Talk to those who talk to your customers: Building a customer-informed content strategy from scratch

The best stories usually start with an uncertain hero receiving their new mission, unsure where to begin, from the Lord of the Rings to The Princess Diaries. 

If you’ve been newly tasked with leading content for your org—in a new role or a reorg—you might feel like Frodo being handed the One Ring or Mia Thermopolis learning she’s the princess of Genovia. Whether you’re an experienced content pro or a brand leader or product marketer who’s diving in the deep end, how do you decide where to spend your time and energy? 

The old way of running some keyword research and churning out a few articles to rank won’t cut it. The tried-and-true tactic that does hold true is to “talk to your customers.” That’s great and all, but a new content leader often doesn’t have the bandwidth or customer access to talk to 30 end-users in their first few months on the job.

Here’s what you can do: Talk to the people who talk to your customers. The customer-facing teams at your company whose job it is to convince customers to buy and solve customers’ pressing problems. At Beam, we’ve built an onboarding process to give content teams customer insights that can drive strategy, build alignment, and inspire resonant content all year long. (As Director of Client Strategy, this is my jam.)

Keep reading to turn conversations with customer-facing teams into a content strategy that clicks. 

Phase 1: Hear from your customers via your team 

At Beam, interview-driven content is a hill we’ll always die on. But there’s a difference between asking an industry leader tactical questions to inform your next blog post and asking a seller how your brand messaging is missing or hitting the mark. 

Every aspect of your content priorities should build on customer intel, so conversations with your customer-facing colleagues can lay the groundwork for an informed and successful content strategy. Even if you don’t sit down with customers right away, sales and CS (and others) can give you strong signals about customers’ burning questions, toughest pain points, and biggest wins with your product. 

Every time the Beam team onboards a new client, we start those conversations with customer-facing teams. Then, we compile what we hear, compare notes with our point of contact, and work together to set a direction for months of content.

Here’s how you can run those conversations for yourself. 

Lay the foundation

Start by choosing the roster of teams that can give you the clearest signal about your audience. Curate a mix of voices from teams including:

• Customer Success
• Sales
• Product Marketing
• Customer Marketing
• Sales Engineering

Before you ever get in the room (or on Zoom) with these folks, decide what you want to accomplish and which questions you’ll ask to do it. Your overarching goal should be to uncover “What are you hearing from customers?” But that question on its own is a little too broad to get the insights you want; you’ll need to get more specific.

First, review existing sales documentation and battle cards, which can introduce you to objections and strategy at a high level; real-world conversations with customer-facing teams add nuance and give you detailed language and examples. Then, build out a list of questions that help you uncover the rest of the story. Just like you’d focus a conversation with a customer around their problems and goals, do the same thing with your colleagues:

• Their top priorities and KPIs
• How the product messaging and positioning are landing with customers
• The typical adoption journey
• Why and when customers commonly churn
• Common questions or confusion they hear from customers
• Gaps that the current content or marketing isn’t filling

Target your question list to match each team or individual you’ll be talking to—you’ll probably dig into objections with sales, retention with CS, and brand story with product marketing. Once you’ve built a roster of people who talk to your customers and a plan for each conversation, put time on the calendar.

Lead the conversation

Now, it’s time to sit down with each person for 30-60 minutes. How do you make the most of this chat?

While you should always come in with a list of questions, the real secret to a great interview is your flexibility: noticing patterns or anomalies in what someone says, following up for more detail, or adding a new question on the fly. Anytime you hear the other person say something you didn’t consider during prep—a new angle or perspective on your customers, industry, or product—dig deeper. Ask them to tell you more or explain their thought process; if they can give you specific customer examples, even better.

During these chats, be on the lookout for (and take notes on) these three patterns.

1. Common themes

If you talk to two or five or 10 people who spend time with your customers, it’s a pretty safe bet that some topics will come up over and over again. A persistent problem buyers face. A need that the status quo solution isn’t meeting. An industry-specific change that’s affecting everyone. 

