According to research from PwC, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, and 92% will abandon it after just two or three negative interactions.
To hit the mark on a top-notch engagement, organizations must commit to building a compelling customer experience. This requires a tailored strategy for every audience type – one that’s infused into every customer interaction and business decision. The primary way to create such an experience? Content.
However, a successful content strategy is no easy feat, and many businesses over promise and under deliver on their approach. Not only do they struggle with developing content, but they also lack the expertise and bandwidth to manage, monitor, and produce content that engages with key target audiences.
Content may be king, but it’s a crown not easily attained. The key to the throne is a proper plan of attack, which includes these five strategies:
- Enhance Your Content with SEO: Your business needs to first reach readers in order to connect with them, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be a foundational piece of your content strategy. SEO is a huge vehicle for driving organic traffic to your website, if done correctly. To execute an effective SEO strategy, weave keywords and rich phrases into every piece of relevant content. Be sure to do this thoughtfully so that the content still feels natural and flows nicely.
- Strengthen Content’s Impact via Social Media: While a steady cadence of blogs, whitepapers, videos, audio, and infographics on a business’s website is an important ingredient to a successful content strategy, you must also take a strategic approach to the main distribution of long-form content – social media. Take the time to properly create compelling and timely social media posts, actively engage in trending conversations, and respond to customer inquiries and complaints on behalf of clients on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and any other relevant platforms. Since many customers live in a social-first world, it’s now a required place to strengthen the connection between brands and customers.
- Manage Your Content in a 24/7 World: As content surges across digital media, fake news and misinformation spread exponentially. Organizations must stay ahead by adopting an effective approach to content moderation. From filtering malicious social media posts and product reviews to keeping up the 24/7 influx of user-generated content, organizations must find a way to effectively moderate content. Our advice? Leverage the right balance of human and machine, as AI solutions support human moderators by efficiently rating content for authenticity and determining accuracy. This makes the moderation process smarter and more agile.
- Ensure a Human-Centered Design Approach: Design thinking should be at the root of your content strategy. Marketing and design research, social listening, customer satisfaction surveys, warranty-data analysis, focus groups, and other methods will ensure a clear picture of your customer base. By adopting this approach, you craft messages based on customer needs and desires.
- Enlist Third-Party Expertise: Organizations don’t need to carry the full responsibility of content production on their backs. To keep up with high demands, partner with a content service vendor, such as Sutherland, that produces and manages compelling content at scale. These content services are customizable to meet the individual needs of clients. Leverage these services to optimize how customers, employees, partners, and the business interact in order to achieve business outcomes at scale.
These five steps will help lay the foundation for meaningful and interactive customer experiences. It will help your business find its voice and speak to customers in a way that’s truly meaningful. From there, customer engagement will come naturally, which will pay dividends in the long run.
Strong customer engagement is vital for cultivating loyalty and building long-term relationships. With an engaging content strategy in place, enterprises gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace by building trust with their customers through unique, consistent, and personalized experiences.
