You might not consider customer retention the primary goal in your content marketing strategy. After all, you can’t retain customers if you haven’t acquired them, and no business can reach future revenue targets with nothing but last year’s receipts.

But you may want to think again. As CMI founder Joe Pulizzi says, it makes sense to make your current customers’ informational needs and pain points your top content marketing priority: “Only after you perfect the loyalty experience and turn customers into evangelists should you look at other parts of the buyer’s journey.”

And it seems the most successful content marketing organizations agree: According to CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022, 78% of top-performing content marketers use content to build loyalty among existing customers, with 64% focusing on nurturing leads and subscribers, and 57% on generating sales/revenue.

Of course, the same content approaches to win new business won’t necessarily help keep customer connections warm after their post-purchase excitement has cooled. But it’s worth going the extra mile to sustain their interest – and empower them to exert their influence. Here are a few reasons why:

What you – and your customers – stand to gain

• Financial incentives: For starters, there’s the revenue perspective. It can cost as much as five times the marketing spend to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Furthermore, according to Harvard Business School, an increase in customer retention by just 5% can lead to a 25% to 95% increase in profits.
• Upgrading and upselling opportunities: If your customers are happy with what you delivered the first time, it becomes easier to approach them with add-ons that can scale their success, upgrades that expand their capabilities, or additional offerings that serve their other needs.
• Trust you can trade on: Trust in brands is a hard-won commodity these days; but once customers trust you, they may be more willing to influence the decisions of other prospective purchasers. On the other hand, if you fail to reinforce their trust, you may put your retention rates in jeopardy – especially for younger audiences: According to a recent TCN consumer survey (gated), 65% of consumers ages 18 to 24 and 61% of 25-year-olds to 40-year-olds are likely to abandon a brand after a poor customer experience.
• Valuable information: If you earn a customer’s trust, they’ll give you the keys to unlocking their heart – and the hearts of others like them. And in many cases, those keys come in the form of personal data.

If you’re relying on anonymized insights, behavioral analytics, and composite customer profiles to inform your content initiatives, you’re missing a critical part of the picture: who your audience members are as individuals.

In contrast, your satisfied customers aren’t aggregated analogs – they’re real, live people whose personal opinions, creative ideas, and use cases can deepen your understanding of what content prospects really want to see. Their unique perspectives can help inform and improve your efforts to attract others like them.

But the bar for loyalty is getting higher

It has become all too common for brands to approach retention and loyalty simply by lavishing reward points on anybody identifying as a customer or loading an app on their phone. And when the appeal of earning exclusive deals and deep discounts doesn’t do the trick, brands often fall back on scare tactics to fuel their fear of change, failure, and risky decision-making.

However, today’s consumers – particularly digital natives and other mobile-first social media shoppers – may be more concerned with fear of missing out on a hot trend than fear of messing up a good thing. And with online reviews, social referrals, and comparison shopping tools readily available to influence every purchase decision, marketers are facing an uncomfortable new reality: Even our most loyal customers may ditch us, their bestie brand friend, whenever something new and more appealing pops up in their social news feeds or their searches on Amazon.

Customers are becoming more selective about the companies they choose to do business with. When a fan perceives their favorite brand uses deceptive tactics, allows harmful practices to go unchecked, or promotes cringe-inducing falsehoods, they may give you a one-way ticket to Canceltown instead of an extended, rent-free stay on their “likes” list (a blow that can take more than a few overpriced pillows to cushion).

Make it the beginning of a beautiful friendship

How do you keep your customers loyal? Your competitors can be everywhere at once. Customers increasingly choose current price, proximity, and convenience over prior purchase satisfaction. A single brand misstep can quickly erode the favorable reputation it took years to build.

Did you guess content? (Ding, ding, ding, you’re right!) But as I mentioned, the rules for retaining customers differ from those to acquiring them. These tactics and tips can help evolve the relationship from a one-time fling into an enduring partnership.

Don’t go out of sight, out of mind

Taking an extended absence from their inboxes won’t make their hearts grow fonder. To stay top of mind, use content to show your business wants to do more than just sell to them. For example, you might consider an exclusive collection of content for customers, such as:

• Personalized thank-you videos or getting-started demos
• Email campaigns that regularly deliver feature updates and inspiring examples
• Live and virtual events that give them opportunities to connect, ask questions, and share their ideas and experiences with other customers

Listen to and support their struggles

Your product may be the answer to customers’ prayers, but it may not give them everything right out of the box. Not only should you monitor feedback channels and customer service call logs to search for distress signals, but you should also proactively prepare content that anticipates – and offers solutions to – common pain points they may experience, such as onboarding guides, process tutorials, and FAQ lists.

It’s also a great time to extend the value of their purchase by sharing the positive experiences other customers have with your brand. A detailed user product review, customer testimonial, or fan-submitted video demonstrating a helpful tip or new use case can prompt customers to discover more effective approaches and experiment with new features that give them more bang for their bucks.

