The Secret Sauce in Content Marketing: Your Customers
What if you could develop content that you already knew would resonate with your customers, strengthen their loyalty and thank them for it, and build your brand as well? As a direct marketer, you have this ability because of the close relationship you have with your customers.
Take that relationship and turn it into a book. Not a book about your company. Rather, a book about your customers: a collection of stories about them and the impact your product has had on their lives.
Engage Your Brand at its Deepest Level
Most products worth selling have a two-tier impact on the buyer. The first is the one that creates likes on Facebook and fans on Instagram. But there's a deeper, more personal impact: the outdoor wear that made it possible for a customer to fulfill a lifelong dream of ascending Machu Pichu. The food that's become a family ritual whenever there's a milestone to be marked. The chairs that are so comfortable that they create an intimate oasis in a customer's home, the place where friends and family retreat to when they need comfort or counsel.
When these stories are professionally narrated, they become a book, or series of books, that empower your customers and your brand. What's more, once you have a book of these stories, you have material that you can chunk into content for blogs and social media. Start with an excerpt from the book, then develop additional content around that.
Here are two examples of how this works, both from books produced for direct-to-consumer companies.
From Dessert to Democracy: Building Content on Content
The first company is known for its fruitcake, and has a devoted customer base that goes back decades. We gathered 21 of the strongest customer stories, culled from queries to the most longstanding customers, wrote them up and published them in an illustrated hardcover.
One customer told of how he used his tin of fruitcake as a decoy as he passed through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin into what was then Communist-held East Germany. The fruitcake had the desired effect: it distracted the guards sufficiently that they never noticed the Western newspaper the customer was smuggling in.
A story like this can be the basis for additional content on what it means to be patriotic — the seemingly small gestures that have their own profound impact. Such content can then be pegged to timely events such as Flag Day or Fourth of July.
Starting a Second Conversation From the First
For the second company, one of the customers featured in the book was a prize-winning author who used a typewriter to compose his best-sellers. The company didn't even sell him the typewriter, but the story fit the book's premise: the objects that inspire someone's best work.
The larger story around this one is how using the technology you like best, even if it's not the newest, can lead to your best work. This story can bring in related content such as some of the recent studies that find writing by hand to be beneficial for young children.
This, in turn, is a great conversation starter on your Facebook page. Do your customers agree? How do they do their own best creative work? And, to bring in the visual media of Instagram, Vine and Pinterest, what does it look like?
This type of content-conscious book is a double-win for companies. It showcases customers as part of their content and uses their stories to create a second level of content. Plus, all of it provides a meaningful, relevant voice to a brand.
If admirers start to ask what's in that secret sauce you use to so successfully engage your customers, just tell them you found it in a book.
Mim Harrison is a brand strategist specializing in content development, specialty-book publishing and product concepts for her clients. She's also a published author. Mim can be reached at mimharrison@bellsouth.net.
- Places:
- Berlin
- East Germany