Content: How to Use the Two Sides of Intentionality to Motivate Customer Action
Connect With Customers
The two sides of intentionality impact how your content connects with customers. Unless you understand and use the two sides of intentionality—your business and your customer—your content ends up misaligned.
Your intention is to show the customer what your business offers. Your customer's intention is to find a solution. Your content functions as the point where the two intentions meet.
Where Your Business Misses the Mark
Your content makes claims about your business expertise and contains points about your product or service.
If you find site visitors are not responding in the way you like, your intentionality may not meet your site visitor's need, only your need.
Your content must relate to your customer's intention.
Your problem is your intention and the customer's are not aligned.
You intend to tell them how your business is their solution. They intend to solve a problem. How can it be wrong?
It Doesn't Matter How Your Customer Gets to Your Web Page
You may desire to build visits to your page through advertising or organic reach. Advertising is fast. Organic reach is slower. Either way what counts is how your site visitor responds once they arrive.
Tactics like formatting best practices or using your competitor's keywords only go so far. Your message must match your customer's intention—looking for a solution.
Why Your Intention Is Not A Match for Your Customer
If your intention is all about you, straight away, you're not connecting. Your development team may be brilliant, but your client doesn't care about their brilliance, per se. Your client cares about what the brilliance does to help them.
For example, a bookkeeping Software as a Service (SaaS) manages expenses and payroll and generates custom reports. Your customer wants to know if their accountant has access and if they can both look at the reports together. Can the accountant not only see the information but generate custom reports for the business?
This prospective customer may already use a competitor's service. The questions they have are specific for a need. If you answer specific questions demonstrating how your product provides a solution, your business is much more likely to get a response.
For specifics like this, you'll want a dedicated page about the details of accountant access. You'll detail how an accountant can work with the system. You'll detail how the system allows building custom reports.
In addition, you'll underscore the benefits of the experience, like saving time, eliminating back-and-forth emails, etc.
Emotional Touchpoints
In a recent article, Google examined how emotional touchpoints vary for the same query. These touchpoints impact how a searcher will respond to your content.
Google examines the six canonical needs of Kantar’s NeedScope:
surprise me
help me
reassure me
educate me
impress me
thrill me
Each of the six emotional touchpoints requires a unique set of responses in your content. This hierarchy of needs and responses challenges Google's search engines. More importantly, the needs challenge you to connect with different emotional needs.
The "Know Your Customer" Challenge
Since people buy on emotions, not rationality—yes, even SaaS bookkeeping systems—emotional touchpoints impact how you create content.
If your business intention has been to develop a customer persona and speak to that persona, now you have an added factor—emotional intent.
Besides demographics like income, location, where they shop, where they hang out online, type of business, etc. now you need to think about the demographics of your best customer's emotional intention.
You can for relevant queries on Answer the Public and ask your sales team the most common questions. But now you need to probe the emotional needs behind the queries.
Aim For Emotional Need
Google struggles with emotional intent. And you can't know the emotional intent behind a query.
The best you can do at this point is to think about the psychology behind a customer's need. You can gather from your sales force the biggest emotional blocks and which of the six emotional needs is most prevalent in their conversations.
Since there is no data set for emotional needs, you need to think about how most customers feel when they begin an investigation into your product or service.
Balance the Two Intentionalities
While you have no direct data equivalent to measure the emotional intent of customers searching for your solution, you can incorporate emotionally based needs into your content.
Think about the six emotional needs and create content that addresses each need.
surprise me - an unknown quality that helps
help me - address the issue and illustrate the solution
reassure me - use testimonials, social proof, and statistics
educate me - explain a process in detail
impress me - results statistics, high-end users
thrill me - highlight and exceptional feature and the benefits
Create content that highlights your product or service from different emotional touchpoints. You help search engines like Google understand emotional touchpoints. You'll help customers understand your product or service from their emotional need. You'll increase your business reach and brand awareness.
Include addressing customer emotions in your content strategy to balance your intention and your customer's intention.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
