How to Build Customer Loyalty with Content Marketing

Build-Customer-Loyalty-with-Content-Marketing

The straightforward ramifications of content marketing include attracting & engaging the prospects along with the sales cycles ultimately driving sales conversions.

At least, this is what the marketers think of in first place & this is where the majority of the marketers align their focus on.

Ever wondered how to build customer loyalty with content marketing? Well, this operates on the simple philosophy of optimizing the omnichannel experiences of the customers, even after generating sales conversions. This includes proactively answering to the after-sales & services queries of the customers & guiding them with the insightful how-to-videos to make the best use of the products or services they have purchased.

But again the question arises: How building customer loyalty is possible with content marketing?

It is possible & some of the most successful content marketers have been doing this for years now. The trick lies in focusing on every part of the buyers’ journeys & accordingly designing pieces of content tailored to each of the individual buying cycles of the prospects.

If your content strategy is superficially focused on just a part of the funnel such as the top of the funnel, all you can expect is attracting the prospects.

The process of nurturing the leads & generating the expected sales revenue in such a situation becomes a challenge, forget alone delighting the customers post-purchase.

The proliferation of technology & intermingling of the data-driven insights in the business story-telling process has made it possible for businesses to build customer loyalty with content marketing.

With the help of intent data & tools available for the psychographic analysis of the prospects, the marketers can analyze the emotional quotients of the prospects.

The apt segmentation, tailored to the niche, implying the machine learning algorithms such as K-means clustering allows marketers to gauze their prospects so insightfully that tailored experiences can be delivered to them. Predictive content strategy & dynamic content empower marketers to address the pain-points of the customers most relevantly with the help of hyper-tailored pieces of content.

This practice, when kept consistent with each of the buying funnel stages of the individual prospects, helps the marketers in developing a comprehensive strategy to optimize the brand experiences across omnichannel.

As customers are delivered with tailored pieces of content right from the first touchpoint to the very last in their buying cycles, this provides them with phenomenal & seamless customer experience.

Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) strategy has evolved as a key brand differentiator in the year 2020.

According to a report by PR Newswire, it has been predicted that the customer loyalty management market will witness a surge from $1.4 billion in 2015 to $4.0 billion by 2020.

If brands can reflect on their mission statement consistently, delighting & sufficing the requirements of the customers in the process, they are doing it all correct concerning what it takes for building customer loyalty with content marketing.

According to research by Accenture, more than 90% of companies currently have some form of customer engagement or loyalty program.

The reality of the moment is that brands are consistently & astutely optimizing their customer experience management budgets to drive customer loyalty.

In an era of Inbound Marketing, where marketing techniques are massively relying on the intent data & other psychographic insights of the customers, brands need to understand the ways to build customer loyalty with content marketing:

1. Define Your Target Persona:

Doing the basics correctly matters the most. Branding & customer loyalty both are long-term goals. As the saying goes, “Rome was not built in a day,” so follows the signal that building customer loyalty with content marketing is going to be a long-term & consistent process.

As is very much true in other areas of life & work, while strategizing to build customer loyalty with content marketing: “consistency beats intensity.”

Marketers need to define, multi-variable test & refine their content strategies if they strive to build customer loyalty with content marketing.

According to Cintell, Companies that exceed the lead & revenue goals were 2.2 times more likely to have documented personas than companies that missed their targets.

Understanding the expectations of the customers and living up to them or surpassing them holds the key to build customer loyalty with content marketing in the long run.

Understand the pain-points of your customers & what challenges they encounter daily. The aspirations, interests & even the details of the overlapping niches where your ideal personas love to hang – out can give you interesting clues to optimize your content strategies for omnichannel, to help build customer loyalty with content marketing.

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Remember you can narrow down your persona as you like; however, assimilating as many interesting data points, as possible helps marketers to refine their content strategy across omnichannel & even helps in designing the omnichannel retargeting campaigns.

2. Swear by an Indomitable Vision: 

Content is studded everywhere on the digital channel.

So, what makes a particular piece of content stand out? Is it the information that it provides?

Well yes, maybe to an extent.

But the actual quality of content is determined by whether a piece of content can stand-out amidst the digital clutter.

After the January 2020 core update by Google, the actual trick to make an impact in the game of relevance of content marketing is to aptly understand & precisely address the challenges being faced by a niche-specific group of prospects or customers.

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Content needs to be highly relevant & useful for a group of audiences. In short, the audience centricity matters.

