How to ensure a content is most appropriate for the customer

Creating good content may also entail curating content held internally, making sure that it is repurposed in ways that suit the customer, perhaps dialling down some of the technical fervour within your organisation to make things easily digestible.

But aside from these myriad discussions about content formats (what it takes to be a good writer/editor/producer, who should create the content and how often) there was a bigger beast to slay.

That beast is a mess of data that may be inaccurate. A consensus that the buying journey often affords a company only one shot at a customer was clear for many of the people I talked to. Having good data and a good contact strategy is key.

In this post I thought Id continue the spirit of Digital Cream and spark discussion of combining content with customer data. Ive also shared an infographic from Experian Data Quality, discussing data quality more generally, and the impact it has on businesses.

To start there was an agreement that the customer can be lost easily, she is sensitive about being contacted at the wrong time or with the wrong content. This means that data collection has to be done correctly, with buying third party data becoming something that some find too risky.

Once data is clean and represents a pool of aware customers, its clear companies need to have contact strategies well defined from the start.

Content cant be curated or created without knowing what the contact strategy is going to look like, and its unwise to start hitting customers with messaging, without any foresight into what next?.

Of course, the complexity deepens once the ball is rolling and you are targeting your customers with content and moving them through the purchase process. More data comes rolling in and depending on what companies are tracking and whats feeding into an automation platform, theres the potential for data to be further obfuscated.

Clearly, attribution is improving but it can be hard to track customers across call centres, email and social, especially when many may switch between email and social profiles. Theres also the problem of tracking mobile interaction. Whilst this may be minimal for big ticket, considered purchases in B2B, its not a device to be discounted, nor is the tablet.

Of course, a lot of companies, perhaps particularly in B2B, are sifting through content in a fairly manual way, but this is another area that data will increasingly play a part. Is your content shared across your organisation and appropriately tagged up and curated to allow sales and marketing to access it easily?

This is another tension in the B2B funnel. More esoteric product knowledge associated with thought leaders traditionally sits outside of marketing and sales. How is this brought to the people who need it on the sales front line? Knowledge is data, after all.

So, now youve listened to me ramble, itd be great to hear from the practitioners. Let me know, within reason, what challenges youre facing when ensuring data quality, whether in B2B or B2C, and how this marries with providing content to customers.

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