Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies used today to acquire customers. Companies who utilize content marketing have had proven ROI again and again, across every business and industry.
Part of the appeal of content marketing is its versatility; content can take numerous shapes and be used for any type of goal, including building customer loyalty. So if you’re looking for ways to grow and increase your customer loyalty and retention, consider the different ways you can use content to do so.
There are several different reasons content helps brands in building and growing customer loyalty. For example:
Content plays a great role when it comes to supporting customer loyalty efforts. At its core, brand loyalty is created through emotional connections. Customers stay loyal to a brand because they enjoy the products, the quality of service, and the overall experience associated with the brand. Essentially, customer loyalty is created because a customer enjoys how they feel when they engage with a brand. Content can help to generate these positive feelings for customers across all different channels and areas.
Here are a few different ideas on how to use content to grow customer loyalty.
Educate and Inform
As stated above, providing helpful and informative content is a major way for brands to connect and please customers. Sometimes customers need help understanding how products work or different ways products can be used. They might need ideas for gifts, or help knowing what types of products are needed for a specific type of event or occasion. Creating content that is educational benefits both customers and your brand.
Promote Special Deals Or Offers
You can also use content to help customers purchase your products. If you’re running a special deal, using content to promote the deal gives customers the information they need to take advantage of the opportunity. Banners, blog posts, social media announcements, push notifications, or other methods are all types of content you can use for this purpose.
If your brand has a loyalty program, you can use the program to feature other brand promotions. For example, let’s say you’re a brand that produces sportswear. When one of your distributors or retailer partners is running a special promotion on your products, you can promote it within your loyalty program, while also highlighting the points earnings and other benefits.
Entertaining content is another great idea for customers. Some different types of entertaining content include:
Interactive Calculators
People love engaging and interactive content. Interactive calculators or other types of modules are part of that group and can be a great feature for customers to use depending on how you incorporate it with your brand and products. For example, interactive calculators are a huge plus for loyalty and incentive programs. For B2B programs, program members can use them to test different sales scenarios and see when they can qualify for certain perks and incentives. B2C programs consumers can track their progress on missions or challenges, and calculate when they’ll make it to the next tier or specific reward.
Quizzes and Trivia
Quizzes are proven to be popular types of content. Just see the success of Potterworld, where individuals take a long quiz to see what Hogwarts house they’d be sorted into. Quizzes are great because by nature they’re very personalized to the individual consumer. The wide range of quiz variations means they can be used for any mix of fun and functional: a quiz can help a customer identify their specific needs or wants to determine what service or products they should purchase, or a quiz could simply let a consumer learn something fun about their unique personality type. Regardless of the intent, consumers overall find the personalized results appealing and enjoy the experience.
Showcase Your Brand Community
Your loyal brand advocates are some of your most important customers. It’s always a great idea to take the time to recognize and demonstrate your appreciation for their loyalty. These don’t always have to be private demonstrations either; you can create content featuring your top brand ambassadors or VIPs, each chosen based on different criteria or occasions. Videos, articles, and social media posts are great methods for introducing the specific individual and highlighting why they’re being recognized.
Highlight User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful opportunity for brands. It’s also extremely easy for brands to utilize thanks to various social media platforms. Using APIs and hashtags, your brand can curate user-generated content that showcases your customer community, brand, and brand products. Pulling all this UGC into a public site, such as a gallery or collage, allows visitors to peruse and share the content further.
Promote Charitable Initiatives
Nearly every brand has some type of charitable giving or initiative now. Thanks to the rise of corporate social responsibility and evolving expectations of consumers, corporations today need to demonstrate in some way that they’re a part of their customers’ wider community and that they share similar values.
Taking this into account, it’s important to create content focusing on your brand’s own charitable or social responsibility initiatives. Year-end highlights, goal progress, and new successes are all great opportunities to create content around. But you don’t have to wait for a milestone to pass - you can create other content that helps educate customers on the Who, What, Where, Why, and Hows of your charitable initiatives (which will also help to build trust, another big part of customer loyalty). You can also tell customers how they can get further involved.
We've covered all the different types of content you can create and different methods for using that content. When it comes to actually creating content to generate loyalty, you need to remember to center your content around your audience, just the way you do for other marketing strategies. This means you need to take into account things like customer ages; demographics; lifestyles or goals; interests; challenges, and other items. Doing so will help your audience connect better with your content, and help it do its job of fostering loyal connections to your customers.
It’s never been more important to make sure your loyalty program stays personalized and relevant. Contact the customer loyalty and rewards experts at Brandmovers today!