The power of user-generated and audience-centric content
- Luke Telford
- 15 September 2009
User generated and audience-centric content is vital to the success of your website. When a visitor first lands on your homepage, they need to be greeted with information that is at once new and strangely familiar.
How do you do this?
There are three boxes to tick:
- Know your customer's interests
- Anticipate how they process content online
- Engage them accordingly
The reason a customer has come to your site should be fairly obvious: their primary interest is in your product, service or brand. The interests mentioned in 1) refer to their interests with respect to your business. How does it compare to other, similar businesses? Is the service it offers good quality? Is it reasonably priced? Is it well established?
The best way to dispel these concerns is to provide them with content that addresses them as they would expect to be addressed by another human being, as opposed to an automated website. Make the content either user-generated or audience-centric, and preferably both.
Publishing customer reviews is the simplest and most effective method of ticking both user generated and audience centric boxes. A review is by a customer, for a customer. It's gratifying to write and genuinely informative to read. People tend to review something if they feel strongly about it, and reviews are usually positive. Given that your product/service is inherently good (which it is, of course), a review section on your site will be characterised by a peculiarly positive hyperbole: lots of glowing reviews.
A quick look at the Big Brown Box
site demonstrates
this. Rarely, if ever, a three star or below review.
There are always a couple of negative reviews, though. The way you handle a negative review is vital. Address the criticism and resolve the conflict behind it, but give the customer an opportunity to follow it up. If you impress them sufficiently with the follow up, they'll want to tell people about it.
Finally, offer customers something they value for nothing, if possible. Provide free, valuable content that's relevant to a visitor's primary interest in your site, and people will not only return, but they'll tell people about your business. Utterly invaluable!
On to number 2). You know a visitor to your site is curious about your product, and we've figured out what they're curious about. Now you need to answer their curiosities in a way that's easy to process.
Most content online is text, plain and simple. Keep the words that you use concise and relevant. Make sure your tone is both personable and suitable to the calibre of customer you're attracting.
Images are important, too. They communicate much more directly than text. Again, quality over quantity. Don't use too many of them and keep those that you do use relevant and to the point.
Video is the holy grail of customer engagement through content. It's more direct than images or text and much easier to process.
Correct use of video on your site removes all the barriers of text-based content. If done correctly, it gives your site a human face, literally.
Keep videos to less than three minutes, preferably between one and a half and two minutes long. Good quality is preferable, but not absolutely vital. Much video content on the web is very humble, so as long as yours is reasonable quality, visitors will forgive imperfections.
If you think your customers are sufficiently tech aware, offer the opportunity to post video reviews. The quality of these isn't so important (poorer quality will probably even lend authenticity) - a video of a customer raving about a product and demonstrating why they're raving is worth a million ‘5 stars, really good thx!' reviews.
Re-purposing content is a good idea also, provided you make it clear that it's not yours. Link to product features and reviews on other sites. Create a YouTube channel featuring your videos and linking to other relevant ones.
Also, update frequently. The more there is to engage your customers the better. If they're aware your site is constanty updated, they'll check back more often. There's also a direct correlation between frequency of updates and Google search ranking.
Give your prospective customers an online context for your business with content that's frequently updated, personable, reassuring and web 2.0 literate, and watch the results. You won't be disappointed.