For example, publication design-centric software company Turtl has a customer-only monthly newsletter, The Egg. It is filled with exclusive tips and checklists, interviews with expert-level users, and thoughtful discussions on relevant topics of interest. There’s also a hall-of-fame page, where it highlights ideas, examples, and stories of success that users share on Twitter with the hashtag #WFT.

Treat them like VIPs

Consumers all want to feel seen and respected by those they admire – including the brands they do business with. Make yours feel special by recognizing their personal contributions and accomplishments, as well as for their status as one of your valued customers.

Personalized content speaks to that desire for acknowledgment and recognition directly. Segmenting your newsletters by customer type or area of interest, customizing how visitors navigate and find relevant information on your website, or even simply tagging them in your social posts signal to customers that you value their time, interest, and contributions to your business.

Tagging your customers in social posts signals to customers that you value their time, interest, and contributions to your business!

Another way is to let them self-disclose the kinds of content they like and send them more of that. It’s a skill that shopping sites like Amazon and streaming brands like Netflix excel at. For example, after I started viewing the latest season of Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father, I received an email asking me how I was liking it so far. Clicking thumbs up or thumbs down automatically opened the Netflix app on my phone, logged my rating on the show’s page, and (let’s assume) fed that info into its algorithm, so it can deliver more accurate viewing recommendations next time I login.

Get emotional

And don’t forget: The “p” in VIP stands for person, not personas. Your customers are individual humans, each with their own passions, preferences, and life circumstances. While their transactional needs might shift radically over time or in relation to current conditions, emotional needs are more enduring and universal.

Storytelling content can help you tap into the human feelings and experiences we all share, as well as those we all want to see more of in our world. By creating memorable moments that aim for the heart, you give them a stronger sense of what your business stands for, beyond the products and services it sells – a critical advantage when it comes to driving loyalty.

Content that respects customers retains customers

As a consumer, what does it take for a brand to earn your loyalty? And, as a marketer, which ones do you think raise the bar for businesses in this respect? Chime in with your thoughts in the comments.

 Don’t Let a Poor Customer Experience Derail Your Content Results

 

Author:   Jodi Harris

One of the most critical aspects of any successful marketing campaign is knowing your audience.

It seems simple, but after initial concept development, multiple iterations of creative, and layers of approvals, it’s easy to lose sight of exactly whom you’re talking to.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re promoting a local nonprofit, selling tires, or offering Web development services; if you aren’t up to speed with who your target audience is and what it wants, even the most expertly crafted messaging is going to fall flat.

The importance of knowing your target audience is magnified in B2B marketing, largely because of the often significant amount of money being put toward a certain initiative. An investment mistake can be catastrophic—especially in the small to midsize business world.

Potential B2B customers share common characteristics:

• They have specific—and often unique—problems they are looking to solve.
• They already have a firm budget and scope in mind.
• They’re willing to do extensive research on your company (and your competitors) before making a decision.
• They are expecting you to clearly illustrate what makes your business different from others, and why yours is the right choice for them.

So, what does that mean for your marketing strategy?

We already know that understanding your audience as precisely as possible is paramount, but that’s just the beginning. It’s what you do with that knowledge that determines the success of your campaign.

Here are five tips to make sure your B2B marketing campaigns appeal to the right people, convey the value your company can provide, and put your sales team in a great position to drive potential customers over the conversion finish line.

1. Create a compelling story

It may be business-to-business, but humans run businesses. Your campaigns have to be compelling to compete with all the messages people are inundated with. So, frequently we think about what story we want to tell about our business instead of the story our readers want to hear.

Your marketing has to be helpful in some way. Jay Baer’s “Youtility” concept explores the idea in depth.

Be relatable. Make it easy for your intended audience to both learn from your marketing and take the next step in the buyer’s journey.

2. Know what you’re measuring before you start

If you don’t set your objectives ahead of time, you won’t be able to measure your success.

Whether your KPIs are connected to brand awareness, lead generation, reputation management, or increased conversions, determine them ahead of time. Doing so will not only help drive thoughtful, purpose-based strategies but also allow you to understand what worked and what needs further consideration the next time you launch a campaign.

Not sure where to start? The first step is understanding your metrics. A lot of energy is wasted on metrics that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of your campaign. Know what metric matters most and how it contributes to meeting your goals.

3. Help your audience find you

OK, so you understand who your audience is, you are positioning yourself properly, and you are telling a relatable, compelling story… but is anyone seeing it?

Again, a successful marketing campaign comes down to the sum of its parts. In this case, you have to ensure your target audience knows how and where to find you. The ability to find your business easily online is critical, and your ads and other marketing activities also need to be where your potential customers are looking.

