So You Think Your Content is Customer Centric

While many technology marketers continue to create self-promotional, beat-your-chest marketing, many others realize that it’s more effective to create marketing content that addresses issues from the customers’ perspective. But while companies understand the idea of customer centricity in theory, they sometimes fall down in practice.

Recently, I was asked to develop a white paper explaining the value of a particular type of software application. The marketing manager sent me a list of value statements upon which the paper should expand. 

Yet when it came time to flesh out these value statements, the content owner kept veering back to a discussion of the product’s features and capabilities. After digesting my notes, I had to go back and re-pose two questions, “What exactly is the strategic business problem that your customers want to address? And what is the benefit to the customer of solving the problem in the manner you describe?”

I was finally able to extract the answers to these two questions by taking a stab at answering them myself based on information from the company’s competitors (some of which applied and some didn’t) and then running my answers by the content owner. Once the content owner saw what I was looking for, she was able to tweak and correct the areas I’d gotten wrong.

I learned several lessons from this experience:

1. Because they’re so focused on cool technology, companies think that the reasons one should adopt the technology are self-evident. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the lackluster economy, companies are looking to align their IT solutions with their strategic business objectives. In other words, no matter how tactical a product may seem, companies want to know exactly how that product will help them address their strategic business goals—whether those goals are to reduce costs, increase revenues, minimize compliance risk, enhance productivity or some other objective. It’s the job of marketing to make a compelling link between their product and how it addresses customers’ business goals.
2. There’s still confusion about what it means to be customer centric. Many knowledgeable content owners (and other industry experts) persist in thinking that talking about product functionality while sprinkling in a dash of benefit sounding language means they’re customer centric. Instead, you need to be able to elaborate on exactly how the customer benefits from the product.
3. Many companies still don’t know what a benefit is. Many companies simply describe their features and think that’s the benefit. It’s not. What is a benefit? As they say, the “feature is the drill and the benefit is the hole.”
4. Concrete examples are more powerful than abstract statements. When I first asked the content owner about the benefits of specific products, she kept going back to a discussion of features. When I prepared examples of what I meant, she was able to give me what I needed. For example, instead of describing all the whiz bang capabilities of the product’s user interface (e.g. graphical process flows, automated alerts, point-and-click, forward-backward navigation), I ran by her a benefit: “The intuitive user interface improves ROI by reducing training costs and by getting people to use the product to improve productivity faster.”

So, to make sure your marketing content is really customer-centric, see if you’re addressing the key strategic business problems the organization faces (as well as the tactical ones) and be sure to describe benefits instead of features.

How well does your company address your customers?

 

Comments

[Ray Wright]

Great post Cheryl,

And unfortunately "oh so true". But a big part of the issue is the time and cost of really understanding customers' businesses. Many product marketers don't get to meet with customers that often. And large market research budgets are a thing of the past. Social media is a good and inexpensive place to find indications of the business challenges customers face but even so, research takes time.

When you've been looking for the "holes" for a while it starts to become second nature but it's a skill that develops over time and seems harder to acquire when you are a product enthusiast or champion. Then, as you indicate, the "benefits" seem obvious if you love the features.

An even bigger challenge, is to define the business value for different business personas. So while the IT department and the training guys will love the improved ROI associated with the intuitive user interface, the manager of the function that will eventually benefit from the new software application will probably be more appreciative of the improved time to value. His ROI improvement probably comes from being able to book more business more quickly because the app can simply be deployed faster.

To deliver maximum impact, marketers must now address the needs of the whole buying committee. Not just the technical buyer.

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Every theory can go wrong in practice. It always should be corrected..

[Philip Jackson]

The third lesson you've shared simply means that one must give the benefits. Of course! Companies should focus on providing the benefits. The customers won't tell you what they need unless you do something about it. A product's features must give satisfaction to customers. If it doesn't, then the benefit has not been provided and the customer's expectation isn't met.

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