Everybody in the digital marketing business is adjusting their tent to accommodate the increasing importance of content. Some go as far as calling it the “king of marketing.” So, it’s safe to say the amount of content being produced is increasing daily. But how much of this is custom content that meets the goals of customer engagement? Probably not much.
The major challenge in these competitive times is to produce unique, custom content. It must connect with customers on a higher level than ever before. With technology advancing at the speed of light, custom content may just be the answer to solve this challenge.
If your content is the food to entice your customers to have a taste of your brand, custom content is their favorite treat. It has to provide them with an extraordinary experience every time. We keep talking about making an impact, but how are brands going to do so in the light of increasing competition?
Consumers see countless advertising messages from brands wishing to rise above the rest. Are you ready to break through this chatter? Custom content helps brands meet consumer needs much more effectively than generalized content.
Consumers will beat a path to the site that offers product information useful to them and products to help satisfy their needs. They need content that gives them a perfect fit for their needs and wants.
When you make custom content to market your products to specific customers, it can increase traffic to your site. It is not your physical product that matters but the value your products and services can offer to your market. Thus, your ability to communicate the value to your customers can best shine through to them through custom content.
What Does Custom Content Really Mean?
Accenture found 73% of consumers preferred businesses offering a personalized customer experience. Customers will be ready to give anything for an experience that feels personal and meaningful to their specific needs.
If the content is not valuable to the personas you want to read it, it is less content than just purposeless writing. The goal of custom tailored content is to achieve specific marketing goals and objectives.
Your content has to communicate your brand promise to different buyer personas, answering their needs. Marketing-oriented custom content should discuss your products and product attributes in a way that makes them valuable and relevant to your customers. When you become relevant to your existing customers, your audience naturally begins to grow.
Think of custom content as addressing your customers directly. You deliver the exact solution they need. Of course, custom content naturally draws in the people whose interest it piques. This content has to specifically target their expectations.
Identify Your Buyer Personas
“Do you think you know your customers as much as you need to?” is a question that brands should regularly ask themselves. Of course, only continuous customer research can answer this question.
There is nothing you can do in marketing without knowing the consumers or target market you wish to serve. You need to identify your buyer personas because they will serve as a guide to customizing your content in line with their needs. Personas are a collection of the characteristics that your ideal customers have. If your content is not attracting and sustaining their interest, there is a problem somewhere.
The deeper you get into segmenting your customers as a result of differences your buyer personas has uncovered, the more effective you can develop different content that can address these differences.
Often, brands make the mistake of using buyer personas they created when drafting their marketing plan. Not updating these can be a deadly mistake. Customers change and it’s easy to miss a customer segment that might benefit from the products you offer.
Always update the customer database that can make you miss opportunities to serve your market better. Always research to ensure your content speaks to the right audience. Your custom content must change with their needs and preferences.
How to Make Custom Content for Your Products
Today’s customer looks to research to gather information about brands. They make their selections based on content that includes solutions to their problems. In the information search process, they look for social proof. They need to know others also liked the products by finding and reading reviews, ratings, and recommendations. At the end of the day, they make a final selection based on their identity and what will satisfy their needs.
However, before you think of personalizing your content, you must develop your brand such that you can identify and establish what you stand for as a brand, your core values, and goals, among others. You need to figure out what differentiates you from your competitors i.e. the distinguishing service and other benefits that customers should expect from you and strive to promote it to your customers. Marry your brand identity with the content you are developing for a quality production.
Finally, gauging its strength by grading content effectiveness will point you in the right direction toward creating winning custom content.
Personalize Your Website
It is important for brands to help users find useful value through the content you produce. Have you ever wondered why a lot of persons will go to a website and see different versions of the site? That is the power of personalization and it is one that can give you great conversions.
The truth is that people visit websites for so many reasons. The biggest mistake you can make is to create your content to satisfy a specific intention. Lots of websites often try to generalize their content in a bid to satisfy the needs of their customers on a general level.
You can personalize your content by displaying different content to different visitors to your site. No wonder Blair Lyon said: “creating a one-to-one customer experience significantly contributes to customers that are highly engaged and this, in turn, has a direct impact on the bottom line of the merchants. Custom content helps you target content to different people where it matters most based on their buyer personas.
Content customers see when searching for information should not be the same others see when trying to buy from you. Making custom content means you speak the language of these different groups. You have to make them feel like the site is solely for them.
To do this, data is collected about your site visitors and content can be personalized according to their location, the device used, a record of their search keywords, the frequency of their visit, their customer history, and so much more.
Some sites go the extra mile to make the buying process easier for their customers by converting the price of their product to the local currencies of their buyers, reducing the friction of checking out. They are rewarded with faster checkout and of course, more paying customers.
Personalize Your Email Campaigns
Email marketing has become much more popular as a cost-effective channel that encourages long-term interactions between a brand and its customers and helps build brand awareness. As we already know, email marketing is a communication channel where our content can shine through to targeted prospects. Customize your emails to your individual customers.
Users express a desire for further interaction when they subscribe to an email list. The major obstacle is getting the customers to accept to subscribe to your brand. Custom content specifically designed for their needs and wants can get their foot in the right place.
Through email marketing, brands have the opportunity to interact with customers where it matters most – their inbox, which they often check on a daily basis. Care should be taken to ensure that they are not bombarded with too many messages to avoid being sent to spam.
The most important thing to note is that you should ensure that relevant product content will always keep them expecting more. Email marketing also affords brands the golden opportunity of getting their message across to customers directly and on a regular basis. Hence, the tone of the message and the content matters a lot. Apply personal touch across all correspondences sent across from welcome mail to future email correspondence.
