Increase Time Spent Talking with Customers

In the pre‐pandemic era, the first step in the content marketing planning process was to define your purpose and set your goals. (I know because I’ve taught courses on the five core elements that belong in an effective or successful content marketing plan.)

But this approach often led many of the least successful content marketers to prioritize their organization’s sales/promotional message over their audience’s informational needs.

In the post‐pandemic era, it’s now more important than ever to avoid a product and sales orientation and embrace a market orientation and customer focus. And the best way to do that today is to increase the time content marketers spend talking with customers.

B2B salespeople will argue that they’re already doing this. But research has found that they’re talking with customers about different things than B2B marketers should focus on.

In fact, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, in partnership with WARC and Lions, undertook a major study to analyze the effectiveness of 10 years of B2B marketing campaigns, and to replicate the Lions and WARC B2C study, The Effectiveness Code.

Following were among the key findings of The B2B Effectiveness Code:

• For B2B brands to grow, they require a better balance of short‐term sales activation and long‐term brand building. In addition, they need a greater focus on large audiences who aren’t necessarily “in the market” today, as well as more use of emotion to connect deeply and powerfully with B2B purchasers.
• But their data showed that B2B marketing currently skews heavily toward short‐term, rational, and tightly targeted campaigns that seek to drive immediate sales effects. Their data also found the use of long‐term campaigning, broad targeting, and emotional creative work were largely absent from B2B marketing.

For B2C marketers, it’s more challenging to increase the time spent “talking” with consumers. We can’t hold more focus groups muffled by masks these days. But we can do the following:

• Use qualitative, quantitative, and digital techniques to gather customer insights.
• Design customer surveys, conduct market research, and analyze the data to identify or validate who our customers are as well as what they need and expect.

In Chapter 1, this is Step 3 in the process of developing a digital marketing strategy. But let me add this tactical advice: you can conduct a website survey that asks visitors three key questions—for free.

In a post entitled, “The Three Greatest Survey Questions Ever,” which was published in July 2015 on Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik said these key questions are:

• What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• (Conditional, if No) Why were you not able to complete your task?
• (Conditional, if Yes) What could we have done to make your experience delightful?

And, I might add, there’s no better way for content marketers to get “a seat at the table” than by being the “voice of the customer.”