Does Your Marketing Content Address Your Customers’ Needs?

Recently, a team member and I provided operational support to one of our expansion stage portfolio companies, by completing an analysis on their customer facing content. Our goal was to understand the key issues and pain points faced by their prospects, so that we could make recommendations as to how the company can enhance their content marketing strategy to address these concerns.

We structured out a project summary and got together an organized work plan. Once we had by-in from everyone involved, we set out to collect some data points. Following are the three sources we chose to collect data from:

Prospects – potential customers who are faced with several industry-related issues.

Customers – current customers who have experienced the company’s sales process.

Internal – various employees who have been involved in the sales process and understand the challenges associated with their industry.

Our research efforts were primarily comprised of face-to-face and telephone interviews, as well as a customer survey.

We followed our work plan by gathering all of the research, synthesizing our findings, and looking for gaps. It was our goal to determine what this company provides with respect to content and whether or not it is currently meeting the needs of their target prospects.

This process showed me that despite the fact that this company’s marketing representation is creative and focused, they are not necessarily providing the messaging that their target prospects are looking for. There are some significant gaps between what their prospects want to know, how it is presented to them, and what this company actually provides.

Keep in mind that as you put in the time and effort to create new content, make sure that you understand your audience and that you are speaking to them. Technical briefings and buzzwords are typically not the right answer. Your company may come across as advanced and professional, though the last thing you want is for your audience to be left with the question: 

so what is it that this company actually does?