Content marketing is a rich field of creativity. It’s where you can grow quality leads quickly, like weeds, but with the appearance and quality of the most stunning flowers. Plus, content marketing is enjoyable. There’s plenty of creativity, with various formats like videos, ebooks, podcasts, and infographics.
Now, let’s discuss the customer marketing landscape. It’s pretty dull in terms of content, filled with text-heavy case studies, data sheets, and how-to guides. Content marketers create a rich environment of content, but after you finalize the deal with the customer, you stop the engaging content and move into a bland area.
Oftentimes, content marketing focuses on net new customers. It’s top of funnel. It’s about creating awareness and useful content to drive leads. However, consider this: on average, it costs organizations between 4 and 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. In addition, 20% of customers bring 80% of revenue.
It’s time to cultivate a customer-centered approach to content marketing. The next evolution of your marketing strategy is customer marketing, and content marketing is your fuel. Deepening customer relationships with great content creates advocates, develops trust, and inspires customers to be customers for life.
Here are a few tactical examples of applying a content strategy around the customer.
Get visual with customer stories
Throw away those multi-page, text-heavy studies. Instead, focus on the customer, with their tips and quotes in the spotlight. Secondarily, support their points with clear ROI numbers, all in a visual way. This will put an interesting and engaging spin on a case study to encourage reading and sharing. Utilize different formats, such as Slideshare, infographics and visual social posts.
Build games and quizzes
Your customers have their own vernacular, interests and even inside jokes around your product or industry. Celebrate and support this by creating games, quizzes and other interactive content that lets customers have a little fun. When building the game or interactive content, utilize a platform that customers find familiar and comfortable, such as Playbuzz.
Reinvent the webinar
Oftentimes customers watch webinars to learn more about using a product, to enhance their skills, or learn about other product offerings. This might be helpful to new customers actively seeking this information, but to engage existing customers, create interactive webinars. The Salesforce Demo Jam webinars are in a game show style format, where apps are demoed in three minutes or less for the audience vote. It’s a lot of fun, and has customers coming back month after month (as well as new sign ups) to tune in and vote.
Thank your customers with content
All boats rise, so when your customers do well, you do well. By celebrating milestones and successes in partnership with your customers, you’ll create relatable, sharable, exciting content. Use ebooks, flipbooks or Slideshare to recap the year, celebrate an anniversary, or highlight great customer stories.
I’m thrilled and honored to be presenting about this topic at the upcoming Digital Summit Phoenix on February 22-23. I hope to see you there.
Read more: Marketers Put Content Marketing On A Pedestal For 2017