Making the Leap: Egocentric to Empathy in Content Marketing
Imagine this scenario: Company XYZ has developed a fantastic business making products and services, developing marketing programs that give reasons for the features and benefits of those offerings and making sales. The mix of SEO, publicity and newsletter is focused on explaining the solutions offered with the intention of educating and persuading prospects to buy. This is the way it’s been done in the past and it’s what current marketing programs are based on. Pretty common right?
But let’s also imagine in our hypothetical situation that sales progression has started to slow down or even slumped. Competitors are starting to cast a shadow on Company XYZ in search results, the blog doesn’t really get many shares, likes, links or comments and it’s nothing but crickets chipring on the Facebook Fan page, on Twitter and the YouTube channel. The staff responsible for making content are running out of thoughts. Seem familiar?
There are tens of thousands of companies in this situation: inactive marketing and slow or loss of momentum.
Many era when agencies like TopRank Online Marketing are tapped to help established companies fix or step up the performance of their online marketing mix, one of the most common situations we see is the need to transition from an egocentric view of marketing to one of customer empathy. I’m not saying these companies don’t care about their customers, they really do. But SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing programs that are focused solely on the product/service Features and Benefits model are running their course.
The need for this transition is especially present with content marketing focused programs. A Content Marketing: Discovery > Consumption > Sharing model means leveraging SEO, Social Media, Online PR and Email Marketing to help customers find, know and promote company content to boost awareness, engagement and sales. But if the content topics are solely focused on what the company deems vital, such as features and benefits, then there can be significant drawback.
Say Company XYZ has chose the mix of content on their website focused on explaining the products/services in the feature and benefit style. That means the company is deciding what’s vital. It’s their egocentric view of their offering that drives content. When a company is solely focused on explaining its own point of view, they may be missing numerous and compelling opportunities to make the kind of content that gets mutual, associated to and that inspires sales.
The transition from egocentric to empathy simply means looking at the company’s products/services offer from the customer point of view. Doing so opens up a bevy of content creation and social engagement opportunities. I know this sounds intuitive and obvious, but my experience over the past 13 years as an online pusher has been that common sense is to be sure, the smallest amount common business. 
How to make the change? Here are a few simple steps towards opening up a goldmine of content marketing and social media engagement opportunity:
1. Make personas about your ideal customers identifying their preferences for content discovery, consumption and sharing. What are their pain points, what situations are characteristic of their need to buy your solution? Use those personas as customer segmentation guides for making a Social & Content Marketing strategy.
2. Audit your unfilled content and reconcile it with the information customers really need to: buy, use & recommend your products/services.
3. Tap into Customer Service and Sales departments discussions with customers to find out what the most common questions are. Develop a creative strategy to answer those questions with content and media online, on an ongoing basis. Make a topic matrix in your editorial plot that will help you manage plotted creation, optimization, promotion and measurement of this customer-centric content.
4. Use real-time and social media monitoring tools to identify questions being questioned about topics of interest for your butt consultation and products/services mix. Something as simple as a persistent query on search.twitter.com can reveal topics to cover in your content plot as well as engagement opportunities. Quora and Facebook are also useful in this way.
5. Crowdsource content from active customers and fans. Present challenges or requirements for opinion and information on relevant topics from your social networks and customers to make new content mutual with the community. Topics could range from the reasons why the category of products/services is vital to innovative uses by current customers. Recognize contributions publicly to underline participation and sharing behaviors. Find ways for fans to participate in a way that meets their needs and in doing so, help meet your brand’s objectives.
There are many other angles a company could take once the door of thinking like a customer is opened. There’s a time and house for brands to choose what information is best for customers but the days of by that egocentric approach as the driver for content is over. Tap into what’s vital to your customers, build entrust and engage them to make a more sustainable approach to content marketing success.
We have many, many smart marketers reading this blog, so how have you helped your organization reckon about content with more empathy towards customer needs? Are there creative examples you can share?
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