Community Discussion - How do you sync your marketing with your customers' experience?

[MattRoney]

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?

[ChrisAshton]

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.

[EGOL]

For a small retail site, my content strategy hits three areas.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.