Providing content is an opportunity to connect with your target audience through:
- The value of the information,
- Your point of view and
- Your voice.
Even if they don’t buy from you at first, if they like you and find your ideas interesting, they start to align with you psychologically, increasing the probability that eventually they will become customers.
Mohan Sawhney, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management says, “You can’t expect customers to tune in only when you have a product to launch,” he says. “You need to have a constant presence.” He cites five strategies for authentic customer engagement:
- Offer customers real value
- Build a customer community by asking for opinions and insights
- Inspire customers, perhaps by sharing your brand’s vision or making your brand an agent of social impact
- Provide entertainment value
- Keep the conversation going by being constantly engaged with customers
Content can drive customer engagement across each of these dimensions, building and nurturing relationships along the way. Let’s examine how.
Content as something of real value
Depending on your business, you can develop how-to guides, tools and training that your customers find valuable and engage with you to access and use. People consider video to be high value, so consider delivering how-to content and training that way, although people also give downloadable how-to guides high marks.
Infographics are also near the top of the content value chain. Why? Done well, they communicate important statistics or data comparisons and trends simply in memorable visuals. People like to share infographics, too. Why? Because they can confer authority and credibility on the person who shares them. Be sure to facilitate sharing of much of your content, but especially infographics.
Video interviews with experts or even other customers who relate their stories about how your business has solved problems for them also generate high interest among audiences.
Other value content ideas include:
- Resource guides and thoughtful reviews
- Reports and white papers sharing research or data insights
- Case studies
Content as a means for building a customer community
Content that encourages audience participation includes user-generated media that contributes to moment-in-time content like a yearbook or event-driven collection of stories, photos, audio clips, video clips, music, etc.
Interviews with customers—or by customers—about timely, relevant topics or issues provide video, audio or text-based content that you can post to your blog, social media, website or podcast.
Content that inspires customers
Here is where your point of view becomes paramount. Thought leadership content in the form of videos, articles, blog posts, presentations, white papers, etc. are excellent vehicles for
communicating your brand’s vision or your insights about trends that affect your customers or industry.
Other thought leadership content that has the potential to inspire your customers include conducting or sponsoring surveys or comprehensive research studies covering issues of importance to them, and subsequently publishing the results through sponsored articles, news releases or reports.
Also, the stories you share about your business and its initiatives on your website and social media, or through email newsletters, for example, create impressions that resonate and accumulate over time with your target audiences.
Email, web and social media content focused on your social responsibility or charitable cause support activities shares important facets of your corporate character that customers otherwise wouldn’t see.
Content that entertains
Think about entertainment value two ways when it comes to content. First, there is content as entertainment…brand-sponsored online games, for example, can help build customer engagement.
Second, there is the entertainment value with which you imbue most of your “regular” content, and that manifest in your voice and design.
Content that constantly engages
Finally, Sawhney says, keep the conversation going by being constantly engaged with customers—always innovating, responding to customer concerns as they arise, and nipping service problems in
the bud via timely, tactful communication.
“You can’t expect customers to tune in only when you have a product to launch,” he says. “You need to have a constant presence.”
Some people respond to information, ideas, thoughts. Others respond to controversy or an alternative perspective on topics and trends. But don’t manufacture an opposing point of view that isn’t fact-based and in the true best interests of your audience because it likely won’t stand the test of time.
Instead, focus on the customers’ needs that your product or service addresses. What affects them? How are they changing? Are there alternative solutions? Are there other factors they could address to amplify or mitigate their needs?
This brings us back to Professor Sawhney’s prescriptions because focusing on these things with content will naturally lead you to innovations and service that grow and strengthen your customer base.