Olivia Atkinson
Live from #INBOUND2021
We attended the INBOUND2021 session led by Dr Tess Needham, centred around customer experience. Here we discovered how your Customer Success and Content Marketing can become A Love Story.
Effective content marketing speaks directly to your prospect's exact needs, answers their questions, and makes them smarter and more informed to help them do their job more effectively.
This blog provides tips for aligning content marketing and customer success to create customer-centric content that guides prospects along their journey, builds trust with your brand, and ultimately leads to growth.
What is Customer Experience?
- "How customers perceive their interaction with your company"
All roles in a company should be focused on the customer. Improved customer experience is a win-win-win. Your current customer is the same if not more important than your future customers. Especially in B2B, it's not just about your customers, but also your customers' customers.
Tess refers to 'Customer Success' and 'Content Marketing' as the main characters in a love story.
customer success
Customer success people are subject matter experts about your products. Typical activities would include:
- Onboarding new customers
- Often giving proactive customer support
- Helping customers get value from your products
- Deeply understand customers
- Writing documentation to grow customer expansion, things like NPS surveys
Content Marketing
Content marketing people make the customers smarter and better at their job. Typical activities would include:
- Writing blogs posts, website pages, reports, videos
- Creating education downloadable content like guides and ebooks
- Link market trends with the products
- Understand the position in the market
Why Align Customer Success and Content Marketing
Aligning the two together provides a better experience for prospects, customers, teams and businesses. Content is essential for growth and can help with customer retention and expansion. Customer success can lend expertise and customer insights.
- Supercharge customer growth by putting the customer first - everyone wins.
Tess refers to the alignment as a journey (very on-brand with HubSpot's customer journey)
It's personal
Get to know each other, it's about internal team relationships. Learning each other's strengths makes it easier to collaborate and create a foundation for communication.
Align
Tess shared a tip her and her team use, writing up their notes or goals and priorities and sharing them each week with the other teams. Sharing goals and metrics between the two teams ensures everyone is in the know and encourages alignment.
Listen
As a marketer, you can see what customers are saying on support tickets and also reach out directly, take note of what prospects are saying to the team before they come to a customer. Depending on how digital your sales activity is, you might have a recording of sales calls to hear what your customer is saying.
- Always come from a place of empathy - understand their pain points by talking from their point of view.
- Be relevant - tailor to their specific needs.
- Advocated for the customer when the customer can't be a part of the conversation.
- A really simple way of listening is just asking for feedback, and asking if there's something they want that you're not doing.
Pathways
Supercharge the customer experience by creating consistency with your brand. Think about the customer journey and tracing that journey through how the prospect comes to you a certain way. How did they become a customer? How did they see customer success? Review the touchpoints every time they react with your brand.
Multiple touchpoints mean you can consistently align marketing and success. Knowing your personas is key - are you presenting the right information to those people? Look at the points where they change from being a prospect to a customer, is it a smooth experience?
Their journey won't be linear, it might be searching for documentation, product pages.
Every page is a potential entry point and has to give enough information that they want to stick around and learn more.
Data
It's really important to be data-driven, use analytics to find those pathways customers are taking. Content analytics can help show what pages people are looking at, you can see if the data is reflecting what you want those journeys to be.
It can be easy to get too into the data and be single-minded. It can be just as simple as visiting your website through fresh eyes and pretending to be your persona and asking what things would frustrate you or cause friction.
Unlock
Unlock a bridge of communication internally between customer-facing roles and those creating the content. Customer-facing roles see trends and have the insight and knowledge of the client. The content team have the experience and understand the client position in the market.
Maximise
Make the most of your content, quality content takes skill and time to create. How can we squeeze more juice from that content? Creating multiple pieces of content from every idea, making sure that content is adapted for multiple platforms, whether that's a webinar, a CPD, an ebook or a guide.
Include customer stories - adding in that customer-centric framing but talking about a larger topic can make the customers feel valued.
Connect
Connect customers with other customers, create a network - enhance the value they get from your product or service. This is something quite unique that they wouldn't get anyone else.
Enable
Help customers to expand the adoption of your product internally - content marketing can help create content tailored to that account/company to spread the word internally on their own pain points for that customer.
When they're working together - they can identify specific pain points - and create resources that speak directly to customers.
Promote
Feature customers in the content, you can use NPS surveys to find customers that are promoters.
Why not invite your customer to speak at an event? Hear their story, make them feel valued. It's much more compelling for the customers to use their own voice.
Beware!
Be consistent with the voice - with both customer success and content marketing. Having a style guide can help with this. Getting other members of the team to review to ensure the tone is correct. Consider your personas when doing this - if you have a misalignment it could be a point of confusion for the customer.
The icing on the Cake!
Great customer success is a differentiation if you're in a saturated market. Why not share or showcase the people from the success team? It allows prospects to see who they'll be dealing with if they were to become customers.
Session Round-Up
Another great session from INBOUND2021. I had not intended this write up to be quite so long but there were so many great tips and suggestions that challenge how we can do better.
This approach suits the building and construction industry perfectly. Typically companies have teams of customer-facing roles, these are normally salespeople. It might be too much to ask for one person to solely manage customer success, but imagine how much your retention rate or repeat customers would grow?
One thing people love to see in construction are other people's projects and jobs, as they can relate to them. Imagine how valued as a customer you'd feel if you got asked to talk about a specific project on a companies behalf.
The session ended with some questions, and one was about sales content. Tess proposed that if you are creating any content for internal purposes, like a one-page sales document, put it on the website (it might need slightly tweaking). Find dual purposes for documents.
Another was about gated content. Content shouldn't be gated for your customers, it makes sense for lead generation (although some do advocate making all content being ungated) but for customers, you already have great relationships for it's not necessary.
Sales and marketing can be so disjointed, but really Sales do know the customer best and marketing or content writers do know how the company fairs against others and how they are positioned in their market. Why wouldn't they work together?
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.
Book A Free Consultation Today