Con­tent map­ping can help pro­vide struc­ture and direc­tion to the paid, owned, earned, CRM and oth­er mar­ket­ing teams that’s often miss­ing at the begin­ning of a project. Con­tent maps can help pro­vide the col­lab­o­ra­tion and inte­gra­tion points des­per­ate­ly need­ed inter­nal­ly that dri­ve a more uni­fied voice and expe­ri­ence to delight our cus­tomers.

Cus­tomer-cen­tric sto­ries, engage­ment, and even design should start with ques­tions. Yet we often go straight to strate­giz­ing, writ­ing, and cre­at­ing.

Here are six peo­ple you need to inter­view before you cre­ate a con­tent map which gen­er­ates the sto­ries that engage your per­sonas in their cus­tomer jour­ney.

Customer Service

No one in your orga­ni­za­tion is more attuned to your cus­tomers needs, desires, and prob­lems than your cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment. Inter­view a cus­tomer ser­vice lead or man­ag­er and ask ques­tions about top-lev­el prob­lems and needs:

• “What are the top 5 or 10 ques­tions you get asked every day?” This will depend in part on the com­plex­i­ty of your offer­ing.
• “What are the top 5 things we do as a brand that gets us the most com­pli­ments from our cus­tomers?”

Inter­view some­one in the call cen­ter. Cre­ate a set of ques­tions rel­e­vant to cus­tomer delight and how they might impact the goal of cus­tomer joy:

• “What would you change about the com­pa­ny if you were CEO for a day?”
• “What’s your biggest frus­tra­tion when deal­ing with cus­tomer issues?”

Salespeople

It’s good to get two per­spec­tives from the sales team: one from some­one who man­ages the team and one from some­one who han­dles sales direct­ly. For B2B this is enor­mous­ly impor­tant; it’s esti­mat­ed that more than 60 per­cent of the deci­sion to buy is made before a cus­tomer ever reach­es out to the sales orga­ni­za­tion. Hav­ing great answers to cus­tomer ques­tions and prob­lems before the sales con­tact is made is a big impe­tus for cre­at­ing a con­tent map.

Com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and social media teams are, ulti­mate­ly, sales­peo­ple. They’re the voice of the brand. Intel does a remark­able job of allow­ing its social media team and all employ­ees to engage with cus­tomers to under­stand their biggest prob­lems. Ask them:

• “What are 5 ques­tions your poten­tial cus­tomers ask most often?”
• “What resource do you wish the mar­ket­ing team would cre­ate to help you train your sales­peo­ple?”

Competition

Study the com­pe­ti­tion, learn about their strengths and weak­ness­es. You could even go so far as to find a past employ­ee and get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the com­pe­ti­tion’s biggest advan­tage and biggest pain point. Ask the ques­tions:

• “What does our com­pe­ti­tion do bet­ter than we do?”
• “Where is our com­pe­ti­tion weak?”
• “Why do we lose cus­tomers to our com­pe­ti­tion?”

Best Customers

This is the real­ly fun part. Get on the phone with your best cus­tomers and let them cre­ate the con­tent poten­tial cus­tomers need. Ask cus­tomers:

• “Tell me about a time you used our product/service and how that helped you.”
• “Why did you choose us?”
• “As a cus­tomer, what’s one thing we could do for you that we don’t cur­rent­ly do?”

Critics

Reviews on Google, Yelp, Bizrate, and oth­er ser­vices are becom­ing a very impor­tant part of a brand’s sto­ry online. When com­pa­nies ask how to get rid of bad reviews, the smartest answer is always, “quit doing the thing that incites the bad reviews.”

Short of being per­fect, though, we can often dis­arm a dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer by under­stand­ing and help­ing resolve the prob­lem pub­licly. Sure, it’s nat­ur­al for bad reviews to be mixed in with the good, even with an excep­tion­al­ly cus­tomer-cen­tric orga­ni­za­tion. The goal is to see the bad review as an oppor­tu­ni­ty rather than a chal­lenge to over­come.

Choose crit­ics from both review sites and cus­tomer ser­vice and ask them:

• “What could we have done bet­ter to help solve your prob­lem?”

Just own­ing that there is a prob­lem can be enor­mous­ly dis­arm­ing. It’s hard to be angry when your frus­tra­tion is met with patience and a true desire to make things right.

Crit­ics reviews, whether shared online or with your cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment, are an enor­mous con­tent oppor­tu­ni­ty to bet­ter under­stand the cus­tomer jour­ney and impact it pos­i­tive­ly. Ignor­ing crit­ics dur­ing the con­tent map­ping process means you’re only see­ing part of the pic­ture.

Business Intelligence/Analytics

Lever­ag­ing ana­lyt­ics to improve the cus­tomer jour­ney requires we don’t just share data, but that we share the sto­ries the data cre­ates. We can eas­i­ly become over­whelmed because there’s so much data and so much you can poten­tial­ly do.

In the face of hav­ing the data to learn every­thing, we often fear it’s a fail­ure to just learn some­thing. There are rarely absolutes.

Asked to choose four cus­tomer frus­tra­tions in the sales fun­nel, four dif­fer­ent ana­lysts will like­ly have dif­fer­ent answers. That’s OK. Just ask your busi­ness intel­li­gence teams to share their method­olo­gies, show their think­ing, and reveal their find­ings.

We often come to ana­lysts with huge expec­ta­tions and lit­tle guid­ance, leav­ing them to scram­ble to share a dash­board with a lot of data but no good sto­ries or action­able insights. Great mar­keters know that con­sis­tent improve­ment over time beats paral­y­sis by analy­sis every time.

Set out to learn and improve some­thing. Rather than ask­ing for just the data, ask for the take­aways. Ask your ana­lysts:

• “If you could fix two or three prob­lems in the fun­nel, what would you fix?”
• “If you could test two or three things to improve cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, what would you test?”
• “If you could spend more mon­ey in a par­tic­u­lar chan­nel, what chan­nel would you choose?”

Summary

When you pre­pare your con­tent map ques­tions, know that you’ll be most suc­cess­ful when you take the approach of “what’s in it for them?” rather than “what’s in it for me?” If our goal is to spend time dis­cov­er­ing what’s best for our cus­tomers and how to delight them, does­n’t it make sense to delight your teams as well?

• Share with the sales team that the con­tent map you’re devel­op­ing for the cus­tomer jour­ney will pro­vide them with resources to share with poten­tial cus­tomers.
• Share with your cus­tomers how valu­able they are as brand advo­cates and how their answers will help you pro­vide them a bet­ter product/service.
• Share with your cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment how impor­tant they are to the cus­tomer life­cy­cle and brand suc­cess.
• Even share with your crit­ics how their hon­est appraisal of your weak­ness­es helps you pro­vide a bet­ter expe­ri­ence and maybe even win them back.

As you’re gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion, log ques­tions and answers into a spread­sheet. Pat­terns will begin to emerge that help us define the sto­ries we need to share dur­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney.

You don’t have to use these 16 ques­tions. It’s just impor­tant to ask lead­ing ques­tions that get you to real, hon­est answers. Once you’ve com­plet­ed this exer­cise, you’ll have informed feed­back to begin your con­tent map­ping exer­cise from the peo­ple who mat­ter the most.

Let your next cam­paign or mar­ket­ing project begin, not with con­tent devel­op­ment, not with chan­nel selec­tion, not with a paid cam­paign, but with lis­ten­ing. It could be your sim­plest and smartest strat­e­gy yet.