When you hear a concept more than once, lean in—you’re probably looking at one of your content pillars or at least critical context for your upcoming strategy. Repeated themes come straight from what customers are communicating to your colleagues, so you should build your content roadmap around those narratives. 

2. Content and communication gaps

No shade to your predecessor or the rest of the marketing team, but your customer-facing interviewees probably need at least a few assets that marketing hasn’t given them yet. Sales enablement or demand gen, in particular, might have a laundry list of content they want to better support customers, especially if the content function is newer or hasn’t been filled for a while. That’s a content gap. 

But your early conversations are also a great time to uncover communication gaps: areas where teams aren’t talking to each other. CS hasn’t shared with marketing what they’re hearing from customers. Sales has repeatedly asked for one kind of deliverable when they probably need something else instead (but no one’s told them otherwise). 

As you ask about what customers are saying and what each team needs, you’ll surface these gaps really fast. If someone’s frustrated or exhausted by not getting what they need from marketing, confirm when, how, and to whom the gap has been shared, if at all.

3. Disconnects between teams

Two customer-facing teams within the same company can have vastly different viewpoints of how customers feel or the “why” behind what they’re seeing. Someone thinks the current message is landing with the right audiences, while someone else disagrees. Five different conversations might surface five different opinions about a specific feature or the product overall. 

Friendly reminder: You don’t have to solve these differences of opinion or change anyone’s mind on these initial calls. (It’s probably not even realistic to assume that you could.) For now, you’re on a fact-finding mission. Ask multiple layers of questions when possible to make sure your contacts aren’t just saying the same thing in different ways. Your goal is to understand where the discrepancies that do exist come from. Are they based on current customer sentiment or outdated market understanding? Are they broad, big-picture company issues or localized challenges? 

You can take action to help solve these disconnects with content later. For now, you’re just learning.

Tally the takeaways

You’ve asked great questions. You’ve asked great follow-up questions. You’ve spotted patterns, noticed clashing opinions, and gotten signal on what’s working and what’s missing. Now, it’s time to turn those conversations and customer insights into tangible next steps for your content. 

Tech is your best friend here. Drop your interview recordings into your transcription software of choice, then highlight key quotes that signal themes and gaps for your content strategy. Use these callouts to summarize for yourself, your leadership, and the broader team what customers are saying, what they need, and how content will meet them.

Your interview insights should help you plan for content on two levels: strategy and execution.

1. Strategy.

Is there an overarching concept your product or brand is well-suited to introduce and create content around for the next 3-6 months? Look for a gap and a solution, or a then-and-now that matches where your brand is headed. Let your customers’ thoughts and needs (as shared by your customer-facing colleagues) lead the way. The magic happens when you can answer customers’ dissatisfaction, confusion, or frustrations with content that also supports your teams’ priorities and goals in the near term. Turn customer insights into content pillars or priorities—the big ideas you’ll build both cornerstone content and smaller pieces around.

2. Execution.

Brain-dump a list of all the potential content topics that came from these conversations. Look for quotes and ideas that can spin off the big-picture strategy you’re setting. Not all of these will materialize into a blog post or downloadable asset, but they might show up within another piece or become something bigger down the road. Treat this recap process as a “no bad content ideas” space—keep track of every thread from what customers have said (via your team) somewhere you can reference later and use to justify the deliverables you actually create.

Phase 2: Build alignment with your team and customers

We’re not saving lives here. Every marketer who’s been around the block has likely heard some version of this reminder that, even though our days are often filled with so-called “fire drills,” human existence doesn’t hang on whether that blog post goes out or not. Yet even though content may not save lives, your strategy work can play a wider role for your org beyond lead gen or brand awareness by driving alignment.

Because you started by listening to and learning from customer-facing teams, you now have the insights you need to build a content plan that everyone can get behind and to shine a light on silos that keep everyone from collaborating well. Before you start building content, get in sync with sales, CS, and product marketing to help them do their jobs and work together better.

