Good morning, readers! Today, we’ll unlock the door to improved customer experiences, will discover the secrets of successful content generation, will find out how we can tell if we’re engaging our customers in the right way and will find out what one survey says is a top concern among mid-market businesses.
One key to improved customer experiences? Simplified content.
It’s no secret that content marketing is a huge part of any marketing team’s overall marketing efforts. But is your marketing team one of the many that falls victim to underestimating the direct impact it can have on customer experiences? You’re not alone, says says Mark Nardone in Martech Advisor, pointing out that only 21% of the marketers his firm PAN Communications surveyed indicated that they were “ahead of their competitors” when it came to the strength of their content marketing program.
So how do you boost your content marketing efforts to the next level? One suggestion Mark gives it to revisit and maintain your buyer personas. In their survey, PAN noted that less than half of marketers made frequent persona or content strategy updates. “If your business is evolving—and if the industry is evolving—then so are your customers,” Mark said. Read the rest of Mark’s tips here.
Content generation secrets
There’s nothing like staring at a blank Google doc with the cursor blinking in the upper left-hand corner to give all of us a bit of anxiety—especially any marketer who’s tackling content generation tasks. What do you do when the deadline is just around the corner but every idea you come up with for “new” content has already been done?
In an article on Business2Community, Eva Webster talks about this specific situation, and gives actionable tips on how to overcome the writer’s block blues. For example, Eva recommends approaching content from the point of view of sharing. Have you seen a recent case study that could relate back to your business or your audience? Write about it within the context of your business and link to the case study itself. Is someone in the industry or one of your clients doing something interesting? There you go—there’s another topic that has the potential for generating lots of mileage and interest in your content. Check out Eva’s other ideas for coming up with new content here.
Customer engagement: are you getting it right?
Your customer engagement strategies are working well, and your customers are completely satisfied with your frequency of communication and the method by which you communicate, right? Do you know this for certain, or are you just assuming? According to Ernan Roman in CustomerThink, unless you are engaging in two-way dialogue and providing value-added communications, it’s the latter—and your business may be in real trouble by the time you find out what customers really think.
To get customer engagement right, Ernan says, you must think of it as either high-value engagement or NO engagement, with no in-between. Customers have higher expectations for CX excellence, and they feel “entitled to demand the best or go elsewhere!” Ernan urges marketers to “utilize new avenues for engagement” including “tablets, phones and smartwatches” for brick-and-mortar sales, and reminds us about the importance of responsiveness when designing personalized content. Read all of Ernan’s tips for customer engagement here.
Survey says: Security is a top priority
Mid-market leaders are concerned about information security—that’s one of the key takeaways from a survey performed by Deloitte Private as reported in Martech Series. The survey, which reached 500 executives from mid-market companies with annual revenues ranging from $100 million to a little more than $1 billion, found that in general this boost in technology is causing companies to augment their workforces rather than downsize.
Additionally, these mid-market companies are interested in analytics, with nearly 60 percent of respondents indicating that they’re using analytics for sales and customer management activities and 48 percent saying that they use analytics for marketing. Read more of the survey results and see how your own business stacks up here.