3. Engage with Your Audiences across Omnichannel & Focus on User-Generated Content (UGC):

A keyword-centric content strategy is outdated, at least in the solo form it is. The selection of keywords is subjective & doesn’t reflect on the intent of the niche-specific personas.

An intent-driven content strategy can help you on way to the optimization of sales conversions & in the long-run can also help build customer loyalty with content marketing.

Social Media is an excellent place to interact with the audiences & interrogate them to discover if a particular form of content resolves their challenges.

The physical spaces such as events are also excellent places to interact with the customers to explore their expectations.

The Q&A platforms such as Quora also serve as a repository of niche-specific questions. The marketers can either directly answer the questions of the prospects on the platform or can write a relevant piece of content to resolve the pain-points of the customers in the form of a blog.

In short, keeping your eyes open & capturing the photos, videos, hashtags, comments & questions posted by users across omnichannel & social media platforms, helps marketers in creating pieces of content to drive optimal traction from omnichannel.

Brands can try strategies such as retweeting followers’ posts, running visual contests or simply encouraging customers to share their experiences with the brand to create great user-generated content (UGC).

Deploying the user-generated content (UGC) in the right way can help the brands in painting a positive brand image. Thus, the user-generated content strategy can be used to inspire customer loyalty with content marketing.

4. Social Listening:

Listen to what your customers are talking about your brand on social media channels. And by listening we mean qualitative as well as quantitative measurement & optimization of the quantifiable goals for optimization of the attribution modeling pathways opted by the organizations.

Social Listening also sometimes known as Social Media Measurement or Social Media Monitoring is a way of capturing the perceived notion that customers have of a particular brand. This indexing of the popularity of the effectiveness of brands is solely based on insights derived from social media channels, engagement on blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube Channels, chat forums, etc.

While user-generated content by & large is a definite sign of how the customers perceive a particular brand, social media monitoring also includes the constant tracking of the popular metrics aligned with user engagement & conversions.

The popular metrics for social listening include Page Views, Click-Through Rates (CTRs), Comments, Shares, Text analytics & Emotional & Sentimental Analysis of the prospects & customers. Analyzing these metrics over a while, competitively benchmarking & optimizing them helps brands in scaling-up their content game.

Thus, social listening is an impeccable way to build customer loyalty with content marketing.

5. Employ Storytelling:

Buying is more of an implicit decision. While planning to build customer loyalty with content marketing, the marketers should remember that anecdotes not only entertain but also creates lasting impressions in the mind of the customers that influence a purchase.

According to Gartner, “Stories have the power to engage prospects with an emotional hook that endears them to a brand.”

Marketers can leverage the power of technology amalgamated with impeccable content strategy to optimize the omnichannel brand experiences for prospects.

Incorporating the most effective forms of content such as videos for visual story-telling & podcasting for audio-storytelling, equips the marketers to engage & spellbound the customers.

Thus, not only the conversions are optimized but the momentum is set to build customer loyalty with content marketing. Establishing strong bonds with the customers, in turn, brings more customers as your existing customers become your brand advocates & vouch for your products. This is called positive Word-of-Mouth-Marketing, which is arguably one of the most inexpensive ways to attract more customers. Also, building customer loyalty with content marketing fuels repeat purchases & revenue from after-sales services.

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Wrapping Things Up

Every type of business needs a unique approach to their content strategy. Before you can ever achieve the acme expertise to build customer loyalty with content marketing, you will need to review, revise, multi-variable testing & optimize your content strategy for omnichannel n-number of times. The relevancy game for content will also keep on changing based on how the search engines shape their algorithms to define relevancy.

Nevertheless, the standard rules will never go out of fashion. Storytelling will always remain important, so will be the fact that who is telling those stories. In the long run, a relevant & tailored content strategy can help your brand stand – out as experts in the niche & people listen to subject-matter-experts with more trust than they do juveniles.

Carsten Schaefer, Founder & CEO, Crowdly.ai puts excellently how one can optimize his content strategy to reflect on subject-matter expertise. He states, “Instead of measuring how long someone stays on a page, we have short surveys about our content which we send to our newsletter subscribers.”

A nanochannel content strategy is a thing of past & for building customer loyalty with content marketing, thinking omnichannel is the only way out for the marketers.

Valasys Media is a well-renowned name to help B2B customers sustain & grow their revenue margins in a highly competitive marketplace. Our services such as lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services have been designed to help marketers realize their core business bottom-lines & have been hyper-tailored to suffice their specific requirements.

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