A recent study showed that 95% of adults between 18-34 years old follow a brand on social media. That’s a huge pool of potential customers, but in a busy online space capturing their attention is no easy feat.

That’s why a customer-centric content strategy, that focuses on their needs and interests, is vital for attracting those elusive eyeballs.

There are three key steps to implementing such a strategy, and in this post we’ll go through the basics.

  • Understanding the pain points and most common queries customers have
  • Creating content that provides a solution to these issues
  • Distributing that content through right channels.

Finding out what customers want

In order to understand what it is your customers need to find out or the pain points they are experiencing, you need to collect data around your brand or product range. This is where social listening comes in.

Using a social listening tool like Brandwatch Analytics you can collect mentions from across various platforms that relate to your business and then explore and segment that data.

Try to answer the following questions:

  • What topics are coming up most?
  • What does the more negative conversation tend to be about?
  • Are my customers or prospects being slowed down or frustrated by anything?
  • What questions are people asking about my products?
  • Conversely, what are customers finding easy and what do they have a good understanding of?
  • Are customers of particular demographics finding different things difficult or easy?
  • Are issues arising at particular times? Looking at mentions over time, what new topics or issues are arising that I can deal with?

Identifying key themes by using these questions can now act as inspiration for your customer-centric content.

Creating and distributing customer-centric content

When you’ve found out what it is you need to focus on, the next step is to craft content based on your research that will help you achieve your goal of telling your customers what they want to know.

1. Create social media posts

Inspired by what you have found in your research, you can create insightful social media posts that address the questions and difficulties customers are having.

You can target different groups within your target audience using ads. Facebook Ad Manager, Twitter Ads, Instagram ads are all fantastic ways to ensure that the posts reach the audiences that need to see them.

You can also use social listening to find out when your audience is most active on social media and what kind of posts they share.

Check out Brandwatch Audiences to find out more about getting to know your audience and what they look like and talk about.

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2. Addressing high priority content through your website

What your customers or potential customers are talking about on social media should also be reflected in your website content.

Solving the high priority queries of customers through the homepage of your website can be a quick and customer-friendly way to address any interests or questions quickly.

You can also address other concerns based on priorities in other sections of your website like your blog or FAQ section which we’ll come to shortly.

3. Go deeper in a blog post

Is there something that your target audience needs to know more about? Do you want to provide detailed information but are restricted by the word count on social channels? The best option in this scenario is to create a blog post on your website.

Make sure to create a variety of blog content that deals with the most common customer queries. When that point comes up in any discussion on social media, you can simply share the URL of the blog with them to read so they can learn more about a product, its features, functionalities, how it was made etc.

4. Check for SEO opportunities

Don’t forget to benefit from any keyword ranking opportunity in any posts you create. And while you’re at it, ensure that you thoroughly research the keywords and include them in your copy.

Social listening can at times throw surprises at you by letting you know about the most unexpected words used when discussing your brand. A further research can be done on these keywords to find if any of those have good search volume.

Content can then be created to feed the search engines and rank organically, providing the required info to your audience directly through search engines.

5. Create an FAQ Page

It is not possible to address all your customers’ queries at once. However, you can get the gist of all their queries from their comments, complaints and messages across social media and use this information to come up with a detailed FAQ page.

It will contain answers to the most common questions and, like the blog posts, you can easily solve common queries by directing customers to this page.

Facebook has smartly designed it’s FAQ page keeping in mind the most common queries that customers may have.

6. Getting inboxes buzzing

Sending newsletters, offers and other notifications to customers can keep them engaged and informed.

At the same time, encouraging customers to email with issues and responding helpfully and quickly will hopefully keep them from posting nasty comments in public.

A highly dissatisfied customer can be the toughest to handle and can impact your brand reputation in no time.

7. Identifying influencers that matter to your brand

Through social listening, you will also be able to identify the influencers or popular social media profiles discussing your brand or topics related to your brand.

Engaging with them both publicly on their posts or privately to discuss potential partnerships can help build lucrative relationships. 

You can also find influencers within your industry who aren’t discussing your brand or following your profile that you may want to engage with.

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To conclude

Social media as a way to learn about and interact with customers shows no signs of drying out. As a brand or business, it is mandatory for you to keep up with the pace and make it a point to never miss out on any opportunity that comes your way. For the time being make do with these points for a stellar customer-centric content strategy aided by using social media listening.