Match content to goals

Your interviews should’ve uncovered each team’s core initiatives and KPIs for the year, along with what content has supported them well in the past and what hasn’t measured up. Now, your job is to match the themes and takeaways you heard with a plan to create content that supports each team’s priorities.

Review everyone’s goals side-by-side with your newly crafted strategy and direction. Where is the overlap? Where could you create one piece of content that supports multiple customer-facing teams? 

You might find that demand gen needs a specific gated deliverable to support a campaign or that sales is missing sales enablement content for one specific vertical. Look for common threads between two or more teams—which ones are focused on the same feature, problem, or customer? Those are the green flags that will point you to your cornerstone pieces: Larger, longer-term, and heavy-lift pieces like research reports, product guides, or multi-SME roundups can support demand gen and sales enablement’s needs.

A single cornerstone piece, especially backed by original data from surveys or your platform, can turn into:

• Sales enablement materials with strong customer proof
• Thought leadership during webinar or event presentations, podcast appearances, and earned media mentions
• A top-of-funnel gated piece focused on problem awareness, which demand gen can put ad spend behind
• A product-focused implementation guide, if you covered those tactical elements in your survey or SME interviews 

The cornerstone approach to content uncovers immediate wins and inspiresfollow-up content for the months ahead. As you create, share with the teams who need the content you’re building: 

• What you’re working on
• How it will help them (this is the most important!)
• How they can help
• When it will be ready
• What spinoff or redistributed pieces will come next

Your content exists to support customer-facing colleagues. But that doesn’t mean you’re a vending machine for everything they request or anything they want at a moment’s notice. That’s the fastest way to get overworked and overwhelmed by every marketing need under the sun. 

Steer clear of being a content genie by:

1. Building clear, understandable processes to receive requests from sales, CS, product marketing, and demand gen all in one place, like a form or spreadsheet. If someone reaches out ad hoc, point them in that direction.
2. Clarifying expectations (you won’t be able to fill every urgent request on their ideal timeline) and your own team’s strategy and focus for the current 3-6 months. If you have a documented strategy and can show that what you’re working on will help the requestor do their job and serve customers, they’ll understand your intentions… and probably be more patient.

Knock down silos

Your job clearly isn’t to be your company’s family therapist. But as we’ve pointed out, odds are good that you’ll uncover some miscommunications and conflicts in need of resolution after talking to everyone who talks to customers. These disagreements could go one of two ways—here are the scenarios we typically see and the role content plays in each one.

Scenario A: Make space for each opinion

If the disconnects are noticeable but not make-or-break for your strategy, try to make space for each of the different opinions within your content plan. 

For example, we commonly see sales objections come up as a point of conflict: Two sellers or teams might disagree on which one is the biggest issue to address through content, or they might describe different patterns in buying committee behavior. 

When you’re facing at least two distinct viewpoints, consider which one is more realistic—or whether both can be true. If you can consider or cover each perspective within your content strategy and execution plan, do it. Those two or three distinct sales objections might become different angles or topics within the overarching narrative, and you can prioritize the one you heard most often. 

Scenario B: Get together to hash out the differences

What about when a difference of opinion isn’t just a “coexist” situation? What’s your role when teams’ misalignment could negatively impact how teams serve your customers (and how you create content to do the same thing)? 

Let’s say two or more different teams understand the market, customer, or problem fundamentally differently. Those cases call for clarification and conflict resolution, especially if the success of your strategy could rise or fall based on the variety of opinions present. 

It’s time for a meeting of the minds.

Surface the disconnect to your leadership, and try to get someone from each team on a call or face to face—aim for a level or two below the C-suite. Once in the room, take the “here’s what I heard” approach. Summarize the key dissenting views you heard, and explain why they could be a sticking point for future content. 

Then, create space for those involved to share more context—which firsthand customer experiences shaped their stances about what the market’s truly saying? You’re here to present your findings and share why they’re a problem for future content, but it’s up to leadership to uncover answers, find common ground, and surface the results to the C-suite, if needed.

