Idea: Follow in the Footsteps of Companies
Successfully Using Customer Media and Content

The companies that really know how to use customer media content—to create and deepen relationships with customers, not just to fulfill some checklist of sales and marketing materials—have a few things in common.

From our work and research, here are 10 traits of companies setting the benchmark for using customer media and content that works:

1. They know specifically how their customer media and content efforts support their company’s mission and bottom line–they aren’t producing content for feel-good reasons.
2. They’re focused on hard metrics directly related to sales and after-the-sale relationships. They’re less concerned with soft metrics like followers, likes and engagement.
3. They’re obsessed with applying (not merely tracking) the insight from such metrics.
4. They “nerd out” when discussing how their product or service can help a customer accomplish something. They are less concerned with their products’ components because they know most customers want an outcome, not a set of features.
5. They’re obsessed with finding better ways to help customers become smarter, savvier users of their company’s products. They want to help customers have the outcome they intended when purchasing the product. They love how-tos.
6. They’re inspired when they discover helpful customer features on websites unrelated to their work or professional interests. (They’re too weighted down with cognitive bias to learn from approaches found in their own fields.)
7. They view media and content as integral parts of a product, not merely as tools to market products.
8. They use words like teach, help and serve rather than promote, market and target when discussing their company’s customer media and content strategy.
9. They’re constant experimenters and tinkerers, but they’re skeptical of anything new that doesn’t sync with their customers’ needs or behavior.
10. They’re doers and not just planners. While in pursuit of perfection, they know what Voltaire meant when he said, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.“

Bonus Post on the Hammock Blog: Six Savvy Users of Customer Media and Content

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