You Only Need These 3 Things for Customer-Centric Marketing
Weaving Together the 3 Principles of Customer-Centric Content Marketing
For me, utilizing content to do the work of marketing is an organic process where disparate fibers are woven together to create a colorful fabric that becomes a cohesive whole—both beautiful and serviceable. Once you’re familiar with all the available threads and have a catalog of stitch motifs from which to draw, it’s a matter of weaving them together, in and out through different channels, formats and vehicles. Thinking through my process as a content weaver, I settled on three key principles I’ve adopted over time as a guide. They keep the customer at the center, help craft a message that resonates with that actual person and flow logically and directly into creative, authentic content.
1. Solve a Problem, Don’t Sell a Product. Whatever you do, don’t start with product benefits and value props. It’s not that these aren’t helpful and important. It’s just… real people don’t think this way. So start by thinking deeply about your customers and their problems. How could you help them? If you are your customer, use your own life to come up with ideas. If your reality is very far from your customer’s, find a way to get close. You already have the tools needed for this: curiosity, empathy and imagination.
If possible, find people you personally know who are within your target audience and talk to them.
Talk to people who know these customers. Salespeople in your company can be a solid resource here.
Read novels with central characters who are like your customers.
Really dig into customer research and read between the lines to garner helpful nuggets of insight that reveal a customer’s problem hiding in plain sight.
2. Add the “You Get.” One of the most impactful grad classes I took was on classic rhetoric and how those roots infuse modern sales and marketing. My brilliant professor at the University of Cincinnati, the late Mary Beth Debs, PhD, collapsed centuries of thinking to help us understand how Aristotle’s framework is still relevant today. She also hammered home that all audiences are always looking to see “what’s in it for me.” Her advice was simple, easy to remember and ultra-effective: add “you get” whenever and wherever you can. Literally those two words.
I challenge you to try this for yourself. Whenever you’re writing anything aimed at getting a customer to buy something, see if you can phrase it to include a “you get.” When you do this well, you get better results. It can also help you get to the point more quickly.
3. Create Helpful Content. Now get out there and actively help your customers with their pain points.
What blog post can you publish with unbiased, authentic information that’s aligned to how your customers think and act?
How can you package that story up in social?
What can you add to your home page that brings that problem-solving, customer-centered approach to life?
When you’re thinking up your next email campaign, use that angle to spark your subject line, headlines and body copy. Link to more helpful content on your site.
Before long, your customers will think of you as a problem-solving partner they can come back to again and again for solutions and content that improve their lives.
I used Napkin AI to create this graphic based on inputting my article!
