Content Marketers: 5 tips for working with Customer Success teams

On the list of events I wish I could've gone to this year, CMWorld is right up there. Thankfully, independent marketing consultant Dennis Shiao shared a great recap in CMSWire last week, highlighting content marketing OG Joe Pulizzi's keynote. In it, he pointed out the opportunity that delightful ongoing content experiences present, in addition to campaigns. Shiao smartly tacked on his personal connections to Pulizzi's thoughts, including this little gem:

“One thing to consider is forging stronger collaboration between marketing and customer success teams, so that marketing can stay connected with customers.”

Customer Success teams are generally in place to help ensure that customers can achieve their goals with your company’s products and services. This can mean a lot of different functions, but it often includes content experience professionals—writers, designers, video producers, content strategists, and information architects—that focus on educating customers through how-to materials.

As you evaluate your content marketing spend, it’s a good idea to understand the content work that’s already happening within your organization. In the case of Customer Success teams, there’s a natural opportunity for partnership.

Forbes author and leadership strategist Shep Hyken had some related takeaways from his time at Conex last month (another conference on my wish list!):

“Ask yourself, ‘What kind of content would we produce if we weren’t trying to sell anything? What if we were just educating?’ The concept is to promote by educating, not selling. When you help people understand, they start to have confidence in their buying decisions.”

Collaborating with your Customer Success team can not only save you the agency spend, but it can also result in authentic content that resonates more deeply with buyers.

By bringing key marketing concepts like branding, consideration subject matter, and social media together with your Customer Success team’s deep customer expertise, product knowledge, and post-sales content experiences, your company can meet your prospective customers’ learning needs at multiple elevations that are appropriate to each stage in the customer journey.

Ready to partner? Here are five tips to help content marketers get started.

1: Explain branding decisions and deliver on media needs

People who are familiar with engaging in a pre-sales context understand that having a consistent company image, both visually and behaviorally, translates to trustworthiness, which can translate to sales.

To people who work on post-sales content, the reality is that branding is often understood as using the right fonts and colors. If you have a very mature Customer Success organization, they may also understand branding to mean a consistent voice and tone, as well as curated photography, graphics, and fictitious data.

When post-sales content is reviewed against brand standards, the resulting required changes can feel insignificant and hyper-critical to someone who is ultimately focused on helping existing customers through confusion or pain points in your products. The right logo size or graphic selection might interfere with communicating a concept in the most effective way, and if the team producing the content doesn’t have the context around why brand elements are important to your company, a good Customer Success team will prioritize effective communication over all other feedback.

Instead of walking away from Customer Success content that doesn’t meet brand requirements:

• Take the time to help your Customer Success team understand the reasoning behind the feedback they receive, and listen and adjust when that feedback doesn't work.
• Do the work to keep your Customer Success team informed of the “why” behind branding changes, instead of stopping at the "what."
• Listen and deliver on your Customer Success team's material needs for effective communication—this might mean things like new graphic elements, unique content types, or adjusted guidelines that account for learning contexts.

If you explain the opportunity that brand alignment offers in terms of reaching and helping even more people, your Customer Success team can be a powerful partner to enable content marketing at scale.

2: Collaborate on content designed for a pre-sales context

Customer Success teams are tasked with ensuring customers can effectively use the products or services that they are paying for. This typically means feature-level how-to content. When a new feature rolls out, Customer Success teams fold that feature into a broader content set covering 80% of existing-customer use cases.

On the pre-sales side of things, the targets look a little different. Marketers understand who the company is trying to attract, what might resonate well with that audience, and what people are looking for when they’re evaluating purchase. Customer Success teams don’t have that insight. It means that if marketers deliver content that resonates during consideration for new audiences, and then are successful in securing those sales, the post-sales content delivered by Customer Success may not account for moving someone from the content they consumed during consideration, through to the 80% that’s been delivered to serve the existing customer base.

Instead of independently producing pre-sales content within your marketing team, and then walking away successful when you see the right sales numbers come in, try working with your Customer Success team to deliver content that resonates in a pre-sales context. This will enable the Customer Success team to fold those content pieces into the larger content set more effectively, ensuring your new customers have a seamless experience before, during, and after purchase.

