Using Live Chat Data for New Content Marketing Ideas
by Chris Porter
You know content marketing is the key to driving brand awareness, generating sales, and reaching new customers. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, one of the toughest parts of running a content marketing strategy is simply deciding what to write about.
You don’t want to simply repeat what your competitors are doing, and coming up with ideas of your own can be a gruelling process. So, why not take inspiration from your customers instead?
Live chat – the solution rapidly gaining ground as the preferred way for clients to communicate with their favourite brands, is also an excellent source of insight into what your customers are talking about. With chat tools, you can discover trends in what your audience members usually ask about and use that information to guide your content choices.
Here’s how you can get started.
1. Identify Trending Questions
The easiest way to use live chat to inspire your content marketing strategy, is to see which terms, keywords, and questions seem to show up most often in conversations with customers. AI tools can automatically collect information from thousands of customer conversations (without impending on privacy and security requirements).
These tools can then list the trending topics that seem to appear most often for your customers. For instance, you might notice that your clients frequently ask for tips on how to set up your software or need advice on how to allow recurring payments.
Make a list of trending terms and questions you recognise in your live chat transcriptions and saved conversations, and arrange them into groups. For instance, you might have a group of questions for:
- Product or solution operation
- Complaints and feedback
- Pricing and deals
- Delivery or subscription management
2. Find the Right Content Option for Trending Topics
Once you’ve got your list of trending topics, you can think about how to best respond with content. For instance, if customers frequently ask questions about how to add a new number to their Contact Centre service, you might create a video guiding client through the process. You can also set your automated chat system and self-service solutions to direct customers to these videos in future.
Other kinds of content might be better for blog posts, website pages, eBooks, or articles. Go through your list of topics and assign the most appropriate content type to the query in question.
You probably have a good idea of what kind of content your audience like most from your website analytics and tracking tools. If you have multiple segments in your target audience, you can even create your content in different formats to fill out more of your content plan. For instance, you might start with a video about setting up smart routing, then follow up with an article and FAQ page.
3. Explore New Ideas
Although the trending topics that appear in your chat conversations are likely to be the issues your content needs to focus on first – that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t focus on other ideas too. Pay attention to some of the things your customers say less often when discussing your product or service, and ask yourself whether it might be worth creating content in those areas too.
A great way to determine whether a topic is worth covering is to discuss potential ideas with your sales and marketing team. They’ll be able to confirm whether the things you hear about in your live chat conversations are also common among customer discussions in other areas. You can make a list of the keywords that have the most potential and check out whether your competitors have covered similar areas in the past.
If you uncover topics that haven’t been covered by the competition, this is an excellent chance to differentiate your company and fill a knowledge gap. If other companies have produced similar content, you can always look for new ways to add a different twist.
Take Advantage of Discussion Data
Conversational data from your contact centre conversations and live chat discussions isn’t just a good idea for tracking valuable information about your audience. You can also use your conversations with customers as a source of inspiration when you’re not sure where to scale your content marketing plan.
You’d be surprised how much information and insight you can get just by listening to the questions that come up during the sales, service, and marketing process. You may even want to have a chat with your live chat team every now and again to get their feedback.