Personalize Your Social Media Campaigns
Social media platforms are popular media platforms to increase the awareness of brands. You need to know the platform your buyer personas make use of. The one that they are most comfortable interacting with.
Make your social correspondences much more personal to increase conversions. In order to do this right, there is need to have the right data at your fingertips. This will help you know your audiences better and target messages to their specific needs. Your content should be such that it captures the interest of your audience at every point in their journey.
As much as it is important to be consistent, do not make the mistake of dishing out the same message across all your social media platforms. This is because these platforms all need different writing styles and content to be efficient digital channels. Discover the best strategies that work best for each platform and use it to generate deeper engagement.
Listen and listen really hard. Social media platforms give you room to converse with your audience and know their pain points on a personal level. This will help you address these problems with effective solutions that satisfy your customers.
Make a decision on the voice you wish your brand to be identified with. This goes to show that your messages should be communicated in a consistent brand voice across all platforms you engage your customers on. This should be in line with the personas your message is addressing. Of course, your voice cannot be rigid or professional if you wish to appeal to teenagers or younger audiences.
The goal here is finding effective ways to engage your customers. It is important your customers feel heard and important. This is why you should answer questions and reply to comments in a timely manner.
The Advantage of Custom Content
Making custom content builds the environment for the sustenance of a long-term relationship with your customers. This is because your product will always be relevant and of interest to your customers and they will keep coming back to you. When your customers are on your side, they can become brand ambassadors and help communicate your brand message for free across all the sales channels they use.
Making Custom Content Increases Customer Engagement
Custom content strives for engagement i.e. it seeks to engage your existing customers and not only attract new ones. It encourages first-time customers to stick around because of the custom content that you provide for them. A customer that initially planned spending seconds on your site will extend the time to minutes and become a frequent visitor.
Personalization of your content is important to the success of your digital marketing campaign because you create relevant and valuable experiences that make them feel connected and understood. You can target messages based on previous purchase histories of customers and suggest relevant options for customers, thereby increasing conversions.
According to statistics from knexusgroup.com, 56% of consumers prefer to shop at retail stores offering personalization. An astounding 74% confessed seeing content that didn’t match their interests was frustrating. On a similar note, they discovered that much more than ordinary adverts, personalized adverts convert ten times better.
Now you know that customizing your content makes it more valuable to your customers. This makes them engage more with you and deepens their relationship with your brand.
Position Yourself as an Authority
Customers spend so much time online and they become exposed to numerous content. Most consumers require content with a breath of authenticity and relevance. They want content that stands out above the noise.
The production of relevant content and useful guides to your target market will position you as an authority in your industry. This will set you apart and customers will always flock to your site in search of information because of the connection that has been formed.
The more you produce relevant content, the higher the customers who will become fanatics and cannot wait to consume your next production. To do this, your content should be accurate and transparent, such that it is seen as being authentic. This can do wonders for your online sales reputation.
To be authentic, brands must choose quality over quantity with the aim of engaging their customers and adding value to them at every interaction they have with you. You need to know your audience and develop content with their needs in mind. Consistency is the bow to wrap all your efforts in if you want to sustain interest and reduce customer churn.
Increases Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is the peak most brands hope to achieve. When customers are loyal to you, it shows that you have succeeded in attracting and nurturing them much more than competitors.
Customers are more likely to take a content that engages them viral so that others can appreciate it too.
Personalized experiences are naturally more engaging and memorable to your audiences, which can drive customer loyalty. Personalized experiences become easier to produce with the availability of data that the advent of digital mobile channels brought upon us. Thus, eCommerce retailers have ample opportunity to gather data about their customers from the different channels that they interact with and create a seamless customer experience.
Deep insights can be gathered from the data collected and through this, buyer personas are created. This will help firms understand their customers better and predict their preferences, thus provide content well suited to satisfy their needs.
We all know that customer loyalty is a hard currency to earn and it takes dedicated effort to gain it. Loyal customers will go far and beyond for brands they love and keep buying. Personalized and custom content can help you get them buzzing about your brand and all it stands for.
Increase Brand Visibility
In this current modern digital world, brand visibility is easier to get. This is because technology has made it easier for brands to engage directly with customers, obtaining feedback quickly in return.
With the internet, it becomes quite easy to make content available to a large number of people. The good side of it is that customers can get quick access to yours. The bad side is that they become cynical, having been exposed to defective and unappealing content. This is where custom content comes in. To make you stand out from your competitors, increasing the awareness of your brand.
The production of custom content attracts and satisfies customers, thus increasing the visibility of brands through recommendations and referrals. Creating content that is made specifically for customers can increase the chances that they will spread the word about you.
Your brand visibility increases when the people you write actually read the information you have to give. Custom content is quite different from disjointed text, producing markedly different results.
Finish Strong
As a brand, you may have produced the best content in the world but it seems not to be producing the desired results. It could be attributed to the fact that your content may be too generic without targeting any specific customer group. Thus, it always fails to connect to anybody, leading to poor conversion rates.
Customers desire content that shows them that you took the time out to know their needs because it is targeted at those needs. You need to get information that will be relevant and valuable to your customers to them. If this is done, it will help increase their engagement and deepen connections. This is why data is becoming a necessity to champion content marketing and personalized offerings.
Brands that stick to the memory of customers are those that deliver on their customers’ expectations in moments that matter to them. Often times, brands may not know the exact time that it will matter most to the customers. This is why it is important to ensure that there is consistent quality service delivery across all touch points with them.
Remember, no matter how customized your content is, you cannot go far without a solid content marketing strategy in place. A content marketing strategy will help you to be better prepared to deliver content that will form lasting impressions in the mind of your customers.
Now that you understand how important custom content is to a successful eCommerce business, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