3: Include Customer Success in your social media strategy

Social marketers have unique expertise in the content and conversation trends on each individual platform where your company is engaging. Your Customer Success team likely has some thoughts about social media as well—they use these platforms too and can see the opportunity to reach (and educate) large volumes of customers in the places where they’re already spending their time.

Customer Success teams typically deliver content in a reactive context—a customer gets stuck and looks for an answer, a customer makes a purchase and looks up how to get started with a task, etc. Because social media enables you to proactively capture the attention of large volumes of people, it’s particularly attractive to Customer Success teams, who are measuring content effectiveness through increases in product usage and decreases in support call volumes. In a proactive context, content can help to ensure that a customer’s experience with a feature is positive from the get-go, and the more people see what’s possible with a product, the more likely they are to use it.

What these teams don’t have visibility into, however, is what your company’s broad communication goals are for your social channels, and how feature adoption fits in. Social platforms look like large-volume opportunities for Customer Success teams, and without understanding (and, more importantly, being included in) the broader communications strategy, you will likely see Customer Success teams increasingly creating their own social presence to achieve their goals.

Take the time to understand the business objectives of your Customer Success team, and then work with them to fold those objectives into the social media and broader communications strategy for your company. The result will be a cleaner and more thoughtful experience for customers, with the right volumes and messages landing at the right times.

4: Leverage Customer Success expertise in product usage

Customer Success teams sit on a goldmine of data that can help you craft more effective campaigns. Because they’re focused on product usage and can see related content traffic volumes, clickthrough rates, and customer comments, they have a deep understanding of where customers are getting stuck, what they seem to like and dislike, and what product features and scenarios are underused.

When you work with your Customer Success team to plan your content marketing campaigns, the result is precision content that is more effectively targeted, because you’ve brought in professional expertise in content that bridges sales objectives with product realities. Instead of delivering content that matches what you hope your products and services are delivering to your prospective customers, Customer Success teams can craft content that explains how your products actually work, in alignment with brand messaging. The fact of the matter is that usually there’s a gap between vision and reality that nobody wants to acknowledge. Customer Success teams know how to gracefully bridge that gap, because they genuinely want to help people achieve the goals they had at purchase.

When you’re planning a campaign, go talk to your Customer Success team. Find out what the product realities are about the story you’re trying to tell, and ask for their help in sharing that story in a way that customers can actually follow through on. They may even already have some existing content that would work well with the right CTA.

5: Build on their existing ongoing content experience

Your Customer Success team likely already has an ongoing content experience for existing customers. It might be framed as a support or training website, or maybe even a knowledge base. It might be public, or it might sit behind a sign-in for paying customers only.

Take the time to go learn about what that experience looks like right now. You might be surprised by what you find there—a wealth of content that, with maybe a few changes, would make for an incredible content marketing experience. Instead of spinning up a new site to ensure that you can hit your marketing objectives, try connecting with the leadership in your Customer Success team to explore evolving the ongoing content experience in a way that would also work in a pre-sales context. That might mean adding purchase links in strategic locations, or building spaces in the information architecture for scenario-based content that resonates during consideration. It might mean moving portions of the site out from behind a paywall.

By collaborating on a unified pre- and post-sales content experience, you offer your customers streamlined learning that feels consistent throughout all of their interactions with your company. And that consistency can translate to renewals, additional purchases, and recommendations to others.

The bottom line...

All of this guidance really boils down to this: Acknowledge the role that your Customer Success team has in your organization, and open a dialog with them to start actively collaborating. Most of the challenges in this space stem from a lack of awareness on the part of both teams, around each team's purpose and goals within the business. Start sharing, start listening, and you'll be offering current and prospective customers significantly more delightful learning opportunities around your brand.

Who wrote this thing I just read? Hi! I'm Sonia Atchison—I'm a content strategist passionate about breaking down silos, building community, systemically delivering social good, supporting Gen Z, and making space in corporate environments for the maturing creator career path. I'm currently fortunate enough to be blazing creator ecosystem trails at Microsoft, and enjoy sharing what I learn with others along the way. You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and occasionally crashing random stages and podcasts. I'm based in the Seattle area and love talking content—reach out if you want to grab coffee!