Mistake 2: Writing content without learning how your customers talk
According to a study by CEB, 90% of B2B businesses have turned to content marketing to get access to buyers in the early stages of the purchase process. But the term Content Marketing brings it with the baggage of “industry best practices” and content writing tips that promise to be effective in any use case.
This is a chapter from “The Big Book of Marketing Mistakes”. It is a place where I am documenting lessons from mistakes made in my journey as a marketer. Join me as I experiment, fail, learn, grow and succeed.
It was my first week as a content strategist at Pipemonk and Vijay Sharma (a friend and mentor) had come to see how things are shaping up. He wanted to see my vision for content marketing at early stages of Pipemonk. Within seconds, I started drawing a neat looking Content Marketing landscape that included everything from blog writing, lead nurturing, social media promotion and what not. After 4–5 minutes of drawing and explaining, I paused to take questions. The plan looked like a sketched version of this:
Vijay asked me a simple straightforward question. “Tell me about 3 problems that your ideal customer faces”.
I was dumbfounded. All the theoretical knowledge I had gained around content and inbound marketing failed to help me. Till then I had not taken efforts to actually understand the end customer and learn how he/she talks.
I course corrected. For the next 3–4 months I mostly did customer support and community engagement. Lot of my time was invested into engaging with community forums, handling email support tickets, managing live chat support etc. I was not shy of grabbing any opportunity that came across to talk to a target customer.
Good content attempts to solve a problem for the reader. Writing content without deeply knowing how your customers talk about their problems seems foolhardy.
When I transitioned to a full time marketing role within some months, I had powerful insights about the type of communication that will work. The customer interactions showed its impact as our organic search volume increased. I didn’t make assumptions about the content to use in landing pages. Whenever I found it hard to finalize the type of sentence/verbiage to use in a blog post, I would fall back on the learnings from forums, support tickets and live chat transcripts.
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