Content Marketing for Your Customer Service Website

Benefits of Content Marketing for Your Customer Service Website

With an understanding of how content marketing fits into your bigger strategy, and why it's important to find room for it, going through the benefits of content marketing for customer service brands, specifically, will showcase all the ways it will help grow your business.

Improve Your Reach

Brands that create sharable, targeted content that readers actually find interesting to read will see their reach multiply organically, saving them money on ad dollars and helping them attract new customers.

For example, many brands use social media to push their latest product or post "yeah, yeah" content about their general service or offerings. Imagine if your brand instead spent time planning content that would encourage interaction and offer a deeper look into who your brand is, like content that showcases your quirky team members or posts that get your users talking about what they like to see.

On your blog, you'll also see a major difference in interaction, engagement, and organic traffic if you start posting content that's based on an audience-fueled strategy instead of best guesses.

In fact, one of the most direct ways content marketing can improve your reach is by giving you a boost to your SEO strategy. After all, when you're writing content targeted at your audience, you'll naturally include the long-tail keywords they're looking for, and that means better rankings to increase organic traffic.

Boost Engagement

Loyal customers might already be subscribed to your newsletter, but do they open them? If they open them, do they read them? If they read them, do they click the links you include? Most brands see a major drop off when it comes to the percentage of readers who subscribe in the first place, down to the percentage of readers who actually open those emails, click the links, and engage with your brand.

Of course, email newsletters are just one example of how customer engagement tends to dwindle without an active content strategy, but since you have so many metrics on subscribes/unsubscribes, open rates, and CTR, your newsletter can be the first indicator that your content isn't as engaging as it should be.

After all, if even your most loyal customers aren't motivated to read or act on your content, it's not going to work for the droves of people coming to your brand for the first time through your website or social pages. If you aren't already tracking your metrics, it's a good idea to look more closely at the information social media platforms provide you about your followers. You should also implement tracking tools like Google Analytics on your website.

Once you're able to track engagement, you'll be able to see the huge uptick that strategized content provides. It goes back to posting things that are interesting and sharable -- When you're basing content on what you know about your audience rather than what you assume or want to be true, big changes happen.

Breed Loyalty

In the customer service industry, in particular, customer loyalty plays a key role in a thriving business. Whether you offer a product or service that people will come back for time and time again, or something they'll only seek occassionally, great service means customers will remember the experience. That makes them more likely to tell friends and family.

Content marketing can help you breed that loyalty by shaping the customer experience, and the process starts from the first time a person learns about your brand or interacts with you online. With the right strategy, customers will feel connected to you, even before making a purchase or reaching out directly, thanks to branded, lively, and engaging content that is transparent, informative, and backed by your company's values.

After making a purchase, content marketing will help you convince that customer to come back. Depending on what you offer, your content can help ensure customer success, like through informative guides, or focus on overall satisfaction by following up with them and getting them to continue engaging with your company.

What Do Readers Want in Your Customer Service Content?

Now that you know the ins-and-outs of how content marketing can give a boost to your customer service brand, the next question everyone asks is: What exactly should go into my content marketing strategy?

Ultimately, content marketing is about giving your audience both information they want and content they will enjoy, even if they weren't necessarily seeking it out. This requires in-depth audience research rather than "best guesses." In the customer service industry, it boils down to the following.

Personalized Content

If you offer an email newsletter or other form of direct communication, you likely think of personalization as adding a reader's name to the subject line. Still, customers expect you to go far beyond that.

Personalized content begins with targeted content, which may not be directed at a specific individual, but is dedicated to your audience, which you should have detailed very well as part of your content strategy. Targeted content will go beyond talking about general questions and concerns, and use language, perspectives, and solutions that you know will resonate with your target audience.

From there, you can continue personalizing your content for your specific audience as you collect metrics showing how your audience reacts to the information you offer them. As a customer service business, you'll also get plenty of opportunities to interact with individual customers directly, and that's where the personalization will continue with the help of your CRM tools and customer profiles.

