Where should content marketing leaders go to refuel and refresh their content marketing program? There are many ways to gather customer input to feed a content marketing program. In our interviews, we listened to how many of these women were seeking a better life, how they were surprised that they were as good at driving as male drivers, the confidence they gained as drivers, and how the trucking company they worked for (our client) supported them. Marketing is about creating two-way conversations with customers. One-to-one conversations help you uncover context to create more powerful content. Many organizations have customer service departments or call centers where consumers can order products or call about warranty issues. Nearly every interest or industry offers a time and place where its most die-hard enthusiasts enjoy gathering and sharing stories. If you represent a trucking company, go visit a truck stop. This program not only fuels our client’s social media channels, it lends its content authenticity and saves significant content-creation time. Nurture relationships with outside experts and quote them in the same white paper (or other piece of content).
Where should content marketing leaders go to refuel and refresh their content marketing program?
Having conducted hundreds of customer interviews over the years on behalf of my clients, I find the raw, unfiltered perspectives of customers provide powerful, new insights. I’m not talking about gathering quotes for a customer testimonial; I’m suggesting creating a steady stream of conversations that can inspire your content marketing program.
There are many ways to gather customer input to feed a content marketing program. Because we want to be efficient with our time, many of us often turn to technology, such as the online form builders, online surveys, and omnibus studies, to gather input. But, when we use technology to gather customer input, we often miss three critical ingredients: depth, context, and emotion.
Go to the source
Effective content marketing is about mining and sharing stories that matter most to your brand’s core fans. It’s about sharing the emotions and the drive behind those stories – that’s what people love to read, listen to, or to watch.
Simply put, it’s about being more human rather than relying on mechanisms that gather lots of data but offer little in terms of emotion.
This hit home for me over the past year while working on the content marketing program for a major U.S. trucking firm, Transport America, which wanted to attract and retain more qualified drivers, and uses www.changingtrucking.com as its online home.
When you’re putting out a monthly newsletter with four stories, along with a social media campaign featuring daily Facebook posts, you’re going to run out of gas if you rely on re-merchandising existing marketing content. Instead, we went to the source: the 1,700 truck drivers who drive those 18-wheelers across the continent.
Sure, it’s easy to ask in an online survey or a Facebook post, “What are your favorite trucking songs?” or “Is the greatest trucking film of all time Smokey and the Bandit?” But to uncover deeper insights, we needed phone and face-to-face interviews with real drivers who haul loads of packages, parts, and products all over the United States and Canada. We regularly interview more than a dozen drivers a month, with each conversation lasting an hour or more.
When you take that much time to talk to people, you become a witness to their stories and gather real-life, substantive details that make content come alive.
For a recent story, we talked to three women truck drivers about how they got into trucking, the unique challenges women drivers face, and what keeps them going. In our interviews, we listened to how many of these women were seeking a better life, how they were surprised that they were as good at driving as male drivers, the confidence they gained as drivers, and how the trucking company they worked for (our client) supported them.
We learned from one female driver, a single mother with three kids from Chicago, how she made the leap from working as a manicurist to realizing her dream as a truck driver. (Her father was a truck driver and many people in her life had told her she couldn’t cut it as a driver.) From another, we learned that she and many other women don’t want special treatment from their male counterparts; they simply want to be respected as drivers.
These kinds of stories, posted on the trucking company’s blog and distributed through its monthly newsletter, demonstrate why this particular trucking company…
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