Welcome to 2017!

The holiday festivities have passed. We’ve remembered Auld Lang Syne, toasted the year gone by, and spent time with friends and family.

Now it’s time for that age-old tradition: New Year’s Resolutions. But don’t limit yourself to just personal resolutions. Now’s a great time to jump in full force to your marketing efforts.

This is more than adhering to company policy. You need to set personal goals for yourself that reflect what your company wants to achieve.

How will your company improve their marketing, and sales, in terms of your customers? Are you going to improve client retention? Expand outreach? Increase networking efforts?

All of these questions relate, in some way, to your customer relationships. Take a moment at the beginning of this year to define how you’ll improve not only your marketing efforts, but customer happiness through marketing. A content marketing plan helps with this.

Marketing = Customer Service

At the heart of all great marketing lies great customer service. When you help your customers, make their experience easy, help them to understand what you do and why you’re a good choice, your product is already pre-sold.

When a hotel manager needs to buy a POS system because the parts for the old one are out-of-date and it runs too slow, it’s a stressful time. They need to change out new technology, spend hours on training for a new system, and become accustomed to the placement of new buttons and speeds.

Not to mention find the money to pay for the cost. It’s a huge investment in time and money, and they don’t want to spend more time or money trying to get in touch with a company they’re considering.

Your marketing efforts should be a reflection of what it’s like to work with your company. Don’t send a great piece of information and then not follow-up with a prospect. You want to know if they found it useful, so you can help them in the future.

Include a short line in an email or blog post asking to share the information if they found it useful. This isn’t asking them to work for you. It’s guaranteeing your customers and prospects that their time is valuable. You only want to share information they’re interested in, so you can help them in the future.

You can map out these interactions with a content marketing plan. It’s easier to craft the customer’s journey when you know what will come next.

Direct the Customer

You can create connected blog posts and direct your reader to past posts within the entry. This extends their time on your site, which increases their chance of buying. It also shows you want your customer to have the most complete answer to the question they asked.

There’s nothing worse than a prospective customer who has a great conversation about the product, but doesn’t have time to get all the answers they need. Or they receive an answer, but it’s incomplete. Then they have to spend more time playing phone or email tag trying to get the answer before they can move on to the next part of the buying process.

Connected blog posts and directing readers to related posts helps improve their customer experience and user experience of the company.

Track Results

Tracking your results is one of the most important aspects of your marketing. If you don’t know how well or horribly something resonated, then you can’t adapt. This is why every opportunity you have to test, you should.

You can do as much research as you want, but your market’s needs, desires and concerns are constantly changing. You want to know when something performs well. Not only can you see the results, but you can determine future projects and needs based off of what you find out when tracking results.

Let’s give an example. According to Content Marketing Institute, 93% of B2B companies use social media. However, very few of them know if their social media efforts are worth anything.

Are people interested in what they have to say? Are the followers and likers interested buyers or people who scrolled through but didn’t read?

You need to track results to find this out. It’s a waste of your time, but also your customers’ time, if the information you’re publishing on social media, in email and on your blog isn’t useful to them. How you’ll track and the results you need are a part of any good content marketing plan.

Having a ton of content, even if its high quality content, is only useful if your customer needs it. If they see your 7 pages of archives but don’t find a useful topic in the sidebar, they’re going to leave and never come back.

When you track results, guide your customer and give useful information, you pre-sell your product. When they decide to take the next step, they’re not only looking at the product you have but what it’s like to work with you as well.

Are you ready to start helping your customers through defined goals? Contact us for a free 20-minute consultation to find out about our content marketing plan services. Or check out our other services.