How to Use Your Content Marketing Strategy to Improve Customer Retention
Getting customers in the first place is hard enough, so why lose them when you can adjust your strategy to build a loyal following? Nothing is better for business than creating a base of loyal customers that refer others to you, thus repeating the cycle!
Content marketing is an excellent strategy to build brand awareness and attract new customers. If used effectively, it can also be incredibly effective in helping you retain the customers you’ve already earned.
Using your content marketing strategy to improve customer retention requires techniques and approaches that are a bit different from those effective at gaining new customers.
Here are the three main methods you should take to use your content marketing strategy to improve customer retention:
Focus on Consistent New Content
Publishing the same exceptional piece of content, or slightly different versions of it, including cuts and shorts, can be a fantastic, cost-effective strategy to gain new followers. Still, it won’t be the best one to retain the ones you have.
To keep high retention, you must always make new content with new topics and add value to your existing customers in different ways. Although this sounds difficult, there are a variety of ways to do it viably:
Use AI Tools
AI programs such as ChatGPT can serve as fantastic tools for brainstorming and speed up the process of creating blogs and other written text, especially when the content is more expositive rather than creative.
Keep Things Simple
High production values such as quality editing and top-notch audio are essential, but they shouldn’t come at the cost of your consistency. Sometimes, focusing too much on polishing a content’s production can backfire, as many users prefer more relatable and attractive content.
Use Data Intelligently
Data is the name of the game when it comes to content marketing. Using data tools will allow you to access useful information about your existing clients, such as how often they look at your content and what they like and don’t like. You can use your data for two primary purposes:
Personalization
Once you’ve engaged a client, the best way to keep them is by utilizing content that appeals to their specific needs, whether emails, videos, or others.
A straightforward example of this is sending a particular type of email to a client who hasn’t seen your content in a long time, incentivizing them to return.
Automation
With proper data and tools, you can automatize the type of content you send to your existing clients based on the variables your data show you, such as the example mentioned earlier of a client who hasn’t opened an email in a long time.
You can automatize content based on your clients’ behavior and response to your previous content, making your job easier and more effective.
Keep a Constant Interaction
Great content helps you gain new followers and clients, but retaining the ones you have requires that you go out of your way to interact with them constantly.
The two most cost-effective forms of interaction are:
1. Giving Prompt and Proper Responses
Responding to emails, messages, reviews, and comments from your clients, and doing so promptly, is a proven way to get your clients to stay with you.
However, these responses should be quick and easy to follow. Most importantly, they should make your client feel like their feedback matters, even if it’s negative. Responses that contradict your client’s opinions or don’t offer solutions to their problems will likely have the opposite effect.
2. Providing Self-Service Options
Not everyone has the resources to have constant human interactions with every one of their followers or potential clients who require it. Luckily, this is where self-service options come in.
Self-service options might include automated chatbots, which allow users to get proper and fast responses to their inquiries without relying on human employees.
Bottom Line
Customer retention can sometimes be an even bigger challenge than acquiring customer attainment, but it is essential to any business’s organic growth.
Just because a strategy or content gains you many new clients doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll help you retain them. You must apply specific methods to use your content marketing strategy to improve customer retention.
The three main methods we recommend for improving your content marketing strategy for customer retention are focusing on consistently making new content, using data in strategic ways to offer customized and automatized content, and constantly interacting with customers.
Although these three methods are not the only ones that work, they can provide the baseline for a customer retention strategy.