The paths your audiences use to engage with content, make decisions, and buy are becoming increasingly complex. It’s never been more important to let people shop when, how, and where they want.
But how do you know what customers want? And how can you create content that engages and drives them to purchase?
We recommend starting by doing research to understand customers’ motivations, goals, and behaviors. That usually means creating experience maps and personas leveraging qualitative and quantitative research methods, like interviews, surveys, and analytics, to get a holistic picture of what your customers want – and whether you delivered. (For details about our suggested qualitative research methods and when to use them, click here.)
This approach helps you develop empathy for your customers, provides new insights, and identifies gaps and opportunities that can catapult your content efforts (and results!) forward. Taking a data-centered perspective also provides a clear way to take action, which gives disparate teams with varied goals an objective path forward.
You can leverage the insights you uncover to craft content that resonates with your audience, which will help with search visibility, user satisfaction, and engagement. But there are other applications as well. Think about how you can use your deeper knowledge of your customers and prospects to target your product roadmap, build loyalty programs, and enhance your other channels, from email to social.
Customer paths to purchase will continue to evolve and become more intricate. Taking a data-centered approach to understanding your customers will help you deliver what your customers want when and where they want it.
