For experienced marketers, it’s no surprise that understanding the motivations of buyers and what influences them can be instrumental for creating persuasive content marketing campaigns.
While that statement makes sense intellectually, old habits die hard.
Most marketers continue to focus on how digital channels like email, social networks and search work vs. how customers understand those platforms or even why they use them. Day after day, content is being created and keyword optimized by marketers with little more than intuitive insight into customer interests and preferences for content discovery, consumption or engagement.
So, how do you go about discovering opportunities for customer influence and applying them in your content marketing to be more persuasive and effective?
- Find stories that represent examples of customer that have made the transition from previous behaviors to the desired behaviors and outcomes. “I used to think this, then I found out that, and that’s why I use/buy from company 123.” Whether the goal is to change from one product/service to another or to shift thinking about a brand, those stories that are tailored specifically for the personas for each major segment of the target audience can provide the information and inspiration needed to make fundamental changes in their awareness, perception, acceptance and transition to the brand’s desired outcome.
- Make success stories part of the bigger story for influential content. As success stories of transitioning from the old ideas to the new are told, it’s important to find and promote early successes as well as create a process for engaging with prospects, conversion and implementation. Success stories can be small, tactical examples or more strategic and comprehensive. The role of search in such a scenario is to optimize for discovery but also to analyze search data, interactions and conversions for continued efforts at message refinement. The same attention to social analytics would also apply. In the end, those success stories can become the spokespeople for future growth, engagement and conversion.
- Make change easier with relevant, persuasive content. There’s a lot of opportunity to bring in customer insight and brand storytelling into content marketing optimization and communications. Digging into the “why” for customers and understanding their motivations and influences will help content marketers better understand how to become more persuasive in a way that creates better customer experiences and sells more product.
Thank you for working with TopRank and please do not hesitate to contact me directly with any questions or ideas on how we can serve you better.
Customer Insights are Key for More Persuasive Marketing Content
