How to Give Your Customer What She is Looking For

Who is your ideal customer?

Right answer: the binge consumer.

Wrong answer: any other kind of customer.

Accomplishing the ideal is always a lofty goal. Especially when your ideal customer is the most challenging one to reach.

But does alluring your ideal customer always need to be so difficult?

Not if you know how to do it.

Valued Content with the Right Momentum

To attract any ideal customers at all,  content must offer substance, excitement and novelty — yet be simple enough to read in minimal time, without trapping anybody in cumbersome nuances. The more your customer searches for content on Google, the more relevant material he hopes to click on. But the more he clicks on, the less he ends up reading. So why is he interested in content to begin with?

What is the Challenge?

How do we mold our content to accommodate this paradox? Look at these Chartbeat stats of how much content is (or isn’t consumed):

As expected, content marketers are posed with a challenge. Content marketers put in 100% effort for their content to be consumed by ideal customers, and only 50% of it gets read. This is the challenge.

I know you can handle it.

The Ideal: Your Content is Binged

Ever hear of binge readers? They just might be your secret weapon to winning the challenge of balancing substantial, yet highly fluid content. You want to show him that your single resource alone holds the key to all the content he could ever want.

But how can you lead him to so many places through such a narrow bridge?

Binging begins when your customer is fully engaged, so much so that your content is all he’s thinking about. You captivated him, and he’s more than just excited, he wants as much of your content as he can possibly get.

Once you know his direction, your content can become a bottomless treasure chest: your customer will keep digging for more of what he loves. He’s not just looking for content to enjoy. He has questions to be answered, blanks to fill in, and needs to satisfy.

He knows what he wants, and he craves it till the last lick. If you don’t have it, he won’t stick around. But once he gets it, he’ll keep asking for more.

Why It’s Binging Time

This generation of customers demands access to your content at any time, anywhere. The more data you have on him, the more he expects your personalized input. He demands experiences that fit him like a glove. And once he gets them, he’ll binge till the cows come home. That is the kind of ideal customer we desire.

Why Meeting Demands Leads to Binging

Binge Readers are a prototype of the ‘on-demand generation’. Thanks to technologies like the Internet of Things, Big Data, and sensor-programmed devices, the demand generation stage has set the stage for radically personalized interaction between customer and content. Breeding intuitively responsive experiences, they’re demanding your personalized input. They know you’ve got the data, they know it’s possible. Cause today, anything is possible.   

Content Needs to Fit Like a Glove

Targeting binge readers to consume your content soothes your worry that your content can’t have all the answers, without saying too much.

For content to be binge-worthy, it needs to answer all the right questions. You don’t just want your customer to approve, you want him to indulge in your content with immeasurable glee. There’s a fine line between relevant content that’s worth a 50% read, and irresistible content that brings all the answers to the palm of his hand.

The irony is, binging means taking in all you can get. But with bingers, although their limits are sky-high, their standards are, too. They won’t just binge on anything you feed them. You need to earn their appetite.

With boundless content options to binge on, even when they like your content area, he needs to be navigated to the content that’s really worth his last lick.

Once he’s ready to binge, the more likely he is to share. The better it tastes, the more he binges. And his binge sensation only brings more and more content sharing. He wants to share his sensational joy.

These ratios are from our vault of Roojooms. The most-viewed content correlates with the most shares:

The Netflix Era: Guiding Your Customer Through

The success of Netflix is the token example for how the on-demand generation thrives on binging. To Netflix customers, TV access means an unlimited, personalized stream of the content they want — in supersized amounts.

Curated to customers based on their preferences and viewing history, Netflix (and similar services like Amazon) releases TV series a whole season at a time, unlike the (age-old) frequency of a weekly or bi-weekly basis. On-demand gens don’t settle for cliffhangers between episodes that once had us at the edge of our seats all summer long.  They get what they want, when they want it.

Bottom line: content needs to come in heaps and heaps. They want it all, not just a modest helping.

Binging Content On All Fronts, Not Just Video Streaming

Netflix (and similar media services) have set the backdrop that our content stands upon: customers are calling the shots with content. If customers have gotten used to consuming Netflix according to their terms, then that’s how they’ll want our content to be, too.

Content Marketing is actually very plausible for binge content consumption. If one customer reads your Whitepaper, and decided he was hooked on what you had to say, it wouldn’t stop there. There’s plenty more where that came from. Instantaneously, he’ll search for your eBook, your webinars, and any content he could get his hands on. But, if you actively divert him to a landing page that announced your webinar next month, he’d be put off. He wants to hear it now, or even download it to his phone to listen to on the train. He’s not interested in 3 weeks from now.

If you show him personally that his questions can be answered not just with your blog post, but clarified even further with your eBook or your Infographic, he’ll want all of it. You’re guiding him to every point on his agenda, and the less he struggles to find them,  the longer he’ll stick around.

Feeling the Excitement: Getting your Customer’s Fullest  Attention

The customer excitement and binge process is also a product of this reality: Attention comes in bursts, not drops. Sending customers scattered drops of content for him to collect at his leisure won’t bring on his binging. If you send him a burst of content that really tickles his fancy, he’ll dive into it, as soon as he can, for as long as he can.

How to Know What He Wants

Logically, this can often be done with analytics. When we’re programmed to process what content our viewer likes, we can suggest more of that kind, using our knowledge to excitement him yet again.

We need to curate his personalized content package. Even if your content has all his answers, you he won’t know this by searching on his own. You need to present your content in a way that proves it without him asking.

What is your experience with content binging? Tell us in the comments below.