Building a content marketing guide to motivate your customers

No content marketing guide would be complete without taking a deep dive into the psychology that motivates your customers (or buyers) to action. Continuing on from choosing the right content for your business, that’s exactly what we’re about to do.

You really need to know your customers in order to look critically at what motivates them to action, especially when choosing content as the motivator. And you need to know what sorts of processes they go through before making a buying decision.

So how do you get to know what sorts of content your customers would not just like, but trust enough to buy from?

1. Know thy customer and you can’t go wrong. Building your own content marketing guide is the first step to success. By that, I mean think about:
   What you want from content marketing in terms of aims and goals
2. Researching SEO and the terms you will need to include
3. Sitting down with a pen and paper and ponder how your customers discover new things and consume content

 It’s the latter where our focus is today. 

Ask yourself questions like:

• Do my customers like to do their own research? If the answer is yes, using blogging, guest blogging and article sharing via social media are great ways to win them over so they can soak in your information at different touch points.
• Do my customers have a lot of time on their hands? If the answer is no, using short forms of content, visually based content that is easy to scan, or content that is delivered direct to the customer such as newsletters are your best bet. Make buying your product a quick, scanning job.
• Do my customers care about the environment and causes? If the answer is yes, try making your social media a place to share information about the sorts of things your customers would support and help spread the community message.

Think about what would motivate your customer to look for your product, what would motivate them to choose you over your competitors, and use this to help design your content marketing guide and your endeavours going forward.

Where do my customers go for their news and information?

Having a blog for people who don’t read, or popping up on Facebook when all your audience have joined Twitter makes even the best content redundant. Always match the channel with the customer.

It can sound complex and that you need to run focus groups, yet a lot of the best information available to you for your content marketing guide resides in places you already have access to.

Think about places such as:

• Google Analytics and other places for reporting
• Social media analytics 
• Call centre call logs or studying the frequently requested information in customer emails
• Anecdotally from staff that deal with customers the most – so customer service, your technical support, sales staff etc

A quick rule of thumb in choosing sources for your content marketing guide:

• If your customers often ring you to ask short questions, have a Facebook and Twitter presence so you can not only answer those short questions there, but have other customers with similar queries see the response.
• If your customers often have the same problem that you need to email or talk them through, pop it into a blog and regularly cycle it through your marketing and social media.
• If you know the common objections you get from your customers, use Q and A pictures via social media to allay those fears through giving the appropriate response.
• If your prospects really want to dig deep and get to know you before they make a purchase or become loyal customers, record and share podcasts on topics related to your business so they can soak in your information.
• If your customers want to be stepped through an idea or a process, use visual mind maps, video or slide presentations, or explainer videos.

And this is simply the beginning of the choices of content available to you.

The name of the content game is to think how people self educate, and use that format to tell your product story. Next, we’re going to look at if you have time for content production.

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