Think like a web editor: How to make your online content work harder

Something about “The customer is always right” has never sat well with me. 

Commonly attributed to US department store pioneer Marshall Fields, this old retail saying is still used widely to help customer services representatives remember to prioritise customer satisfaction. In a retail landscape where experience matters more than anything else, customer satisfaction is still very relevant. 

However, if you’ve ever worked a customer services role, you’ll quickly realise the cognitive dissonance inherent in serving from a “Customer is always right” mindset.

Because, the fact is that the customer is not always right. He or she is regularly confused, misinformed, misguided or even intentionally misleading. Individual customers can be downright wrong in all kinds of ways. 

And that’s not surprising: It’s not their job to engage with your business in an informed and efficient way. 

Customers are just trying to go about their lives, mashing the matrix of their complex wants and needs against your business’s offering or that of your competition, and hoping enough relevant bits will mesh for them to come away with the right product.

The only thing individual customers should be relied upon to know is their own wants and needs, and sometimes these are up for debate too. 

However, when you view customers in aggregate online, it’s a different story.

If you’re a SME, you’re probably used to checking web traffic on Google Analytics or your platform of choice, but did you know that you can also use it to see what your customers are clicking on, searching for, spending time on and navigating from to reach you?

Your business’s website doesn’t just broadcast your branding, blog posts and information about your offering to the world. It also collects a lot of information about how that content is received, which you can use to fine-tune future content by offering more of what’s popular and less of what’s ignored. 

As you look through your website’s analytics, consider:

• Are visitors spending the most time and clicking the most frequently on the content you’re prioritising?
• Is there significant traffic across any topics or content pieces that surprise you? 
• Could you stand to offer more topics or content pieces like those?
• Are visitors looking on Google or your website’s search engine for keywords related to topics you haven’t covered in blog posts or marketing material yet?

There’s also a number of free tools which aren’t tailored to your offering but can be used to find out general information about what customers want to hear about your product or category.

• AnswerThePublic collates questions people type into search engines and organises them into beautiful word visualisations.

• Google Trends is so much fun. It analyses the popularity over time of key search terms and ranks them for you. You probably didn’t need a graph to tell you that New Zealanders’ searches for ‘online shopping’ spiked hugely during lockdown, but isn’t it interesting to see that those searches had more or less dried up by June? 

When you’ve got a healthy-looking list of topics, keywords and ideas that you know your customers want to hear more about, you can approach a content creator like me to turn them into blog posts, marketing collateral, white papers, social media posts and other pieces of content. 

You can do this with confidence as your topics have already been road-tested.

If you’re not convinced by all this digital stuff, you’ve probably seen this principle of aggregate feedback in action organically in the form of ‘desire paths’. These are the little off-piste shortcuts customers create as they move through your store - cutting through a display here, shifting a display rack there so that they can get to the counter or exit by the most direct route. 

Individually, those customers should stick to the aisles. Collectively, they offer accurate information about how your store can and should work. It’s just the same online: Through their behaviour on your website, customers are telling you what kind of content they want.

And in that context, they really are always right.

Sarah Dunn is a B2B content marketing specialist and former award-winning magazine editor. If you’d like help telling your business’s story, you can find her at https://www.sarahdunn.co. Cite “customer is right’’ for 5 percent off your first project.