It’s commonplace for most of the initial interaction between customers and your brand to happen without human contact. Potential customers are typically well down the buyer’s journey before they actually raise their hand to indicate that they want to communicate with you regarding a potential purchase (this is especially true for SMB buyers).
Here are 7 questions to determine whether your content is improving or worsening your customer experience:
1. Is your content reflective of what your customers want or is it reflective of what product marketing wants?
2. Is your content omni-channel? Different buyers consume content different ways so it is critical to serve up your content in a variety of ways.
3. Can visitors quickly find what they are looking for and then find more?
4. Have you identified the major personas and created content accordingly. Which leads me to…
5. Is your content personalized? Have you leveraged your marketing automation and CMS capabilities so you are serving the right content to each individual site visitor?
6. Is your content exceptional or just “good enough?” This is especially critical when it comes to content for SMBs. Why? Because:
a. there is so much SMB content out there, and
b. most of it is merely obvious stuff, and
c. some content even gives bad or false information
7. Do you have the right content for each of the steps in the buyer’s journey?
Bonus: Are there links from your content to product information and/or checkout for when the buyer is ready to buy? SMB buyers want solutions and want them to be easy. So it is critical to make the transition between content and the transaction seamless.
Consistently serving up a great customer experience is hard. But consider this — content is much easier to control than your hundreds or thousands of sales and customer support people. So, the next time you publish an article, make sure it is great. Your brand is at stake.
