3 Steps to Starting the Digital Conversation With Your Customer

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BASIC
3 Steps to Starting the Digital
Conversation With Your
Customer
One-sided conversations neither inform nor educate, and
whatever information is shared will likely be dismissed or
quickly forgotten on the receiving end. In this respect, digital
conversations are no different from face-to-face
conversations.
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One of the basic mistakes any content marketer can make is
to not listen to the customer’s side of the story. In their
online behaviors, browsing habits, and social cues lay a
portrait of not only who they are, but also what they are
trying to say.
Below are three steps in starting a digital conversation with
your customer that will not only show them you are
listening, but that you have the answers they need.
1) Listen to Your Customer
Monitoring the online activity of your customer is invaluable.
Digital behaviors connote need. Such needs can be broken
down into the keywords used by the customer in search.
This is their language, and in understanding their language
you can know how to respond.
Listening to your customer can be done in two ways:
through your site architecture (and resulting keyword
amplification) and through external site research that
incorporates the browsing behaviors of your customer.

Site Architecture
First, organize your site in accordance with search. What
does this have to do with listening to your customer? Your
customer employs different methods of search in finding the
solutions offered by your brand.
By listening and responding to these methods, your site will
rank higher and therefore be easier for your customer to
find. According to the e-Commerce Guide to Search Visibility
and Content Marketing, it’s easiest to separate the content
on your site into two categories: commercial intent
keywords and editorial keywords.
Commercial intent keywords are intuitive and linked to the
product or service offerings of your site. Ranking for
different variations of these keywords helps to create a wide
net that can catch relevant customer searches that aren’t an
exact match.
Focus on keywords that are directly related to your product
and home pages, then move on to long-tail keywords that

have a high exact match search volume. People search with
questions. Figure out what questions your customer will ask
and build your site around those questions
Editorial keywords are related to your products or services,
but not linked to any specific product or sale. Editorial
content is considered more trustworthy given it is not linked
to a specific product or service. For editorial content
development, use keyword research to gain a basic
understanding of the information your customers are
seeking.
External site research
External research can be conducted in countless ways,
utilizing tools that are free or at little cost. Below is a short
list of popular tools utilized in researching digital behaviors:
Topsy: a priceless tool for tracking online social
behaviors and keywords within social commentary.
Buzzsumo: If you want to find out what content is
trending, use Buzzsumo. This tool is also helpful when it
comes to finding influencers about any given topic.

Hitwise: analyze online customer behavior at the
granular level and use that data to construct mosaics
that help the marketer construct a digital portrait of the
customer, which is necessary for engagement.
Brightedge: an outstanding tool for keyword research
(among other things). Use Google Adwords in
conjunction with this tool to verify your results.
One of the best ways to learn how to answer the content
needs of your customer is to look at those websites that are
effectively doing the same thing, and analyzing their strategy.
Evaluate their headlines, structure, and overall methods of
organization and then modify said strategies for your own
content calendar.
The biggest value in this is testing site structure with your
audience and then allowing your content strategy to evolve
as a result. In everything, continue to modify your content
strategy and allow it to guide the evolution of your site
structure, content creation, and promotion
2) Using Editorial Content to Fulfill
the Need

What is the power of aforementioned editorial content? As
Brian Halligan says, “Inbound marketing (the baseline
definition of editorial content) focuses on earning, not
buying, a person’s attention.” Relevant content that reaches
a relevant audience is inherently trusted more than anything
paid.
Consider these statistics:
94% of the links search users click on are organic, not
paid.
68% of all organic clicks go to the top three search
results.
75% of search engine users never scroll past the first
page of search results.
Websites with 51 to 100 pages generate 48% more traffic
than websites with 1 to 50 pages.
B2B companies that blog only 1-2x/month generate 70%
more leads than those who don’t blog.
Companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to 6-
8x/month almost double their leads.
An average company will see a 45% growth in traffic
when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50.

Additionally:
B2B buyers are 57%-70% through their buying research
before first contacting the seller.
Providing helpful, relevant information that serves the
customer directly influences the buying decision. With your
content, focus on your customer, not your product. By doing
the former you will positively influence the latter.
In creating content that serves, follow three main guidelines:
1. Write as an Influencer: Brands are all part of specific
industries, and all industries have specific issues that
affect both B2B and B2C customers. Construct a diagram
which outlines the issues your brand is trying to solve
and write to those issues without the inclusions of your
products or services. The trust customers give you, as
the influencer, will translate into brand awareness and

the influencer, will translate into brand awareness and
conversions.
2. Consistency: Customers love stability. If your brand has
an inconsistent message within its content your readers
may develop a negative perception of the brand,
product, or service.
3. Don’t write to sell: Try not to include product or service
information within your editorial content. Create content
that serves the customer, not sells to the customer.
Remember, in having a digital conversation you must first
listen, then respond. When it’s your turn to talk, you may
only have one chance to do so; don’t waste it with fluff. Speak
specifically to your target and create editorial content that
serves them.
3) Promotion
The “publish and pray” strategy is akin to using a shotgun on
a long-range target. It assumes that everyone will find your
content and it will be useful to them because it’s so good
there’s no way people won’t see it. This tactic is incorrect, if
for no other reason than the amount of content that is
produced everyday will drown it out. Without promotion,

your content (and the research and money spent on it) may
be completely wasted.
Social promotion through Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and
other sites can accentuate larger promotion campaigns but
only in unison with an effective promotion strategy that
targets the prescribed customer and meets them where
they are already hanging out.
But social promotion isn’t enough. Your keyword analysis in
Step 1 should tell you where your customers are spending
their digital time. Because these blogs, industry publications,
and media outlets are relevant to your audience, the
editorial content created in service of your customer should,
in some way, be relevant to these information hosts as well.
If it is, reach out to them with your new content to join a
larger digital conversation.
Creating editorial content that is targeted to your customer
and then not promoting it is like thinking of what you want to
say in a conversation but keeping it to yourself. Promotion is
that moment when you actually speak, and in doing so, give

the right answer to the right customer at the right time.
Everyone strives to be that person who listens carefully to
the other side so that they can construct a thoughtful
response. To be that person (or brand) in content
marketing, one must first figure out who they are speaking
with, what they are saying, and why they are saying it.
Once this is realized, the answers to their questions or
solutions to their needs can be packaged in the content that
is produced. Finally, through promotion, said content can be
effectively placed in front of those people that need to read
it.
The key point in this process is creating content that serves
the customer. Brands exist to solve problems, so in your
content, work to that end.
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3 Steps to Starting the Digital Conversation With Your Customer

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