Three cases in three industries: how interviewing prospects adds value to any content initiative

No matter your industry, successful content means making a connection between you, your prospects, and your brand.  Value-added content isn’t just a good read—it serves the specific needs of decision makers you want to engage to drive sales. As HubSpot observes:

“When you put yourself in your audience’s shoes, it becomes easier to acknowledge struggles and think critically about the best solutions. That's why empathetic content marketing is such a powerful strategy for businesses.”

Here, we’ve invented three very different cases based on our insights in three very different industries to show how one research effort produces a wealth of material for your long-term content goals.

Connecting with Small-Bid Contractors in the Crowded iOS App Market

As with any modern business, residential and commercial contractors—often one-person or family-owned operations—need digital tools to meet their unique business needs. In the crowded iOS field, one company sought to create highly specialized, comprehensive tools that help contractors find job opportunities, bid on those jobs, easily manage communications and project scopes with customers, and connect with other contractors about important questions and issues.

The company needed to engage its customers on their terms, showing they understand their customers’ specific needs and businesses. For their very first marketing initiative, the company invested in a 100-respondent interview-based survey, asking members of their target audience specific questions about their pain points, their most interesting stories, and their recommendations to other contractors.

By aligning those questions with their iOS app features, the new company got the insights they needed to develop valuable, empathetic content their prospects genuinely wanted. With over 100 transcribed interviews featuring 400 unique stories, the company had enough material for over three months of content—blog posts, social media, and even byline articles they’d submit to editors of online publications regularly read by their target audience.

When the iOS app hit the market, their customers knew immediately what the company stood for, how well they understood their business, and how the new tool could help them succeed.

Manufacturers Discover Unique Augmented Reality Functionalities That Transform Their Field Service Operations

In a technology-driven industry like field service, customer satisfaction has become the distinguishing factor for success among enterprise manufacturers trying to maintain long-term relationships with their buyers. Augmented reality is providing the latest breakthroughs in customer engagement, enabling technicians to collaborate remotely, train, and resolve problems for customers quickly in an exciting and cost-effective way.

One augmented reality solution provider wanted to distinguish itself in three specific markets—Aerospace, Hi-Tech, and Life Sciences, which make up 75% of their customer base collectively.

The company invested in a 300-respondent phone survey, interviewing 100 decision makers in each of the three industries. The company asked custom questions that aligned their technology with use cases unique to each of these industries.

The data they acquired was a boon for their content goals. The company developed a single, comprehensive and beautifully designed research report they could use for lead gen across their target markets. What’s more, they created three value-added infographics, one for each market; and three-months’ worth of blog posts and articles that benchmarked customer satisfaction and opportunities in each respective industry—opportunities that align with their product’s value propositions.

Tapping the Interest of Healthcare Professionals with New Insights and Success Stories on a Holistic, Non-Pharmaceutical Customer Care Product

One manufacturer of non-pharmaceutical patient care solutions struggled to introduce a new, relatively untested product into a noisy and complicated market. Lacking success stories and performance data, the company needed a novel way to (1) show nursing directors their product was a worthwhile investment, and (2) highlight the value their product brought to unique use cases in real-world medical environments.

The company invested in 200 phone interviews with goals not only to collect quantitative data from multiple hospital departments but also to provide real stories from practitioners who had used similar products successfully. The result was an outpouring of positive support for such solutions.

The company complemented the survey with quotes from their own successful customers. Now, healthcare decision makers in their target audience have the evidence they need to invest confidently in the company’s products.

Your Content is Your Company—Make it Your #1 Strength

Your prospects are as tired of reading repetitive, derivative content as you are. Give them something different, consistently, and with long-term value. With a little ingenuity and the support of an expert analyst, you can give your customers exactly what they need the first time you connect.

Make the rest of their journey a positive and lucrative one for both parties.