Yiannis Maos, head of digital at Rant & Rave, reveals how marketers can capture customer sentiment and use it to boost their content campaigns
All I keep hearing about is that content marketing is the way forward. But ask yourself this: is your content marketing really that relevant?
As marketers we pride ourselves on being able to segment our audiences in order to create personal, timely and pertinent content, but how many of us know how our audiences feel before we spend our ever scrutinised marketing budgets trying to get them to spend more? The answer is very few of us actually do. However, this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as problem (unless you ignore it) but instead, as an opportunity.
So what’s preventing us from doing this? We live in the age of big data, so surely this should be easy, right? Unfortunately, we’re still operating in departmental silos and therefore the information (in this case, how the customer is feeling), isn’t being passed on to the right areas of the business.
Here are three tips to move you in the right direction:
Capture the voice of the customer
If your business isn’t already capturing how your customers are feeling, then this is a great place to start (if you are then skip ahead). Start simply by picking frequent or valuable customer interactions and then ask customers how their experience was – don’t use surveys (no one has time for these anymore), just ask them to score you and tell you why in their own words.
Demand the customer insight
Now that the business has captured the voice of the customer, it’s important that you get this information. In most cases this would’ve been captured by your customer service department, so it’s time for a bit of teamwork and cross-collaboration.
Set-up a meeting with them (or go one better and create a customer experience board) and work out how to get this information into your marketing/communication solution – the closer to real-time the better. If you can integrate the flow of data, then great. Customers can go from happy to sad in a heartbeat.
Use the insight to enhance your content strategy
So now the information is in your system (hopefully constantly being updated), it’s time to put that data to good use. This bit is easy, in the same way that you would segment contacts based on demographics, geographies, psychographics or behavioural data, you can do the same with the sentiment data you now have – I call this sentiment segmentation. Using a combination of all the information you now have available, can lead to some very relevant, and more importantly, successful campaigns.
Here are a few examples of how it can be used for different customer types:
a) The ranters (unhappy customers)
In most businesses, this segment of customers will be handled by your customer service team, but if you’re tasked with this group whatever you do, don’t try to sell to them. Instead, ask them what you could change to make their experience better or ask them for their ideas to engage them.
b) The ‘on the fence’ bunch
These are the trickiest group as it’s hard to get a true understanding into how they feel and whether or not your marketing efforts will be receptive or not. If possible, use past insight to get a true gauge into how they feel over their lifetime as a customer and then act appropriately (see above or below).
c) The ravers (happy customers)
The important thing with this group is to ignore your inner Jordan Belfort and resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell. Instead think smarter, you know they are happy, so let them tell the world. Give them some sort of incentive to promote your services on social media (small is fine and it will help drive repeat or additional purchases too). Their comment next to an exclusive offer for their friends and family is ideal. This type of activity is often referred to as advocacy marketing.
By using unique tracking codes in your offers, you will not only be able to measure who your promoters are but which ones are driving the most revenue for you.
