You probably don’t know who your customer is. 

Yes, you have a general idea. You know your ideal customer profiles. You have a sense of where they like to hang out online. You know about some of their pain points.

But when was the last time you hopped on a 30-minute call with one of your customers to check in on their real, live problems and desires? When did you last ask a handful of them where they spend time online and get their information? Where they discover products like yours? What their main stressors are? How you can make them look good?

I’ve been thinking about customer research both as an agency owner who needs to know my own customers and as a content marketing practitioner who needs to help my clients speak to theirs. 

Here’s why you’d probably benefit from rethinking who your customer is and how to marshal those insights to improve your content marketing program.

Questions to ask your clients to understand what makes them tick

Here are some of the questions I’ve written for my customer research call with my clients. Please reply with better ones. 

Where do you hang out online? For example, I spend a lot of time scrolling on LinkedIn and follow other content marketing people. What’s your version of that?

Do you participate in any groups or forums? Reddit pages? Do you use Quora?

Are there any real-life groups or associations you’re a part of? 

What events do you go to or does your team go to? What events does your company sponsor?

Where have you found other content or PR agencies? 

What do you read or watch to learn about PR, content, and martech? Social platforms? Industry publications? Podcasts or blogs?

What were you hoping to get out of hiring us?

What do you think can go wrong when hiring a content agency? How might you approach our engagement differently? 

What are the main stressors in your job? 

How can we help you not just from a business perspective but from an individual perspective? How can we make you look good?

What are your career goals?

What I want to know from my customers: where, who, what

I’m trying to determine a few things by interviewing my customers. And I think these insights are crucial not just for developing an overall marketing program but for developing a content marketing strategy specifically. 

Where they hang out and search for professional information: my intuition has always been that the best public forum online in which to find marketers and founders at martech companies, ecommerce/retail tech companies, and law firms is LinkedIn, the primary social network for professionals. So, I create content daily on LinkedIn, schedule a lot of networking calls on that basis, and write this newsletter, which I’ve largely grown on the strength of my LinkedIn presence.

But I don’t have definitive empirical evidence that LinkedIn is the best social channel for my content. And even if it is, I don’t know where else I could easily be repurposing content to ratchet up my marketing initiatives and find more customers. Plus, I don’t currently have an event strategy or take in-person events into consideration. 

Who they are, which I mean in the somewhat deep sense of what they want out of work, who they want to be, whom they want to impress, and how I can help them achieve those objectives. 

What stresses them out and what they need to be true about the engagement. What needs to be baked into our engagement — or it’s a failure? What can we do more of to help our points of contact and their companies? 

Customer research is the foundation of content strategy 

Customer research is essential to growing a business. But it’s also essential to content strategy whether you’re figuring it out in-house or trying to help a client figure it out as an agency or freelancer.

You’ll notice that a lot of my questions focus on where the customer is. These queries go a long way toward determining what can be one of content strategy’s most vexing questions: which channels should the content marketing team prioritize? How do we distribute the content creatively and effectively? Even if we settle on an SEO-driven blog strategy, where can we distribute those blogs to drive impact tomorrow, not just over time?

So many content marketing programs fail or stop getting investment because their impact can’t be substantiated. And as a client once said, they can’t be substantiated because content isn’t king; distribution is. Or as I might put it, connecting with your customers is. Super high-quality content is essential; getting it to your customers is also essential. You need to check both boxes to connect with your customers and drive results with content marketing.

It’s eight a.m. on Thursday morning. Do you know where your customers are?