Our guide to creating customer-centric content

Customer-centric content is content that revolves around the needs of your customers, rather than your brand. Given the enormous wealth of content that exists online there is stiff competition when it comes to getting the attention of your audience. Thinking about your customers, and what they need, will ensure that they find your content relevant and help to grow positive relationships with your brand.

Build data-driven personas based on the end user

This is about understanding who your end user really is. What do they want, what challenges do they face and what is getting in the way of getting what they want? There are many different sources that you can use to extract the data that you need for this, including social media analytics, surveys and feedback forms as well as general audience analytics. If you create personas that feel real and have relevance then it will be much easier to design content that connects with them.

Focus on customer empathy

If we define empathy as being able to put yourself in the shoes of another then it’s essential to be able to understand where customers are coming from and see how your products and services could potentially improve their lives. One of the simplest ways to do this is to navigate through your own website content as if you were a customer – looking for information or products or trying to buy something specific. It’s often only by doing this that you’re able to identify where you have taken something for granted and not used content to make things clear and specific.

Avoid an opportunistic exchange of data for content

A customer-centric content strategy is designed to provide consumers with real value. So, it’s not just about offering a piece of content in return for data – and then a week later asking for customers to sign up to a newsletter to receive another piece of content. Instead, this is the kind of strategy that builds around giving customers content that is actually useful in a way that doesn’t feel purely like an exchange. That could be, for example, that data is exchanged for an ebook and then a week later the customer receives an email linking to topics contained in the book – and then a couple of days later another email with more useful resources that relate to the original ebook. This approach may seem simple or like it’s ‘wasting’ content but it can actually double open rates on emails.

Use available tools to identify what is working for you

There are plenty of opportunities to monitor how your content is being received and what’s working – and what isn’t. A/B testing is a simple way to do this with email content, for example, and you can also look at open rates, conversion rates and unsubscribes to get a sense of what the consumer is responding to.

Consumer-centric content helps to form better bonds with your customers and can also produce more positive outcomes, from email open rates to sign ups and sales. Find out how Iconic Digital can help create content for your business, get in touch today, call us on 020 7100 0726. Find out more about our Content Marketing Agency in London.