Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the “meaningfulness” of a brand are terms that come up a lot when a marketing strategy is being considered. But what does this mean for the content that will be part of the plan? For the most part, this means engagement. The big questions a brand needs to consider are: Will the customer like the content? Will they believe it? Will they respond to it? If the content strategy is considering these aspects of CRM, they will have happy customers and, according to CRM Expert Paul Greenberg, the customers’ happiness is key to whether they decide to choose to return to a brand or not.
Will The Customer Like The Content?
In order to determine what will delight a customer, a brand must know what it’s audience and their likes/dislikes. This can be determined by narrowing down demographics and looking toward what their ideal customer is engaging in on a regular basis. The type of produce content will vary widely based on demographics such as age, sex, economic status and even regionally. For this reason, one of the most important aspects is knowing exactly who your customer is. Once a brand has clearly defined this customer, content directed at what they are interested in can be produced.
Will They Believe It?
Believing in the content goes hand-in-hand with the “meaningfulness” of the brand. Whether a customer trusts a company or not is integral here. In research done by Havas Media Group, it was determined that North Americans are the least trusting when it comes to popular brands. Overcoming this natural distrust Americans have with branding can be done with transparency and providing customers with the expert opinions they need when making decisions. Content is actually at an advantage in this case because it does not have to necessarily sell to the customer, up its credibility as a source of information right off the bat.
Establishing credibility and coming up with a topic that the customer is interested in engaging with is the key here, according Maggie Jones at Marketo’s blog. She points out that companies should carve out a few areas of expertise and that’s where their blogs and content should be focused.
Will They Respond?
Although this is the hardest element of a content strategy to predict, knowing the way a consumer will respond to content is not out-of-reach. Using tools like analytics on social media and blogs, as well as manually reading comments and looking at why people are sharing your content, you can get to know the audience and their habits. It can be useful to create a document or use a program that tracks this kind of information, so that it will be ready to be analyzed after a set amount of time; this blog for example tauts Toggl, but you can also outline your own method.
Creating content has one goal: to engage the customer in a way that makes them want to return. If a brand takes these questions into consideration, over time their CRM and content will collide to make the dialogue that exists between them and the consumer a happy one.
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