Transparency Authenticity

Whether they're just getting to know your company or a long-standing customer, transparency and authenticity are two keywords that just about everyone will mention when talking about what they like to see in a brand. Your company must decide what these terms mean to you, but for most customers, transparency in customer service requires being up-front about policies, solutions, and timelines.

With that said, every business has to draw the line of transparency somewhere. For instance, if you're working with a customer to solve a major issue, no one wants to hear that you don't know how to fix the problem. Instead, you'd want to reinforce your brand's authenticity, ensuring the customer that you're working to find the solution as quickly as possible and backing that with a commitment to satisfaction -- like by offering a voucher, discount, or refund for their troubles.

Ultimately, every brand has a different idea of what their transparency, authenticity, and backing values are, but detailing those ideas and making sure they are consistently presented across all customer interactions (including in the content you offer) is essential. A content strategy will help you pull that off by enabling you to connect ideas, understand your customer's pain points, and produce content that reinforces your primary principles.

Support Content

As a customer service brand, the core of your content offerings will likely be high-value, informational content that revolves around supporting the customer through their journey.

For instance, if your brand helps people who are traveling find last-minute accommodations and make arrangements, your support content should explain what you do, go into detail about how the services work, answer common questions (e.g., response time, fees, etc.), and give troubleshooting tips for an active customer who needs a solution.

Support content isn't necessarily "fun" to read, and it's probably not something customers will consume leisurely. They want it when they're trying to make a decision or accomplish something. For that reason, support content needs to be concise, accurate, and organized. It should also have your brand's voice, even if there's no room for humor or stories.

How to Create an Effective Customer Service Content Strategy

Transparency, authenticity, personalization, and solution-driven content are all important to your audience, but how do you turn that information into an actionable content strategy? That's the part a lot of brands struggle with, so follow these steps to bring your content marketing goals to life.

Know Your Audience

Define Your Brand

You likely already have a brand archetype assigned to your company. In the customer service industry, most companies opt for attentive and motherly, like the "Caregiver," or wise and trustworthy, like the "Sage." Whatever your brand has chosen, you need far more than a simple persona to describe your image.

Creating a brand book is a smart move, especially if you're about to invest time and research into coming up with a detailed content strategy. Your brand book will prove to be a valuable asset in all of your digital marketing endeavors, helping you to quickly and consistently inform writers, representatives, and other professionals you work with about how they should represent your brand.

Research The Competition

It's always a good idea to know what the competition is up to, but in the customer service industry, your competition can help give you endless ideas about how to offer better support to your customers. For instance, if a successful company in your space has started offering a weekly podcast with tips for success to help existing customers, that could be a good thing to recreate in your own unique way.

In a more straightforward manner, you can analyze your competition by looking at the keywords they're targeted. In fact, this is one of the simplest and most powerful things your brand can do when it first starts planning a content strategy.

Tools like Google Analytics will reveal the keywords your competitors are ranking for, allowing you to create content that competes for the top spot. Plus, keyword tools can also help you identify "keyword gaps," which are keywords the competitors are not yet targeting where you could get a leg-up and start reaching untapped readers in your industry.

Create a Calendar

The last element of your content strategy is a content calendar. This scheduling and planning device is the sum of your content marketing efforts and ensures that you're able to organize content so themes, ideas, and topics connect without overlapping. Meanwhile, your content calendar keeps you ahead of your posting schedule and allows you to offer a reliable stream of content for readers.

The content calendar itself will take some time to put together, as it requires you to consider all the types of content you plan to publish across all platforms, along with how often. This will show you how much content you actually need, which will help you determine your budgeting, production capacity, and whether or not you need to bring on an external writer.

For most brands, executing the content strategy turns out to be the most difficult element. Fortunately, platforms like Scripted make it easy to connect with a professional writer who can help you stay ahead of schedule, on budget, and offer the valuable, branded content your readers want.