your product or what it does yet?
a.) A giant pop-up on your landing page promoting your 24-hour 50% off sale, or
b.) An “Ultimate Guide” that explains your solution, its benefits and how to schedule a demo for more information?
Content marketers who understand customer service would go with option B.
The more you do the hard work of learning about your customers, the better you can help them with your digital content. And ultimately, that’s what content marketing is about — helping your customers solve a problem.
Speed Is of the Essence
Everything in your business is connected. Sales, marketing and customer service need to be in sync if you want to grow.
One of the best ways your content marketing team can contribute to your overall business is by preemptively setting up other departments for success. You can do this by speeding up the feedback loop with customers. Integrate ways for your audience to interact with your content via comments, email lists and live chats.
When someone engages with your content, respond with lightning speed. Hire a content marketing support specialist (or program a chatbot) that focuses on the following:
• Answering questions in the comments.
• Qualifying interested customers and directing them to sales reps.
• Providing additional resources like blog posts, PDFs, reports and videos.
The longer you take to respond to engaged prospects, the lower your conversion rates will be. Content creation is just one component of content marketing. Customer engagement is an important extension of it.
Service-Focused Content Increases Automation
All businesses want to get more done with less time. And the beautiful thing is that content marketers who embrace customer service enhance productivity significantly. When your content marketers are also customer service rock stars, they actually save the company money while making customers happier. How do they do that? With self-service content — 73% of customers actually prefer to solve issues themselves on your site.
That means that instead of bombarding your customer support with emails and phone calls, customers can read through a knowledge base or watch a quick video. Putting customer service at the forefront of your content strategy allows you to anticipate your audience’s needs. Your content creators can guide customers through the buyer journey with less friction and less strain on your support agents.
Optimize Keywords and Organic Rankings
Most content marketing focuses on keywords that need to be included in order for the content to be found in the first place. But what are keywords really? They’re questions that your clients need answers to.
People often type their queries directly into the Google search bar. “How do I do X?” or “Where do I find Y?” When you prioritize customer service, answering questions becomes a natural part of your content marketing DNA. Luckily, Google helps you out with this via the “People also ask” section on the search results page.
For example, Google knows that when someone searches for “making an espresso,” they often ask related questions like “How do you make espresso without a machine?” and “Can you make an espresso with regular coffee?” If your brand teaches culinary skills, you’ve just found some tremendous key phrases to build content around.
A regular content marketing team only creates generic content about “making espresso.” But a content marketing team made up of customer service rock stars digs deeper to help their audience overcome challenges with hyper-specific advice. In doing so, they grow their brand while giving the customer exactly what they wanted all along.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot of advice out there about how to optimize your content marketing. You can learn how to optimize your headlines, dive deep into technical SEO, increase click-through rates and create beautifully designed infographics. But at the end of the day, everything your business does revolves around the customer.
Your content marketing team must constantly focus on customers’ needs. That way, you can communicate your product’s value while making the buyer journey efficient and enjoyable.
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Author: Aaron Agius, Forbes Councils Member
