3 Steps to better Understand your Customers' Content Needs in 2015

According to the Content Marketing Institute at least 58% of the businesses have set aside a higher budget for the content marketing and research for the new year 2015. Now their aim is to get to know their customers better to get an adequate return on that budget.

Why must we get to know our customers better than we did in 2014? The most basic difference between content marketing and traditional advertising is an acute focus on our customers’ needs. Obviously, we have to find an overlap between our customers’ needs and our business goals. But content marketing doesn’t work if we don’t deeply empathize with our customers.

Talk To Customers

Big data, for better or for worse, is not a substitute for actually asking your customers questions about their research process and informational needs.

 The questions used to frame the conversation include:

•   What caused you to look for a solution?

•   What did you want to change?

•   Where did you go to look for information?

•   How do you prefer to consume information?

•   Who else helped to evaluate the choice?

•   What pushback did you get?

•   What did you need to build the business case?

•   Why did you choose us?

•   When it comes to the opportunities to improve your business function, what are you most excited about?

•   What aspects of your passions and interests overlap with your occupation?

The final two questions are quite important to understanding your customers at a truly human level.

Validate & Tweak With Web Analytics

For this purpose we use Advanced Segments in Google Analytics. It allows you to define groups of website visitors based on the following criteria:

•   Demographics. Segmentation by age, gender, language and location.

•   Technology. Segmentation by operating system, browser, and device.

•   Behavior. Segmentation by how often a user visits a site and how they interact with the site.

•   Traffic Sources. Segmentation by referral sites and campaigns.

For each of my persona groups, we use the Advanced Segment Reports to answer the following questions:

•   Do they actually behave differently than they suggested in the interviews?

•   What else do they want that was not revealed in the interviews?

•   What do they suggest is an important informational need in an interview, but clearly does not lead to a purchase based on web activity?

The combination of persona interviews and web analytics reports should arm you with a better understanding of that overlap between your customers’ needs and your business goals. You may think we are done and ready to spend the increased budget we garnered, but alas we’re not done.

Craft A Customer Empathy Map

Based on the previous two exercises, we have identified the what customers want and how they generally behave. What we have not yet identified is how they feel.

David Gray, founder of XPLANE, developed a template for an empathy map to fill in the blanks to this sentence: Our users need a better way to ___ because ___.
The questions that asked are

• How do customers think about their fears and hopes?
• What do they hear when other people use your product?
• What do they see when they use your product? What is the environment?
• What do they say or feel when using your product, whether in private or public?
• What are their pain points when using your product?
• Is this a positive or a painful experience for them?
• What does a typical day look like in their world?
• Do they hear positive feedback about your company from external sources?
• What do they hope to gain from using your product?
• Has your customer repeated quotes or defining words?

These are the questions you pose to your internal stakeholders and lead to the conclusions you post in the grid.

We should recognize that our customers are more than web visitors. They are more than their social media posts. They are people with aspirations, fears, challenges and opportunities. We need a combination of qualitative research, quantitative research and group brainstorms to empathize with our customers at a deep level.

We hope this helps you in planning your business’s content marketing.

 Fin J