Are you struggling to create content that engages your audience? Content marketing success relies on your ability to understand and target the customer context. This guide helps you do just that.

2. is selling new products to changed
customers in the same way

3. Customer
Content
Context
a conversation that must inspire,
educate, or entertain, in a relevant way.
it evolves; always-on and everywhere.
a broadcast ‘wow’.
a controlled and time-limited
appointment or promotion.
a multitude of individuals that
must be understood individually.
a target segment or profile.

4. The distribution of useful content in order to
engage, understand and influence a target audience
towards a commercial goal
creation + curation
change perceptions
+ behaviors
information + entertainment
that provides utility
find out why
pull towards you
revenues minus costs
known persona

5. It’s not just marketing

7. The customer has changed, and the purchase journey has
changed. By the time they engage with a company,
most prospects are 60-70% of the way through
their decision process.
This means you have to market ahead of the First
Moment On Truth. Zero Moment Of Truth
is where it happens.
It means that your new battleground is before
they meet you. There is no point in being able to
differentiate your proposition in a meeting or
shop, when most prospects won’t even get there.
Content should be your
best salesperson.

8. Find the overlap between
your audience’s interests,
and your organization’s
‘right to speak’.
The
interests
of your
audience
Your
organization’s
right to
speak
HERE

9. Move from talking about your
products, to talking about your
customer’s needs and aspirations.
Be helpful, useful and trustworthy
as a source of current and future
competitive advantage.
Move from push to pull.
Your
Products
Their
Needs

10. call this the Age of
the Customer.

11. But hasn’t it always been that way?

12. “Give the lady
what she wants”
Marshall Field
1834 – 1906
“The customer
is always right”
Harry Gordon Selfridge
1864 – 1947

13. The village
shop
Literally, knowing
each customer
The multi-
national
Knowing what makes a
good customer
The 1-2-1
marketer
Knowing and being
relevant to each
customer individually

14. Although there is historical evidence around
the success of customer focused businesses,
there is also an increasing social, cultural and
technological imperative.
We are more empowered
than ever before...

15. 1.
2.
3.
with...

16. We live in
a world of
information
ubiquity, with
ability to find
what we are
looking for,
instantly.
Before booking my holiday,
I spent two weeks looking
at weather, resort reviews,
and travel agent websites.
And our behaviors are changing accordingly. But is
our marketing? If your prospects are searching and
finding solutions, you should be actively becoming
a source of information. What if you could inspire,
educate, or entertain your target audience?

17. We live in a world where products
and services are increasingly bought
online, and new entrants in every
market disrupt the existing players.
Since we all have much more choice, our
expectations rise and our loyalty falls.
What are you doing to become the default
choice in your market, knowing that every
prospect is looking at alternatives whilst
talking with you?
Whilst on the phone
to a salesperson, I was
reading a datasheet from
a competitor of theirs.

18. 6 degrees of separation is
obsolete. We are now all
connected with each other on
multiple platforms and
devices, all the time.
Not only can we be continually
informed by our connections,
but we have an audience. Your
customers will talk about you,
not just when asked, but to
their ever-increasing audience.

19. Digital body language is as much
‘real life’ as a physical meeting with
a customer. What are your customers
and prospects telling you by
their web interactions?
There are some obvious clues here: web traffic, dwell time,
channel selection, conversion etc. If any of these are way
below then industry-standard, then you have a problem
to address urgently. If most of the mentions about your
company on social media are negative, that would also be an
indicator of an urgent need. Or perhaps worse,
perhaps no one even mentions you.

21. The ‘Context’ describes the
ever evolving journey of the
customer.
Too often, customer data is static. It describes
who they were. Not who they are now, let
alone who they might become.
Most marketers are operating based on
old data – at least a few weeks, if not a few
months old. You could say that they are driving
forwards by looking in the rear-view mirror.

22. Marketing has moved from
managing the ‘what’ and ‘how’
of marketing to creating a
system of engagement that
provides relevant experiences.
Marketing to a customer
context requires an ability to:
1. Understand context
2. Record context
3. Execute against context

23. Given that ‘the customer context’ is a holistic
view of the customer, you will never understand
it all! So there are various ways of approaching
context, each giving you an angle of insight.
14 examples:
Understand interest and intent Interest data
Understand and qualify engagement Lead scoring
Understand and influence advocacy Social media data
Understand their organization and role Firmographic data
What you want to do? Approach to context

24. Have you got a single
customer view, a central
record of customer
insight?
If you want to realize the
goal of providing a relevant
customer experience
throughout the journey,
you must.

25. 3There is no sustained use for
understanding and recording context,
if it can’t be actioned. Modern marketing
is creating a system of engagement that
provides relevant experiences.
Once you understand
context, you can:
Optimize your lead gen around
the right prospects
Personalize content and propositions
Anticipate sales and service inquiries
Give your entire organization a real-time
view of key individuals and segments to
inform product, marketing, sales and service
decisions.
1.
2.
3.
4.

26. Your
to-do-list

27. When was the last time you
spoke to a customer?
Serious question.
If in the last week, good job. If
you haven’t met more than 3
customers in the last quarter,
how can you claim to have your
finger on the pulse?

28. If you really take time to
look through a customer’s
eyes, you will see what
doesn’t make sense about
your business structure.
Does it make sense for innovation
to be led from the board room,
when those at the coal face see
the problems and can find real
solutions? Does it make sense to
have a separate marketing and
sales function when they are both
talking to the same customer?
Follow the journey of a customer
through every touch-point
with your organization.
What goes wrong?

29. Easy to say, difficult to do. There is
simply no excuse for silos of knowledge
or data in the world of information
ubiquity.
The entire world is connected to an
information superhighway, and yet you create
excuses for why you are different, why there
are huge gaps. Especially important here is
your view of the customer. Every department
should be contributing to, and receiving value
from, a known view of each customer.

30. Is your target
their target?
The best businesses align their internal
targets with goals that matter to their
best customers. Ideally staff remuneration
and daily process will also form around
these targets. Companies that continually
hold to legacy targets and legacy reward
systems will find it really difficult to
change structure and silos.
If your customers crave product innovation
on a weekly basis, how can you shape internal
targets around it? If your customer base really
values an after-sales care package, why are your
targets all about closing a deal and moving on?

31. Do you want to be relevant in every marketing and sales
interaction? idio intelligently tunes your content and
conversations to the emerging customer context.
The reality is that customers and prospects constantly tell
you their interests and intent, by the content they read.
With idio, you can understand & influence their journey,
driving engagement & revenue.
We call it Content Intelligence.
You’ll call it ROI.
Using
content to
engage and
convert
A definitive guide
www.idioplatform.com info@idioplatform.com
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Engage and Convert
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