You possibly already know how effective customer retention can be for your business. Fostering new leads and clients can be far costlier and more time-consuming as opposed to retaining or upselling current ones.
However, in today’s world, where we can use predictive analytics tools in order to create extremely personalized experiences for customers, it’s crucial to concentrate on delivering value as opposed to making a sale or focusing too much on cost.
Offering real value today and constantly into the future will help you connect with customers on a deeper level. They’ll be far more likely to keep you in mind, admire you, trust you, and work with your business long-term.
Content Marketing is a valuable tool for customer retention when it comes to B2B companies. Whether you offer a service or a product, the right content that is skilfully curated and marketed is indispensable for forging, maintaining and strengthening client relationships. In this blog, we’ll set out exactly what content marketing involves and how it can be used to retain clients, reach new customers and enhance your word-of-mouth reputation to drive sales.
What is Content Marketing and how can it be utilized by a B2B company?
Put simply, content marketing means adding value to your product and/or services through the creation and publication of informative, useful, and relevant content. Not only does it complement other marketing activities as part of an overall strategy, but it can also serve to position a company as an industry leader, build trust in its brand, retain clients and strengthen customer relationships, as well as attract new clients through referrals. Examples of content marketing material include webinars, training, ‘how to’ guides and videos, newsletters and infographics. So, how can a B2B company curate content that is useful, engaging and high-quality whilst appealing to the key decision-makers among its client base? Below are some B2B digital marketing strategies to consider.
- Establish Your Objectives & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Before you start creating content, you need to know what business objectives you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure success
At Noah Digital, we’ve come up with a few ideas for you.
Knowledge is Power
B2B Companies often don’t realize that one of their most important assets in content marketing is their niche expertise. Any guides, manuals, video tutorials or even think pieces on important issues within their industry serve to establish them as a voice of trust and authority. For example, a software provider might send out a short, easily-digestible guide each week on one specific feature, not only making their client’s life easier but possibly promoting a capability of the software that their client wasn’t even aware of. As to content that is not directly linked to the particular product or service you provide, if a B2B client sees that your company is offering advice or feedback on crucial matters within their industry, this will only serve to position you in their mind as a trusted brand and validate the purchasing decision they have made.
The most important asset
in content marketing is their niche expertise
Publish High-Quality Content Regularly
Your website needs to be a living, breathing entity. Every update which you make to your website plays a role in its interaction with both search engines as well as customers.
The newer content which you offer, the more value you attach to your users’ experience, which in turn, will keep them returning for more. Offering value is paramount if you want to succeed online, and one of the best ways to do that is by writing content that appeals to your target customer base and find your best customers. When you know who your ideal customer is, you can begin to formulate a plan for how to reach them through your website’s content.
Fortunately, frequent content updates don’t need to have to come in the format of blog posts and newsletters.
Feel free to vary your content offerings with FAQs, product demos, how-to guides, vlogs as well as podcasts.
Start an Effective Online Community
A brand community is a group of loyal customers who chat about your company and similar topics. On the flip side, you’re serving community members with support, free content, and an insider’s look at your products.
Communities are on the rise because they work—55% of businesses agree that building a community has increased sales.
Brand communities are also a way to:
- Gather product feedback
- Connect customers with like-minded people.
- Interact with customers on a 1:1 basis.
- Create relevant content based on customers’ needs.
- Update customers with the latest company news.
Educate New Customers
Investing in a new product can be quite the learning curve. Imagine how overwhelming it must be for new customers to learn your product features.
A quick fix to “product overwhelm” is sending educational content to new subscribers.
The best part about this retention strategy is that it takes little time to execute. It’s easy to repurpose past tutorials and blog posts into digestible guides!
How to get started: Use your customer research and identify their biggest questions and concerns. Then, create or repurpose content around those pain points and include them in your onboarding email.
Upsell Current Customers
Current buyers already know your product is valuable. They don’t need much convincing to upsell or upgrade their plan.
In fact, the probability of upselling a customer is 60-70%. This percentage drops down to 5% for new customers.
Current customers are already aware of your value, so it’s a no-brainer when they see opportunities like the one above.
The takeaway: Identify customers who use your product enough to upsell. You can do this by analyzing product usage, behavior activity, or with a scoring tool.
Conclusion
Be sure to connect with your audience through content that engages and arouses interest. Define your client avatar and make sure you are on their wavelength. Ask yourself what their needs and pain points are and use those as the point of departure for your content marketing plan. Consider investing in professional content creation services to boost and refine your content marketing performance.
These are just a few tips to help enhance your content marketing to increase customer retention and drive sales. If you would like to discuss your strategy in more detail then our content marketing experts here at Noah Digital would be delighted to chat more about how we can maximize its potential.