All Content Strategy Is Customer Support

When Clalit, Israel’s biggest HMO, asked us to create a video to help parents and children prepare for surgery, we knew exactly what to do. We understood the content strategy, and we created a piece of content that could work on two levels. Children would pay attention to the muppets reassuring them about what would happen; parents would read the medical explanations that gave them the knowledge that could beat their fears.

Addressing a single audience is one challenge. Addressing two audiences at the same time sounds like a special kind of challenge.

In fact, every piece of content that forms part of a content strategy always has more than one goal. One aim will always be to communicate a message, and to do it in a way that brings the customer closer to the company. But there is a difference between a content strategy and a communication strategy. Content doesn’t just tell a customer something they didn’t previously know. It supports the customer. It makes the customer smarter. It makes them a better consumer of the company’s product.

So we wanted to give parents a tool to communicate with their children and let them share an experience. We can’t stop a parent worrying entirely before their child undergoes surgery but we can give them the knowledge and the tools to reduce their own fears and calm their child themselves.

But we did something else too. Parents will always have a million questions about the procedures and the processes that their child will undergo, and the more worried they are, the more questions they’ll have. By answering those questions before they had even asked them, we also made life easier for hospital staff. They’d be able to focus on treating the patient instead of on calming a young patient and his or her parents.

And we built a relationship between Clalit and its patients. More than any other business, customers of HMOs have to trust the business in whose hands they’re placing their  health and the health of their children. We knew when we planned that video that we wanted it to feel as though Clalit was placing a hand on their shoulder  and telling them that everything would be fine. We wanted them to trust the company as much as they trusted their doctor.

A content strategy can take many forms. It can consist of regular targeted emails, of simulators and video guides, but it always has a goal that stretches beyond the simple sharing of information. It builds trust between the business and the buyer, and it delivers the best form of customer support.

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