Beating the Risks of Content Scheduling

There’s a phrase that customers hear again and again when they call a major brand: “Your call is important to us.” They hear it after they’ve just spent five minutes working their way through a call flow and they keep hearing it between a repeated Mozart tune as they wait for someone to pick up the phone. And they feel it’s not true. If the call was important, they think, the company would have hired more staff and made them wait for a shorter time.

But the brand’s motivation is clear. Creating call flows and recorded messages automates the customer service process. It makes handling an important task easier for them even if it reduces the experience for the customer.

That’s the risk that content marketers face when they employ content scheduling. 

Setting up automated systems to deliver content allows them to focus on other areas, safe in the knowledge that customers and leads are still receiving valuable information at the time they need it most. But if the content isn’t planned and created carefully, the result can be not closer engagement but greater disengagement. Leads can receive too much information or receive it at the wrong moments, leading them to dismiss future content as irrelevant or unappealing. Flow plans intended to ensure the right content goes to the right lead at the right touchpoint can become complicated so that brands are no longer certain of the knowledge a lead has already acquired as they travel along their customer journey.

Worse, content that must feel personal to the lead, client or customer comes to feel as though it were created for crowds. Instead of being targeted to an individual and his or her personal needs, the content can feel as though it were produced for a mass audience and delivered by a corporate machine rather than by a caring representative. Clients stop feeling special and important to the brand and, like the 23 people ahead of them in the customer service line, start to feel like a face in a crowd.

Content Makes Customers Feel Important

That’s a risk but it’s a risk that can be resolved with careful planning and well-made content. While flow plans can help to direct appropriate content to the right people, those plans should be clear and easy to follow so that the information flow always matches and runs alongside the customer flow. The content should always be engaging—not a reminder to the lead that the company is still waiting for them to act but another conversation in an ongoing dialogue that leads to a resolution.

Content scheduling is a hugely valuable tool. It’s an integral part of the content infrastructure that every brand needs to engage its customers. Creating that automation requires a clear understanding of the customer personas, of their customer journeys, and of the content that will speak to them and engage with them. When it’s planned and integrated properly, those customers genuinely feel that that they are important to you.

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