B2C Content Marketing – How well do you know your customers?

It hasn’t been long since marketers reckoned content as one of the key strategies for marketing. However, if we rewind back against time, it’s not really hard to cite examples of content marketing that existed much before the digital age.
John Deere introduced the magazine, ‘The Furrow’ which provided agricultural tips to farmers. While the company’s main line of business was selling agricultural products, the magazine was composed on a purely informative note. The magazine was first published in 1895, interesting enough; their online version still exists today.
It’s possibly one of the earliest examples of content marketing, B2C content marketing to be precise. Now this, happens to be one of my areas of interest. B2C content marketing is interesting and if done right, it can simply shoot up your sales graph like anything. However, it has some definite areas to be looked into and working on them can assure a smoother path towards success.

1. Emotional content:

People love emotions and appreciate when brands reach out to them with an emotional connect. Reaching out to your target customer, being empathetic with their issues, concerns help you connect with them – otherwise you’re probably one among millions trying to reach out to them with their product every day.
a. Furthermore, connecting with your customers for festive occasions, wishing them makes your brand a part of their lifestyle. With a little branding effort, your content marketing can receive that extra bit of cushion which would elevate its success level.

2. Be a problem solver:

Your customer is just a human being with his set of problems and is probably desperately trying to fix a solution. Are you able to identify their problems? Is your product/service able to address it? You should ideally make a thorough research on what people are looking for and blend your marketing message accordingly.

3. Understand consumer behavior:

Generally, an average consumer buying behavior would consist of 4 main aspects

1. Curiosity/Identification of need
2. Research
3. Evaluation
4. Purchase

4. Your marketing effort should nail down each of these specific aspects in the customer’s buying behavior. In many cases the customer is able to identify his need – to target this mass of people, the best way is to research using Google Keyword planner tool. This would give you a complete detail of ‘what people are exactly searching?’ in a predefined geographical periphery.
5. However, if the customer isn’t even aware of his needs, content marketing can be very well utilized as a tool to introduce new product. Also, when the customer is researching, evaluating his options, your content has the power to reach out to them and influence their decision in the most sophisticated way. Content marketing, as a matter of fact is inbound in nature – you make the customer curious by writing an enticing piece of content. There is simply no element of persuasion involved.

6. Impulse buying:

Unlike B2B marketing, where there’s an entire department/board involved before making an effective purchase, B2C helps you communicate directly to the decision maker, that is, the buyer himself. This actually provides you a great opportunity to capitalize on his impulse. All you need is to keep few things straight

1. Make sure your product has strong USP
2. It’s most likely that customers would evaluate you even while reading your piece of content. Make sure you cite some good instances which can convince them that you are better than your contenders!

7. Finally, you should integrate an element of trust which would seal all elements of doubt that might exist for him. And, believe me, he would feel proud of his a choice!

8. Fear marketing:

This is often ignored but yet a very effective marketing strategy. Humans have their own insecurities. In this case the idea is to make customers see a reverse side of the matter – what happens if I don’t get this product? This is often used by insurance companies when they would like to sell policies. It compels customers to think…’what happens to my family if I’m no more?’

1. If you’re trying to market FMCG products of daily needs, you can definitely come up with thousands reasons as to what might happen if they don’t use it. This really works for a lot of business but definitely not all. You should carefully analyze your products/services and evaluate the strategy that rightly fits in.
2. In a nutshell, B2C content marketing can surely give you success if you know your customers well. Behavioral analysis of customers is one of the crucial elements which happens to be the main fulcrum behind your content marketing success.