Competition for your customers is high, and customer loyalty is the secret sauce for success and continued growth. We all want our clients to return to our businesses again and again and support our brand. Customer trust lies at the heart of building customer loyalty.
Loyalty and trust are the holy grail of a solid relationship with your customers. Buyers who find value in your brand, help grow your company's existence - not just great service or a killer product offering.
In-person interactions with customers are tough, and error prone. New platforms and modes of communication are essential in relationship-building in today's marketplace. Content marketing is the best way to build customer loyalty and trust.
So, what is content marketing?
Content marketing is a well thought out approach to delivering valuable, relevant content to your clients on a routine basis. Content marketing is delivered through many different modes and platforms, and takes on many forms. But most important, content marketing is the vehicle to excite, educate, engage, and delight your clients to build true, lifelong relationships with trust.
Why content marketing? The approach has many purposes:
- Engage customers: Posting content on a regular basis provides fuel for your current clients to engage with, but it also provides more ways for potential clients to find you and more importantly, encourages them to give your brand a shot.
- Demonstrate true value: Customers don’t just turn to your brand for your quality service and products. Clients are looking for value in the form of cost, experience, entertainment, education, or expertise. Through content marketing, you can show your brand’s leadership and deliver continued value.
- Grow and tighten relationships: Creating engaging content helps to mature relationships with your clients, then continue to tighten and strengthen those relationships by remaining consistent, trusted, and valuable.
Many brands misuse content marketing and are disappointed with poor results. This is mainly because of a misunderstanding of what, exactly, is the purpose of content marketing.
Content marketing is not about finishing projects or transactions. It’s not an ad that will make a big sale or encourage a customer to purchase right away. Rather than using content marketing to propel sales, use it to give your clients what they need and want. Ads may turn people off or make them seem tone deaf. But good content marketing delivers something interesting to the audience and positions your brand as a valued industry expert.
There are many ways to do good content marketing: blog posts, clever videos, e-books or infographics. Any type of creative, useful content can be used in your content marketing plan.
For example, if you run a fashion boutique, you might post or share photographed "look books" to entice buyers’ fashion choices. If you run a garden or plant nursery, you could create a video series on teaching basic gardening. Whatever type of content you use, it should truly inspire, educate, and engage your core audience: your customers.
Using good content marketing to build loyalty and trust
Use content marketing with common sense and strategically to build trust and loyalty among your clients? Here are a few ways you can approach it.
- Be your authentic self: One of the most critical things to remember about content marketing is that all your content—whether it’s a blog post, social media or video series, webinar, or photos—should be truly authentic to your brand and core values. Stay consistent with the same messages, common style, and voice you use in other parts of marketing. You don’t want your content to come off as forced. Your content should feel comfortable, unique, and approachable.
- Storytelling: Everyone loves a great story, and storytelling is an awesome way to build emotional connections with your clients. Use content marketing to tell compelling stories relating to your brand and image. You could tell great customer experiences, or your brand’s story and history.
- Show a heart: Is your business committed to giving back? Do you and your brand support a great local cause, or does your staff volunteer for a local non-profit? Tell your clients why and how you donate to do good in this way. If done right, this kind of content can build true trust and loyalty by proving to the audience that you’re dedicated to more than just making a profit.
- Humanize and localize your brand: Often customers are interested in learning about the people and faces behind their favorite brands. Content marketing gives you the perfect opportunity to humanize your brand by showing off the people behind your operations. You could spotlight particular employees or share fun photos of company events.
- Allow clients to interact: Some of the very best content is when clients can really engage and interact with your brand. Fuse interactive content into your marketing plan. Two-way conversation is the key. Make it fun! Things like puzzles work well on social media, while educational webinars and Zoom workshops allow a segment of your audience to get even more value from your brand.
Give them what they need . . .
Never make content just for the sake of making content. An important part of content marketing is to create and deliver content that’s perfectly tailored to your specific clients. Never promote information on customers to drive what
you need and want, supply them with what
they need. Show your clients that you have value to offer and it will build more trust and loyalty.
To do this, you need to fully understand who your clients are. Do a deep dive on their demographics and psychographics to determine the exact segments of your audience. Then, create content personalized for them. They should find everything you share useful and relevant.
The content for your brand will be different, but to really narrow down on the focus your content should have, ask yourself a few key questions:
- What challenges or problems do your clients have, and what solutions can my brand offer?
- What topics are important to my audience?
- What does my audience really care about?
- What can I educate my customers with that will move the needle?
Don’t use content marketing to sell. Your content marketing should be relevant to your brand. The main goal should be on the engagement and value it delivers—not on your brand making a profit. Done correctly, content marketing will convince clients to review your product offerings on their own because they trust you and appreciate the value you have to offer.
Everyone pays more attention to content that’s personalized to their specific interests. By focusing your content marketing strategy around what your customers truly want, they’ll learn that your brand offers incredible value. Always use different modes and types of content to grow and strengthen the relationships you have with your customers; trust and loyalty are sure to follow, at which point you’ve created a customer for life.