What you write in your lead generation and marketing content directly impacts the actions your prospects will take. When your content is detached, dull, and dry, prospects ignore it. To engage, get more leads, and ultimately sell more, you have to create a customer experience that brings to life the experience of working with your company from first interaction through delivery.
HOW TO GET STARTED
Customer experience spans both marketing and sales. Often we only think of it as post-sale customer service. Or, nurturing an email list to try to create engagement and convert contacts to MQLs.
Customer experience is more than the beginning and end of the Buyer’s Journey. It starts with lead generation strategies and continues all the way through sales account management.
Marketing Content
Consider the marketing content you produce and how it portrays the experience you want prospects to feel as they engage and move through the sales process with your company. Are you using descriptors and providing information they need from your website, downloads, articles, lead generation campaigns, webinars, videos, and more? Have content for the complete Buyer’s Journey.
Sales Process
Traditionally the sales process was a salesperson’s domain. Marketing stopped at lead generation except for brochures and case studies. That’s not the case anymore.
Sales reps can use sales sequences (short email campaigns designed for the middle of the sales process) that marketing creates to expand the customer experience beyond sales meetings.
Marketing can run targeted campaigns specifically for mid-sales process opportunities. If you don’t inject customer experience into the sales process, how will clients know what it’s like to work with you? Why will they want to work with you?
Align Marketing and Sales
A well-designed Customer Experience Plan translates into closed business. Even better, it creates long-term clients. It doesn’t look at marketing in a silo off on its own. It doesn’t assume the sales process is something that simply happens.
A Customer Experience Plan aligns the marketing content with the sales process so they are supporting each other’s objectives. It provides prospects and clients the type of information they need to personify the experience of working with you to solve their problems and grow their businesses. Team marketing and sales together to demonstrate what it’s like to work with your company.
EXAMPLES OF HOW TO PUT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN MARKETING CONTENT
Here are some examples of how you can use marketing content to infuse customer experience at different points of the Buyer’s Journey and create excitement, interest, and desire to work with your company.
Lead Generation
You want to inspire curiosity in your prospects from the very beginning of the Buyer’s Journey. You want them to ask themselves, “What is this problem I’m being made aware of? Do I have this problem?” Your marketing content and lead generation campaigns need to serve the dual purpose of both making prospects aware of the problem you solve AND that they are not alone in facing the problem. Provide them educational content and testimonials. Give them hope that you have the solution they need.
Requirements Gathering
This is a sales phase. It’s not uncommon to leave it up to the salesperson to know the customer experience they should be creating. You expect them to use consultative selling techniques to do it. Marketing content can support the sales team throughout Requirements Gathering.
Educational content, visuals, process flows, case studies, and even email campaigns are all helpful resources for the sales team. Now it’s not all up to your salesperson to convey how valuable it is to work with you. Prospects can feel it and are eager to move more quickly to a decision.
Close the Sale
The proposal has been made. At this point, prospects should feel energized, confident, and relieved to almost have this problem off their plate.
While sales is waiting for prospects to wrap up the final details to move forward, marketing content can continue reinforcing what it will be like to work with your company. It can highlight what comes after the decision to remove uncertainty and create excitement, showing that you are best positioned to help them.
YOUR UNIQUE APPROACH TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Each business will have its own unique approach to the customer experience. The goal is to find an approach for your company that spans the entire Buyer’s Journey in your marketing content. If you can build that for your prospects, it will pay dividends in conversion rates, win rates, sales, and customer retention.
Developing compelling content that says what you want and resonates with prospects is hard. If you would like someone to take content development off your plate and do it for you, that’s what we do. We’ll create a strategic content strategy that combines customer experience, SEO strategy, and your branding. Then we’ll start creating the content for you, every month. Contact us at [email protected] to share your vision, and we’ll recommend which types of content will have the greatest impact with your target markets.
