If you're going to be successful with content marketing you need to be consistent with it.
But it's tough because coming up with ideas is difficult and marketers need all the help they can get.
We've written this blog previously looking at 16 places you can find your next content idea but one part of your business that often gets overlooked as a source of content ideas is your customer service team.
Which is crazy when you think about it.
The majority of customers today (72%) prefer to use a company's website to find information to answer their own questions, rather than talking to someone on a help desk, according to research by Forrester.
Also, many customer questions are repeated, so forcing teams to answer them time and time again is a waste of resource.
Instead this is a perfect opportunity to use your customer service team as a valuable source of content ideas that your marketing team can use to answer questions and free your service teams up to deal with more complex questions at the same time.
Creating a resource centre or knowledge base
Whenever your customer service team deals with an enquiry, or you receive an enquiry through other means like live chat or email etc you should make sure you have a place for these questions to be stored.
By reviewing what questions your customer service team is dealing with you can start to identify trends in issues, and if you don't answer the questions on your website already, then you need to create something (whether it's a blog, video, guide etc) that answers the question.
If you see the same question coming up, add it to your website's FAQ page.
If you don't have an FAQ page, create one.
How do your customers want information delivered?
One of the biggest challenges of content marketing, is figuring out the best channels to use to promote your content.
But one of the biggest benefits of using customer service as part of the content process, is that your customers are contacting you and are going to contact you using the channel they prefer to use.
You should record how your customers are getting in touch with you, and use that when planning your content distribution and outreach.
Using customer service to inform buyer personas
Who you are creating content for?
What questions do they have or problems do they face in their jobs?
How do they prefer to get information?
These are all questions you need to answer as part of creating a buyer persona, and they are all questions your customer service team can help answer.
They deal with your personas, or at least people who can influence your buyer persona, on a daily basis.
They have a better understanding of what challenges customers face than maybe anyone else in your company and they know what kind of information your customers need to best help them overcome those challenges.
Failing to use your customer service teams as part of building your buyer persona process means you could be missing out on valuable information about your audience.