It can be a lot of work up front, but it’s worth conducting a thorough SEO audit in an effort to boost your site’s domain authority and to rank at or near the top of search results. Also, identify communities and marketplaces where your buyers go that rank high for the keywords that are relevant to your service area.

Finding sites that rank highly on Google across a tremendous number of service area keywords allow your key audiences searching phrases with those keywords, such as “best digital marketing agencies,” to find you easily, should you be included on these types of lists.

4. Throw fuel on the fire with LinkedIn

Social media marketing is primed for content distribution. LinkedIn allows you to target your buyers when they are in a business mindset, and by building a matched audience with intent data you can use Conversational Ads on LinkedIn to directly target the inbox of potential customers who you know have an interest in your product or service.

Pair those ads with image or video ads to build a greater presence and use an account-based marketing approach to develop deeper relationships with current customers.

5. Iterate, iterate, iterate

Not every idea works the first time, and small changes can have a big impact. Successful marketing requires incremental improvement over time. Finding ways to squeeze out 1-2% more return is critical to reaching your goals and creating a high-performing campaign.

Our team recently tested customer testimonial copy against benefit-focused copy, and the difference in conversion rate was 43%. Also, when capturing inbound leads, we tested a confirmation email versus a confirmation page with a calendar embed. The page with the calendar availability tool ended up increasing meetings booked for our sales team by 124%!

Whether it’s copy, design, or process, consistently challenge yourself to optimize your performance and adapt as quickly as necessary.

Build a successful B2B marketing campaign that gets real results

Although many of the core concepts are similar between B2C and B2B marketing, there are nuances in the B2B space that you have to key in on for your campaign to really take off and perform as well as—or better than—you expect.

You must be precise in your targeting, and it’s imperative that you present useful information that not only highlights your products or services but also educates, inspires, or entertains your potential customers, outside of simply making the sale.

Don’t be afraid to try something new, but also understand why you’re doing it. Set clear goals, get up to speed on the metrics that matter most, and don’t be afraid to tweak and optimize midstream.

The business landscape is as competitive as it’s ever been. You have to find a way to stand out from the crowd and present a compelling reason your business is better than the one down the street. The five tips in this article can start you off on the right track, and when you put it all together you’ll have a successful B2B campaign that drives high-quality leads and ultimately more conversions.

Credits

Author:  Heidi Sullivan

When creating a website for your business, there are certain things to keep in mind from a design perspective that can make or break your site. Even if you do not plan to spend a fortune on your site, paying attention to each of these items you will ensure that the final product is something of which you can be proud.

Here are 5 tips for designing your business website, even on a budget:

Tip #1: Make sure your Web site loads in 5 seconds or less: Have you ever tried to view a Web site only to find that it takes 10 or 20 seconds to come up on your screen? Unless it has been recommended by a friend or you have some other burning desire to visit the site, you probably likely gave up and moved on. The first 5 seconds is very important in terms of the attention span of your visitor. During that period, you need your site to load and for the visitor to be able to “get” what your site is about. If it takes longer than this, your visitors will run out of patience and leave. Tip: if you want to show off a long flash presentation, try featuring it on a page other than the home page.

Tip #2: Limit the menu bar to 5 options: Your Web site needs to be singular in purpose and focused in appearance. If your site is trying to be all things to all people, it will end up being of value to almost nobody. The simplicity and focus of your site design is reflected in your navigation and symbolized on your home page by your menu options. If you believe your site requires more than five menu options, make some of them sub-menus that are available only after the user selects one of the five main options.

Tip #3: Make clearly visible a call to action: Ever shopped at an IKEA? Their stores have a non-traditional layout that allows you to look around freely and yet literally leads you from one section to another, right on through to the multiple cash registers and food goodies waiting for you at the end of your path. Let this serve as a model for how to set up your Web site: on every page, you need to make it abundantly clear to your site visitors just exactly what it is you want them to do. Do you want them to contact you? Order your product or service? Add a comment to your Web site? Whatever it is, make this call to action very easy to spot both textually and graphically from anywhere on the site.

Tip #4: Provide free and clear access to additional help options: You do not want to lose sales (or visits, or whatever your goal for your visitors maybe be) just because you failed to give someone the chance to ask a question. Just as with your call to action, make it clear to visitors that no matter where they are on your site they can easily locate help via phone, e-mail, live chat, call back, user forum, or knowledge database. Hint: present the various options in a prioritized manner depending upon anticipated user needs.

Tip #5: Show consistency among other design elements: The look-and-feel of your site as a whole is really just a combination of all of its individual components. Pay close attention to every detailed component of your new site. Use appropriate colors and graphics, pay attention to font size, make sure your messaging is readable and makes sense, and make sure images look crisp and appealing. Items that you think are minor might form the basis for whether someone chooses to stay on your site or find that of a competitor.

Whether you are designing your own site or hiring a professional designer, pay attention to these items and you will have a winning site for your business.