Mapping the Ideal Customer Content Experience

Mapping the Ideal Customer Content Experience

David Packard, co­founder of Hewlett­Packard (HP) once observed that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people.” That was decades ago.

Yet, even then he intuitively recognized that it’s more than promotion. Marketing is a major contributor to the comprehensive customer experience.

Now that online media increasingly stands in for traditional marketing, selling, and customer service, it’s time to recognize its role for adding value to the customer experience with your products and services.

In short, if you want to attract and retain more customers and enjoy greater profit margins you need to enhance the value of the content experience by planning and mapping it out.

Here’s how.

Reverse Engineer The Traditional Customer Experience

The traditional customer experience was predominantly associated with the product (or service) and followed the typical sequence of marketing first, then selling and customer service. Each stage determined the responsibility for nurturing the customer relationship.

In a digital world, content transcends those stages (and others, such as production) to affect how buyers are thinking, seeing, doing and feeing about your product. For example, let’s say you have sold a product and the customer is uncertain about how to properly use it.

This is reminiscent of the old days when print “instruction manuals” that accompanied products were poorly written, and therefore, confusing. The unhappy consumer turned to the customer service department, and having to do so immediately compromised the experience.

Nowadays, website designers use something called the empathy map to plan out the user experience with a site by asking relevant questions. You can apply it to your business by simply taking a large board and dividing it into four quadrants labeled: thinking, seeing, doing and feeling (or download template here). Then use sticky notes to answer questions such as:

#1 – When using our product what are our customers thinking?

#2 – What do buyers do when they visit our website?

#3 – How do our customers see their day-­to-­day lives?

Mapping the Ideal Customer Content Experience

The idea is to really get personal and understand the worldview of your ideal customer, client or user, and then address that with your marketing content. It will make for a better experience for your customers and staff that serves them.

Here’s an Example

I recently gave two keynote presentations to a group of marketers. I received a thank­ you note from the meeting planner that stated 90% of the attendees felt the program were excellent. It also included a few quotes, with one reading: “Jeff did a great job, but did not customize for our industry.”

Rather than attempt to prove that I did customize, it’s smarter to use this as an opportunity to provide content that adds more value to the product (the paid presentations). I offered to write an article for the organization’s publication to clarify the issue and provide a list of actionable tips (cheat sheet) specifically for their industry, and they enthusiastically accepted.

More important, I will add this idea to customer touchpoints for future speaking engagements to enhance the experience with my company.

If your business actively seeks feedback from its customers you have a good idea how they want to feel after working with your business. Give that to them with products AND helpful information that answers questions and otherwise solves problems.

What your business does or does not do throughout the customer content experience is the engine of business success or failure. Mapping it will help make it more favorably predictable.

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business and host of This Old New Business podcast.

He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedInTwitterFacebook, and Google+

Adaptive Content: How to Map and Manage the Buyers Journey

Adaptive Content: How To Map and Manage The Buyers Journey

This is Episode 44 of This Old New Business weekly business podcast with Jeff Korhan.

If you are not familiar with the term, adaptive content is generally described as content that meets the buyer when and where they are. This is often described as having available the right content, in the right place, and at the right time.

In other words, your content needs to be integrated across multiple channels and devices. While this may seem idealistic, it is indeed possible if you make the effort to map out your buyer’s journey and continuously make experience-based adjustments.

If you really care about being the best in your market and serving your customers well, I’m confident you’ll really enjoy this one-on-one episode with me. If social media and content marketing feels somewhat aimless or random to you at times, then I know you’ll enjoy this conversation.

Adaptive Content Adds Value at Every Touchpoint

For discussion purposes, I’ve organized the buyers journey into three phases, before, during and after the sales transaction.

Phase I – The Audition: Getting Buyers to Know Your Business

Phase II – Collaborative Engagement: Showing Buyers They Will Enjoy Working with You

Phase III – Relationship Validation: Earning the Ongoing Trust of Your Buyers

It’s important for the business to map out each of these phases to fully understand what their buyers are thinking, feeling, doing and seeing. There is a simple tool known as an Empathy Map for accomplishing this. Download this version of The Empathy Map here.

Adaptive Content: How to Map and Manage The Buyers Journey


The Empathy Map by Copyblogger

Buyers have different thoughts, feelings and needs at different phases throughout their journey with your business, and will indeed choose the business that seems to understand them, their challenges and their worldview. In a word, the winning company is the one that is empathetic.

Most marketers place the greatest emphasis on customer acquistion. That audition is the traditional role of marketing and sales. This preview takes a buyer that is uncertain but interested and attempts to convert him or her into a customer.

The conversion process for many businesses is the collaborative engagement phase. This is when the buyer has made an initial commitment and now wants to be cared for, and ideally wowed. Therefore, it’s vital for buyers to completely understand how your business process works and why.

The most important phase of the buyers journey is after they have made the purchase. This is the opportunity to add value to the product or service solution by providing useful education for using it well. This content may be free or premium content as a subscription, or free or premium access to a private user community.

What Happens Next?

Content that adapts to buyers and their circumstances must answer the one question that is on everyone’s mind, and that is: What’s next? 

The reason most buyers do not buy is they do not understand. It’s up to the marketer to map out the journey to address every possible inquiry, and more important, to adapt to recent feedback and changing market conditions.

When you make the shift from a traditional sales process to the more contextual buyers journey, amazing things happen. There is a clear understanding of what should happen next that can create a collaborative dance that leads to even better outcomes than anyone had expected.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on adaptive content? Meet me over on Twitter to take the conversation further.

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About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business and host of This Old New Business podcast.

He helps mainstream businesses adapt their traditional growth practices to a digital world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedInTwitterFacebook, and Google+