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Customer Experience Data and Insight Content Marketing Agency

How content marketing empowers you to understand your audience

Mediablaze

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September 7, 2021 | 5 min read

Today’s brands are awash with data, yet too many companies are harbouring multiple data silos and squandering valuable customer information instead of tapping into the power of a single customer view

Content marketing offers a powerful way to address this problem and enable brands to really get under the skin of their customers…

Marketers should start by defining (or refining) personas of their key types of customer based on data from their website and social channels, combined with their own knowledge. Holding a workshop with people from around the business is an effective way of building personas, with the focus on different customer motivations for engaging with the brand. From there, you can begin to describe typical customers with specific motivations.

Customer personas need a name, age, gender and occupation, and a photo, to bring them to life. This will help your team to empathise with them and, consequently, to create truly impactful content and experiences. (You can use our persona templates to help this process - download our whitepaper to gain access to these, see chapter 3.)

Once you have defined your personas, build them into your content briefs, along with the customer outcome you want to drive.

Targeting and segmenting your customers

A persona gives you an insight that you can test and, using the resulting data, refine. The simplest and most cost-effective way of doing this is to use the sophisticated targeting capabilities of social media to turn your personas into target segments that can be optimised.

For example, Facebook’s Audience Insights tool can help you learn more about your target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics and purchase behaviour. Custom audiences of the people who engage with your content can then be built, and you can reach new people who share similar interests through Lookalike Audiences.

Existing data also offers a valuable means of monitoring users’ activity on your website, enabling you to segment people by the type of content they engage with. Use surveys, quizzes and bespoke customer experiences to capture as much information as possible about existing customers.

Journey mapping and identifying barriers

Once you’ve started to identify different customer segments at individual touchpoints, such as social and email, you can start to develop a clearer picture of their customer journeys. To develop this, it helps to have a complete Brand Experience Map (see chapter 1 of whitepaper - you can download your copy of the whitepaper here).

Targeted campaigns will drive customers to your web site, enabling you to track their activity by creating a segment in your analytics. Take note of what content they engage with, but also where they drop off, and compare the results with other segments too.

Building trust and encouraging loyalty

Building loyalty among existing customers is as, if not more, important than winning new ones. One of the most valuable roles of brand content is to engender trust with your audience. This requires consistency and a certain level of personalisation.

A CRM system will enable you to segment your audience based on data such as location or past purchases, for example. This allows you to automate messages with targeted content.

Content campaigns can also be based around a customer’s position in their lifecycle. For example, if you’re selling mobile phones, new customers will need content to help them learn about their new handset, but 18 months later they’ll be seeking information about a replacement.

Building meaningful experiences

Once you have developed a deep understanding of your audience through the content they consume and the action it drives, you can start to build a customer experience to make your brand stand out and keep customers returning.

A digital product, such as a mobile app or interactive how-to video, is a sound investment when it meets specific and proven customer needs. It will boost customer loyalty, increase lifetime value and turn your core customers into firm advocates.

When Mediablaze worked with Speedo to build a swim-tracking app loaded with training content, it achieved over 100,000 signups in the first year and quickly became a social network for swimmers. Speedo was able to market directly to this audience and deliver a personalised experience.

The results were telling: customers who consumed Speedo content spent 32% more per transaction than those who didn’t.

Are you leveraging content marketing to really get your audience?

Talk to us

Identify and understand new customer prospects

This two-week programme uses in-depth search and conversation analysis to identify new potential audiences for your brand. It includes:

• SEO and search analysis

• Social listening

• Customer research to identify audience needs

• Sector and influencer reviews

We’ll deliver a report identifying and describing your customers and uncovering the right platforms, influencers and tactics to engage with them.

Call +44 (0)20 3176 2632 or visit mediablaze.com to find out more.

How to improve your content marketing in 2021

Many brands are looking for a more sophisticated approach to their content marketing which is why we’ve created an in-depth whitepaper to help you go from ‘good to great’. Produced by our specialist team of content strategists, this piece provides an operational and measurement framework for content marketing and clearly outlines how to up your content marketing game. Download our whitepaper now.

Customer Experience Data and Insight Content Marketing Agency

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