Here on our blog, we often talk about how content marketing is an essential tool for your SEO and helping new customers find you on the internet. However, strong content can also be an important tool in customer retention and building loyalty among your existing customer base.
With effective content in the right places, it is significantly easier to get repeat business from a previous customer than it is to cultivate a new customer. An existing customer already knows the quality of your work and hopefully had a favorable experience with you. Instead of having to focus time and effort on bringing your name to a potential customer and building their trust, you need only remind a previous customer about your available services to bring about another purchase or service call.
Content Ideas for Engaging Past Customers
Whether you provide a service or sell a product, and whether you target only your local community or a wide range of customers, much of your customer base is now online. Fortunately, when you know how to leverage this, it can be significantly easier to keep in touch with existing customers and reinforce awareness of your brand.
There are a few different ways you can do this through your website and other platforms where you connect with your customers:
- Continue Publishing Content on Your Website – You are a source of expertise on the products you sell or the services you provide. This knowledge can be valuable to your customers and they are likely to keep coming to your website if they know you will have new content to offer, keeping them engaged even when they are not actively shopping. If you offer a service, for instance, consider adding DIY guides or maintenance guides that customers can use between your visits. If you sell a product, tutorials, how-tos, and FAQs can keep customers coming back to your website.
- Reach Out for Feedback – Feedback can be extremely valuable for you for a number of different reasons. It lets you know what is working or where you might have room for improvement and makes customers feel heard. But it is also a chance to remind customers who you are. Consider reaching out to past customers shortly after their purchase or service to ask for any feedback they may have. As an benefit, you can often use good feedback for content on your website or social media pages.
- Focus on Social Media Content – Social media can have limited success for finding new customers depending on your industry, but may be more beneficial for connecting with existing customers. Most of your customers will not be visiting your website daily, but they are likely on social media every day. You can capitalize on this by building social media pages that are worth following. Content on your social media pages can include helpful information for your customers, interesting updates about your company, and other worthwhile information. Find a balance between updating regularly without spamming customers and at a rate that you can handle with your schedule.
- Be Where Your Customers Are – Social media comes with the caveat that you want to be where your customers already are. This is what likely brought your company to the web in the first place since most customers are now web users. Now focus on retaining customers by being in the spaces where they are already present online.
- Consider Newsletters – With some customer bases, a newsletter is an effective way to connect with customers since it allows you to reach out to them directly. Even more than your website, it is important to make newsletter content engaging and informative to justify you sending customers emails once a month or however often you send your newsletter.
Customers are not something that can be acquired and then forgotten about. It is important to remember that finding customers is only the first part of the job. Retaining them is equally as important.
But like all content marketing, the challenge here is finding the time and ideas to consistently write high quality content. As a small business owner, this can be hard to do. Great Leap Studios can help you maintain your customer base through powerful content, as well as growing with new customers. If you are looking for ways to grow and expand your audience, contact Great Leap Studios to see how we can help.
