Customers Are Your Secret Weapon
Customer opinions matter more than ever in the age of consumer distrust. Businesses need to understand how to utilize customer opinions to create the kind of content that directly impacts conversions.
By adopting a more strategic approach to gathering feedback and applying user data correctly, publishers and brands can find even more ways to build trust and delight their clients with relevant content.
How to Use Customer Opinions to Inspire High-Converting Content
Consumers these days have, unfortunately, grown to distrust the majority of content and marketing messages that businesses are putting out. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer report, 36% of the public reported that they do not trust businesses to tell them the truth.
Too many customers have been offered false promises from brands or have had negative experiences with businesses in the past. This has led many to approach the arena of online consumerism with a sense of skepticism.
However, if there is one thing that consumers do trust, it is the opinion of other customers. In fact, up to 91% agreed that they found an online opinion just as reliable and trustworthy as a personal recommendation from a friend.
Most businesses know that displaying lots of conversations is a good way to convert new customers. But most marketers do not realize that customer conversations can actually help them to improve their content marketing strategies and their brand’s reputation, too.
The content experience can have a strong impact on the customer experience. By using customer opinions to guide the topics and focuses, businesses can create the kind of content that influences conversions.
Here are four ways that your marketing team can get started.
1. Refine Your Gathering Strategy
First off, in order to get the best use of Influencers, you need to have a lot of them. You also need to have detailed feedback from your customers in order to identify repeating patterns and information that can be applied to your content strategy.
Gathering meaningful comments is a game of happy mediums. On one hand, you want to ask prompts that give you as much information as possible. On the other, you can’t make the prompts too strenuous that customers do not write them.
The key is to keep the prompts simple but open-ended so that customers feel like they can share their honest opinions. One way to do this is to create your own set of comments prompts that ask for both the pros and cons of their experience, as well as additional details that they would like to share. With this information, you can pinpoint patterns and use them to fuel content creation.
For example, create prompts to gather customer opinions that are formatted to draw out 360-degree opinions of the customer experience. Customers are asked to explain what they liked and disliked about the content, as well as share any recommendations to increase interest.
You don’t need customers to write out an essay on their experience, but prompting them to get a little bit more detailed is crucial for better feedback.
2. Identify the Common Pain Points
Once you start to collect more thorough comments, it is time to look for commonalities and related sentiments. Within the comments, there will likely be patterns as to where customers are struggling. You can use this information to create content to answer the burning questions and provide solutions to common issues.
Publishers can utilized this approach by conducting qualitative customer research and creating a word cloud that highlighted the top keywords in their comments. We’ve also conducted market research on our own and asked clients what their biggest challenges they were facing in the upcoming year.
This helped marketing team to better understand the topics that customers were bringing up the most and helped to identify the areas that needed further attention. In one case, we saw that most customers complained that they struggled with the accuracy and reliability of the content.
Spotting the patterns in customer comment is not overly complex. If done properly, it can be a gold mine for meaningful content inspiration.
3. Turn Them into Case Studies
Clients are notoriously hard to convert because they are usually viewing several content providers and can easily switch. Clients often on the hunt for top-quality content that proves its worth and interests. Visitors are especially influenced by data-driven content like case studies in all stages of their journey.
As you get more comments, you can use the patterns and focus on different features of your product or services and create case studies about the successes that your clients have experienced.
Again, this will require a strategic approach to gathering comments, and you may want to follow up with clients who are active and influence readers fucosing on positive feedback to gather more details that can be used to create this kind of influential content.
4. Incorporate Quotes into Your Sales Content
Writing impactful sales content can be tricky. Customers are typically turned off by overly promotional text. Since trust in corporate honesty is fairly low, customers won’t necessarily believe the great things you have to say about your business. However, they are likely to believe other like-minded people. Valuable quotes can be HUGE weapons to help seal the deal on your sales-oriented content.
In order to make the most of customer quotes, use snippets that highlight the UX and help to build confidence in taking decisions. Try to include a mix of comments from people in various positions and industries (if applicable to your audience) in order to appeal to a wider customer base.
It is recommended that from the very beginning, customers are greeted with testimonials from three leaders in different types of interest, all of which touch on specific benefits they have experienced from the publisher.