On the other side of these conversations, you should have greater clarity about which perspective to lean on for your strategy, which ensures the content you create will actually support your colleagues and customers in the right ways. 

Phase 3: Stay involved with customer-facing teams as you execute

Here’s where everything comes together. The initial strategy-setting conversations with customer-facing teams aren’t a one-time thing—customer needs change constantly. 

How do you keep involving your colleagues over time and include them to make high-performing, customer-informed content? Here are three guidelines to keep collaborating with those who spend the most time with your customers. 

1. Ask for their subject matter expertise

Remember that repository of quotes from your interviews? They’re not just ideas and premises for a social media post or campaign. You can also use them as subject matter expertise for the content pieces they’ll inspire. 

Bring in a quote for support in long-form content. Follow up with the speaker for more details or examples of something they shared. Ask them if they’d be willing to serve as an SME interview or if they know a customer or industry leader you can tap. (If you need a refresher on Beam’s approach to great content conversations, steal our SME Interview Guide!)

Work to build a bank of SME wisdom over time, too. Compile a spreadsheet or Marvin project with ongoing quotes you can draw from later. Before reaching out to someone for a net-new interview, check on what you already have recorded with them—reference what they said in the past as a reminder and as evidence you want to dig deeper rather than asking the same questions again.

When you get someone involved in the creation of the campaigns they need and show you care about spending their time well, they’ll be more invested and excited for the final result. 

2. Request input—with boundaries

You built your content strategy with these teams’ goals and priorities in mind, so of course you want them to be excited about the final result. (In the Closing the Content Gap Report, we found that CS was least likely to rate content quality at a 10/10, and CS and sales were the only teams surveyed that rated it at a 0 out of 10—so we’re clearly aiming higher than that.) 

But if you had even five conversations, that’s a lot of potential approvers, which can lead the approval process to spiral out of control fast. As Jess Cook recommends, you should take two key steps to avoid having too many cooks in the content approval kitchen: 

1. Decide who’s getting approval at what time before putting a draft into your colleagues’ hands. Pick the folks whose input is most important for your cornerstone pieces.
2. Explain what exactly you need their approval on. Instead of asking for “another pair of eyes,” request feedback from customer-facing teams on specific elements: overall narrative, customer perspective, or product functionality.

Content that starts with a customer-focused strategy and ends with some (structured and within-reason) feedback from your customer-facing colleagues is your best shot at a home run for all involved.

3. Revisit the conversations over time

Your early strategy-setting conversations are just the beginning. The market will change. Your product will evolve. C-suite direction will shift. Customers’ priorities won’t look the same in a year (or less). So plan to revisit your strategy and conversations with sales, CS, and product marketing later.

You don’t have to decide ahead of time how often you’ll connect—six months from now, things might be largely the same, but a year from now, a lot may have changed. Instead of prescribing when you’ll meet again, your goal should be to keep the lines of communication open. If you do start to interview customers and hear something that isn’t aligned with what you heard early on, that can be a signal it’s time to talk to customer-facing teams again. If CS or sales shares something about customers in a company stand-up that surprises you, consider scheduling a refresh call.

At Beam, we work closely with customers to refine strategy over time when things change. Outside of ongoing biweekly catch-ups, we sometimes sit down for a half or full-day brainstorming session to come up with a new direction and new ideas. We always start with what’s changed with the market and company—we review our existing pillars and collaborate to make sure we can give customers and customer-facing teams what they need from content for the months and quarters ahead.

The only constant in content is change. The algorithms we live by, the trends we love or roll our eyes at, and the most important topics to the most important people? It all feels like an endless game of the Floor Is Lava.

If you keep your customers front and center in your content strategy and lean on the customer-facing folks who are in the (virtual or in-person) cubicle next to yours, you’re setting yourself up for success.

And if you need an experienced partner in your corner to help with those conversations and the big-picture thinking behind the best content, let’s talk.