Does your content provide what your customers and prospective customers really need? How do you know?
Those aren’t minor questions. The time and money spent on blog posts, contributed articles and other content is wasted if it misses the mark. If it’s consistently irrelevant, you’ll quickly lose those readers, along with the sales opportunities that great content provides.
Surveys are an obvious way to find out what customers want. There’s no shortage of turnkey tools for conducting them, such as SurveyGizmo and SurveyMonkey. But keep surveys as short as possible to maximize participation, especially among the people who often have the least time to spare but whose interest means the most: those who sign the purchase orders.
What’s short? One measure is the number of questions: no more than 10 and ideally no more than five. Another measure is the look of the Web page: having all of the questions fit without the need to scroll creates the perception that answering won’t take but a minute or two.
Not all surveys require direct input from your customers. Ask your salespeople what they’re hearing from customers about market trends, new technologies and regulatory proposals, to name just a few possibilities. When you’re at trade shows, pay attention to which sessions are standing room only, and then jot down the best questions that the audience asks. Those are the topics that have people’s attention. When your blog posts and contributed articles cover those topics, you’ll have their attention.
Just as important, notice what they’re not discussing but should be. That’s an opportunity to be provocative, such as with a blog post begins: “I just attended a session about WebRTC, and I was shocked that no one was talking about the contact center opportunity. That’s a mistake, and here are three reasons why.” It’s great when content leverages the hot topics, but it’s even better when it creates them.