15 Content Ideas To Generate Customer Loyalty (And Signs It’s Working)
Brands use content for a wide variety of purposes, from creating awareness of their offerings among potential customers to pushing prospects toward conversion. Once a brand’s content has led consumers through the sales funnel to a purchase, the next step is to retain their business and turn them into repeat customers.
In addition to following up directly with existing customers, a business can put content to work in turning them into loyal fans of the brand. Here, members of Forbes Communications Council share smart ideas for using content to generate customer loyalty, along with signs that indicate the effort is working.
1. Keep Customizing Content For Them After They Become Clients
Custom content is key, and I can’t stress this enough: Don’t stop creating content for them once they become clients. Continue to add value through your content for your customers to boost retention in the future. The best signs are downloads, readership and internal shares, which is when your clients share the content with their teams. – Cosmin Patlageanu, YAROOMS
2. Set Up A Program To Generate UCG Reviews And Referrals
The best way to boost customer loyalty is not to create more advertising, but rather to ask your happy customers to talk about their positive experience. Consumers who get referred by other customers are much more loyal and also purchase more than the average customer. User-generated content is also proven to increase customer loyalty, so brands should set up referral and word-of-mouth programs. – Rafael Schwarz, TERRITORY Influence (a Bertelsmann group company)
3. Create Two-Way Communication With Consumers
You have to create for the consumer. What do they want to learn about (products, future plans)? What value can you provide (training, tips)? And how do they consume content? Too often, teams create content such as press releases only about the company—no two-way communication. Customer loyalty comes from building relationships over time. You measure it through lower-funnel actions, such as continued purchases, website visits and qualified commentary. – Nycole Hampton, MWW
4. Meet An Unmet Need Or Answer A Question
Relevance and responsiveness drive loyalty, and you achieve it by understanding and listening to your customers. The increased advocacy of your brand that comes from social media mentions or customer referrals is a strong indication of loyalty, as it shows your customers putting their reputations on the line for you. – Deetricha Younger, Deetricha Younger, LLC
5. Go Beyond Transactional Needs And Commercial Interest
Develop content that goes beyond your transactional needs and commercial interest. Align with customers’ purposes and causes through real and genuine engagement in social and environmental concerns that affect them. Make customers a knowledgeable (and participating) part of those initiatives. Finally, measure the real economic impact (the ROI) of such content on sales through an ad hoc attribution model. – Pablo Turletti, ROI Marketing Institute
6. Let Customers Be The Brand Voice
Segment your customers so that engagement is highly targeted. Let them be the brand voice by giving them a forum where they can exert influence and achieve “influencer” status. Ensure that you have a polished customer journey that acknowledges important milestones, providing reward-based or experience-based content. Track repeat purchases, referrals, brand engagement, reviews, posts and the voice of the customer. – Javelyn Ibarra, Q-PAC
7. Create Helpful, On-Demand Content
At Cisco, when customers have immediate access to assistance-based content and self-service digital tools (such as chat, video and communities), we’ve found that they move through the life cycle 2.5 times faster and attribute greater value (and loyalty) to a service. We monitor this using telemetry data, health scores and customer listening. – Monica Koedel, Cisco
8. Let Customers Personalize, Contribute And Share Content
Create content that your customers can personalize, contribute to and share. Provide branded frames for Instagram or create a call for your customers to share their favorite brand attribute—in higher education, for instance, it might be “your favorite place on campus.” By doing this, you’re relinquishing control of the message and letting the customer hold the brand megaphone. Measure ROI through downloads, shares and so on. – Kimberly Osborne, UNC Greensboro
9. Rely On Centralized Data To Tailor Personalized Content
It remains important to develop content aligned to audience needs and pain points, but generating loyalty happens when you’re truly able to offer valuable content experiences. With centralized data across all sources and properly tagged content, communications can be tailored at a personalized level and sent at just the right moment. Key signals include engagement metrics and repeat purchases. – Maria Sotra, Geotab
10. Help People Solve Problems With Educational Content
Educational content that helps people solve problems is the best content to create to generate customer loyalty. Whether it’s an explainer video, a tutorial demonstrating better ways to use the product, case studies or tips and tricks, this is the kind of content people gravitate toward. The best signs that show it’s working are increases in the number of visitors, backlinks from other sites and comments from happy customers. – Tom Treanor, Treasure Data
11. Create Content To Match Your Customers’ Search Inten
Use keyword research or social listening tools to see what people are actually typing into that search bar, then curate content around it. Users won’t want or need to search for alternatives, and you’ll see engagement and loyalty skyrocket. Keep an eye out for a lower bounce rate coupled with more pages per visit and higher session duration. – Yael Klass, Similarweb Ltd.
12. Add Value By Becoming A Trusted Resource
Content that is personalized adds value that expands beyond the immediate goal, such as gaining new business or increasing sales. When you become a resource for information, inspiration, humor, affirmations, advice and more—and less of a megaphone—you are truly connecting with your audience and forging a relationship. Success will immediately be seen in increased engagement and, over time, brand loyalty. – Stacy Bliek, Integrity Staffing Solutions
13. Give Your Creative Engine An Outside-In Spin
Flip the conventional content model and give an outside-in spin to your creative engine through your social community (a.k.a. “influencers”). This moves their role in the relationship from “influencer” to “creator,” putting them at the heart of your brand to work on bigger-picture content challenges for future customers. Success metrics would be new sign-ups, more power users and a stronger community voice. – Nanditha Vijayaraghavan, Trusted Family
14. Create Content That Isn’t Just About You
You have to know what is of interest to your customers and create content that is for them—and not just about you. Then, to increase engagement and customer loyalty, you can diversify between written, audio and visual content formats. You can also feature customers in your content or even have them create it, but you need to ensure that it’s easily accessible—customers should know where to find it, and it should be ungated. – Brooke Duffy, Captario AB
15. Create High-Value, Highly Shareable Content
Create high-value content that people actually want to share. Aside from funny memes, genuinely informative and well-researched content that solves problems is what people share the most. If you can be seen as a trusted source of knowledge in your field, audiences will develop loyalty to your brand over time. You can track that by looking at your repeat sales metrics to see who’s coming back. – Amine Rahal, Regal Assets