These tips were originally published in our eBook, Inspiring Customers to Create Content for You: A Marketer’s Guide.
As a B2B marketer, you have boundless opportunities to turn your happiest customers into content collaborators.
Involving customers in your content marketing strategy has lots of benefits, including:
- Uncovering better content ideas and new customer success stories
- Speeding up content production
- Increasing user-generated content
- Growing organic social media distribution
- Building customer advocacy and engagement
Below, we’ve compiled a list of ideas of how you can get your customers involved in every stage of the content creation process.
Note: having a formal advocate marketing program or strategy makes asking for customer participation easier. Learn about the basics of advocate marketing here.
Checklist: how to involve customers in your content marketing strategy
Stage 1: Ideation
- Ask for opinions, pain points and insights on their industry/role to generate content ideas
- Get them to vote on or vet story ideas and value propositions
- Uncover potential success stories through community discussions and feedback
- Survey them to generate original research
- Give them content previews and ask for feedback before publishing
*Hint: An advocate community is the perfect place to do this
Stage 2: Content Creation
- Get them to submit short quotes or testimonials for content
- Ask them to co-write eBooks and success stories in their own words
- Train them to write guest blog posts
- Offer to let them star in how-to videos or podcasts
- Ask them for questions or content for webinars
- Crowdsource tips and insights from them for content round-ups
- Allow them to re-write your product page copy or value propositions in their own words
Stage 3: Content Distribution
- Ask them to follow and promote your social handles
- Ask them to share your content on social media
- Run campaigns or contests to generate discussion around your brand
- Point them to blogs of yours they may want to comment on
- Curate shareable content lists for and with them
*Hint: Make this process a fun competition to inspire participation
Stage 4: Developing third-party user-generated content (UGC)
- Ask advocates to write genuine reviews on third-party websites
- Point them to relevant discussions on forums, such as Quora, Reddit, etc.
- Ask them to combat competitor claims on third-party content
- Create a pool of volunteers for media, PR and analyst requests
- Challenge them to post original content about your brand on UGC content sites like Medium, YouTube, etc.
Want to get your customers involved in your content marketing strategy? Download our guide to learn how other B2B marketers use advocate marketing to create more customer-generated stories.
Don’t make your content marketing strategy all about you
Are you guilty of being a vain marketer? Watch this video to learn how to change your ways.
