Companies use content marketing to achieve many different goals. Content can attract, engage, and convert your audience, but it has many more superpowers. One of those is the ability to increase brand loyalty. Developing content that speaks to your customers, builds trust, and establishes your business as a thought leader is critical to retaining them long-term and boosting your brand equity.
So, what’s the secret to leveraging content to boost brand loyalty? Let’s dive into this topic.
To Build Loyalty, Lead with Emotion
The foundation to building loyalty with content marketing is to make it a pillar of your content strategy. In your content blueprint, you scope out your goals, so including brand loyalty is vital. Achieving this begins with one central theme—empathy.
Empathy in content marketing drives emotional connections. What this really means is that you develop content from your customer’s perspective, not your company’s. If you literally put yourself in their shoes, your perspective changes. With this in mind, your content marketing can flourish, transforming customers into brand advocates.
There’s data to back up the link between emotional connections and loyalty. Your customers who have this emotional investment have a 306 percent higher lifetime value than those who don’t.
Cultivating loyalty has a substantial impact on success, and there’s more data to support this.
Brand Loyalty Is Good for Your Bottom Line
Retaining customers should be just as important as acquiring new ones. Not treating these as equal priorities is a mistake many businesses make, so don’t let yours. Your enterprise content team should put effort into both because it pays dividends. According to research, a 5 percent increase in customer retention correlates to at least a 25 percent increase in profit.
There’s more data to back up the value of loyalty as well:
- 60 percent of loyal customers will purchase more frequently from you.
- 50 percent of loyal customers make more purchases from you.
You can’t ignore the positives of developing long-term relationships, and content is the way to do it. The process starts before they become customers but shouldn’t end after they are. If you focus on education and helpful information from the start, you’re on a solid path to building and maintaining trust.
But how do you ensure that your content plan emphasizes brand loyalty? There are several ways to do this, and we’re sharing ideas from our content marketing experts.
Create Educational, Relevant, and Instructive Content
As an enterprise content team that may support multiple lines of business, you have a busy content calendar. You’re also focusing on developing content that’s meaningful across the buyer’s journey. The underlying theme of much of your content, no matter the persona or buying stage, is to be educational, relevant, and instructive.
Remember, content marketing isn’t really about selling. It’s about engaging with your audience and understanding their challenges. Then, you create content that addresses those things. Just don’t let your content engine sputter when it comes to keeping customers involved.
Great customer content would include:
- How-to guides on achieving goals using your products or services
- Publishing industry reports with trends, data, and stats
- Expert-level training or webinars to boost customer knowledge
- Case studies that include your customer’s story
- Thought leadership pieces on emerging challenges or shifts in the industry
- Introductions to new features or products that would support current customer needs
Build a Community
To be a truly customer-centric company, you need to build a community. The community is mutually beneficial. Customers get access to other customers to learn about best practices or different applications of your offerings. At the same time, you get feedback and a direct channel for distributing new content.
Building a customer community isn’t easy. It requires a commitment to continuing the path with your customers beyond the sale. There are several ways to do this.
First, you could create your own microsite wherein you invite customers to ask questions and have discussions. You’ll completely own this channel and have the ability to post “exclusive” content for your customers around the topics discussed above. The pros are that you have control of the medium. The cons are that you must build it and maintain it.
The other option is to use social media. Your community could be your profile, or you could create a special group that’s invite-only. The former is easier to run and has no barriers. The latter offers more control because you decide who has access, so you don’t have to worry about delivering proprietary content.
Get Personal with Content to Increase Brand Loyalty
While it’s difficult to have one-to-one connections between businesses and customers, it’s not impossible. Your customers will greatly appreciate personalized content that speaks directly to their needs, whether it focuses on their industry, the products they use, or other factors.
Personalizing content does require technology and tools. You can only truly target your customers with the right content if you have the data and platform to make it happen. You’ll need to pay close attention to content analytics to create different paths.
For example, if a known customer lands on your blog, and you have the technology to identify them, the featured content they see would be different from what others see. It might be content about their industry or product-specific. If you have a catalog of content that checks every box, then you can personalize the experience. Your customers will appreciate this approach and keep coming back to read your blog.
Increase Brand Loyalty with Content: Final Thoughts
If you can position your content to engage your customers better and keep them interested, you can reap many benefits. Content is a powerful tool that can drive loyalty and connections. Consider these tips when rethinking your strategies and tactics.
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