Why Content Marketers Need to Stay in Touch with Their Audiences

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Far too often we see content marketers quit at the moment of conversion, the time when a prospect turns into a customer. It appears like that’s the end of the story for most of them.

But, as digital marketing authority Christine Warner emphasises, preserving buyers is as important if not more than procuring new ones. When consumer retention measures succeed by only five percent, earnings can typically rise between 25 to 95 percent.

The content marketing funnel doesn’t stop. As you’re busy concentrating on content for the top of the sales funnel or producing ebooks and white papers for the middle-funnel, all the prospects you’ve previously generated are fading into the Land of Forgotten Customers. New customers are undoubtedly important – but it’s also critical to focus on existing ones.

Toby Scammell points out that the more we study sales patterns, the more we learn that consumer spending tends to defy conventional wisdom, so you need more than just your gut instinct to learn how to retain them. So, what are the things you can do to ensure they’ll remain with your company and purchase more of your brand?

Put Audience Development on the Top of the Priority List

What organizations are finding out is that viewing content as just a replacement or a campaign for other marketing focuses is the wrong strategy. When you view content as a way of feeding direct marketing operations, there’s just one attributable profit to it—as a replacement for brochures, advertisements or other imaginative marketing resources. As we all know, messaging that fails to resonate with its audience can never hope to capture their attention.

The truth is, content is usually more costly than all those other alternatives. It takes longer, and it’s harder, so it’s stressful – and without a strategy, you won’t get where you want to be. Businesses that are thriving have found that content marketing needs to give more than one kind of value to be deserving of the expense. It needs to present combined value over multiple areas of the organisation.

Nourish Your Brand Ecosystem

Let’s take a look at what this looks like through the eyes of the existing customer. They’re part of your audience already as they’ve been through the content funnel. You hold a connection with them because they’ve bought from you, which indicates that you retain reasonable business interest to reach them.

If someone already reached the bottom of your funnel, they’ll continue to be a member of your inbound traffic. They’ve noticed your content was helpful and now that they’ve previously built a reliable relationship with you, they’re even more inclined to recommend your content to others. That’s the solution to keeping your funnel full: as existing customers recommend your content, they shift to brand advocates, the most helpful of all testimonials.

A carefully-thought-through content marketing and audience development strategy is the best way to plug up those leaky holes.

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