Community Discussion - How do you sync your marketing with your customers' experience?
-
Hi everyone!
This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says:
"What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community.
When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience."
It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?
-
This is something we've always done to some extent and we've been putting more of a focus on in the last few months, along with general UX.
A part of our sales process these days is about gathering information on the structure of a company, their brand and "voice" and what it is they're looking to achieve from the business ideally.
With that information, we can make sure our content and overall UX is on point with the rest of the company so it fits nicely. Our aim is to either integrate with or act as their marketing department and have everything look like a single, congruent package.
The last thing we want is for client websites to feel awkwardly out of place with the rest of the user experience.
-
For a small retail site, my content strategy hits three areas.
-
Customer Questions: These are questions that we are frequently asked by our customers. They often arrive by email or phone and can be complex to answer that way. So we write an article, clearly illustrated with photos and sometimes video and place this on the site in a content library. Over time this library will: A) reduce the number of emails and phone calls that you receive, B) allow you to answer the same question in the future with a link (which makes you look prepared and professional - and it saves time), C) it gives you a large customer-oriented website that gives you credibility in the eyes of a visitor, and, D) this library will pull a lot of traffic from search.
-
Basic Product Line Content: This is just basic info about the products that you sell. Their history, instructions for use, advanced uses for experienced owners, how to fix them, how to select them, new products, industry trends. This library should keep you busy for years.
-
Surprises: This is content that your visitor does not expect. It communicates things that they should know but they never thought to ask. Cool and novel things that customers have done and shared with you. How products have been used for community benefit. How charitable, educational, elderly, children's and other groups have used your products. Feature customers who are doing great things.
Every industry or important product line provides many opportunities to prepare all of the types of content above. When I hear people complain about boring industries, I know that they are just not into what they are doing. I don't sell manure or dirt but I know that I could produce awesome content for either of them if that was my biz.
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Have you changed 100's of links on your site? Tell me the why's, the how's and what's!
Hello there. If you've changed 100's of links, then I'd like for you to contribute to this thread. I've created a new URL structure for a website with 500+ posts in an effort to make it more user friendly, and more accessible to crawlers. I was just about to pull the trigger, when I started reading up on the subject and found that I might have a few surprises waiting for me around the corner. The status of my site. 500 posts 10 different categories 50+ tags No Backlinks No recent hits (according to Google Analytics) No rankings. I'm going to keep roughly 75% of the posts, and put them in different (new) categories to strengthen SEO for the topic which I'd like to rank multiple categories for, and also sorted a list with content which I'd like to 410. Created new structure created new categories Compiled list of old URLs, and new URLs New H1, Meta Title & Descriptions New tags It looks simple on paper, but I've got problems executing it. **Question 1. **What do I need to keep in mind when deleting posts, categories, and tags - besides 410, Google URL removal? Question 2. What do I do with all the old posts that I am going to re-direct? Each post has between 10-15 internal links. I've started manually removing each link in old posts before 301'ing them. The reason I'm doing this is control the UX, as well as internal link juice to strengthen main categories. Am I on the right path? On a side note, I've prepared for the 301'ing by changing the H1's, meta data and adding alt text to images. But I can't help but to think that just deleting the old posts, and copying over the content to the new url (with the original dates set) would be a better alternative. Any contribution to this thread would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | Dan-Louis1 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
E-commerce customer registration fields during account sign up
I work for an online print company and recently we were considering adding a field titled "industry" so that we could figure out what industry our customers are coming from. Has anyone seen anything either in favor or against adding this field during the customers account registration process. We understand that less is best however feel that it is important to better serve our customers. Any information on this subject would be very useful.
Web Design | | PrintPlace.com0 -
Looking for a developer with Network Solutions platform experience
Looking for a developer with Network Solutions platform experience. 714-744-1926Tony Ashford
Web Design | | OCFurniture0 -
Is it worth keeping .html even if 301'ing
We're going from static to a wordpress based ecommerce site. While we can append .html to urls the directory structure will change so that www.oursite.com/productname.html goes to www.oursite.com/product/productname.html My question is: Is it worth the trouble (from an seo perspective) of using a plugin to append new urls with .html when we're going to have to use 301 redirects anyway? If not should the urls have a trailing slash?
Web Design | | jbk3650 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0