How to Win Customer Loyalty Through Blogging
Customer loyalty is the key to any thriving business. Whether you are in retail, hospitality, professional services or any other industry, customers who love your brand will keep coming back for more.
Beyond the time-tested marketing channels of email, swag giveaways at events and tradeshows, social media, direct mail, broadcast media, person-to-person marketing in the form of promotional products, and PR, incorporating consistent blogging into your marketing mix can increase customer loyalty.
Creating and maintaining a blog will build customer relationships, establish a platform to tell your brands story and will allow customers to feel like they know someone on the "inside."
This article will show you how to use blogging as a tool for increasing customer loyalty by providing tips on what kind of blog content customers want to read and how they respond when it's personalized just for them!
What Is Customer Loyalty?
First, let’s talk about what customer loyalty is.
It is the willingness and desire to continue purchasing goods or services from a company. It’s also referred to as retention because its goal is to keep customers your brand already has. In the business world, customer loyalty is measured by “returning customers” and “share of wallet.”
There are two reasons why you must encourage customers to come back for more.
The first one is probability.
The fact that your customer has already purchased from you before means they have an existing affinity for your brand. As a result, the familiarity towards your business yields a 65% increase in chances of conversion, according to Invesp.
The second reason is cost.
Keeping an existing customer is much cheaper than marketing your business to a brand new one. In fact, if you can add 5% more effort to your current customer retention campaign, you can boost your profits to up to 95%!
At the same time, even if you do spend marketing your business to new prospects, there’s only a 5-20% of converting them into customers. Therefore, there’s a huge chance that your efforts will all be for nothng!
Therefore, getting in the good graces of your customers provides the highest success rates towards profitability.
A Blog's Role in Customer Loyalty
Blogging bridges the gap between customer and brand effectively.
For instance, your blog posts serve as an educational tool to provide customers with the latest information about your products and services.
The more visible you are with the inner workings of your business, the more reason they should put their trust in you assuming they enjoy the content you produce.
More importantly, blogging provides you with a platform to showcase your expertise and knowledge about your business and the industry you’re in.
By creating content where you share your insights and unique perspectives, you can stand out from the pack and ultimately get more customers to support you.
Blogging for Customers
The next thing you must know is to write blog content customers would want to read. If they don't feel compelled by the content, they won’t decide on using your brand again.
Therefore, to engage customers effectively on your blog, below are the types you should publish:
- Tutorials – Write posts that teach customers and prospects how to use your personalized company products and services properly. Posts can range from basic how-to tutorials to advanced strategies they can execute using your services to achieve their goals. Your guides should help readers get acquainted with your blog, which could help convert them into customers.
- News and updates – If you're launching a new product feature or have company news that your audience might be interested in knowing, it's best to write a blog post about it. This allows everybody, especially your customers, what your business is up to. More importantly, being transparent and open to them lets you build a much stronger relationship with customers, which could influence their decision of staying with you or buying from you again.
- Case studies – It's one thing to show how customers can use your business towards their success. It's another for satisfied customers to show the effectiveness of your products and services. This should not only give non-customers but also inspire your current ones to grow their revenue from the advice of other customers.
- Thought leadership pieces – What separates brands from competitors is expertise. If you're knowledgeable about your industry and have interesting takes on its trends, you can position yourself above others by publishing your opinions about certain topics related to your niche. This also lets you connect with your customers and industry experts to help you build a vibrant and engaged community.
You need to find the best types of content to write for your customers to keep them informed about your business and help them make an informed decision about being your valued customers.
You must also ensure that the content quality is on par with the high standards you have for your business. By observing this consistently across your marketing efforts, you will be able to maintain the high regard customers have for your brand.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Blog Content
Establish your brand voice.
While you share similarities with competitors, it doesn't mean you are the same as they are.
You need to let customers know that your brand is different in a good way from your blog content's voice.
To help you zero in on the kind of voice you want for your blog, narrow down the demographics of your customer avatar.
What's the age, income, education, hobbies, fears, and dreams of your ideal customer? From here, you can piece together the type of audience you want to target for your blog.
Add CTAs
You should have a call to action at the end of your posts. Examples of CTAs are to download your exclusive e-books, produce discount codes, or join your webinar for free.
The idea behind the CTA is to open a line of communication between you and customers. Normally, CTAs require them to sign up to your email list so you can send them your messages in their inbox.
Develop a Blogging Calendar
It's not enough to write blog posts whenever you feel like it. You need to create and follow an editorial schedule that details what your upcoming blog posts will be about and when you will publish them.
Following a schedule for when your posts will go live helps readers develop a habit when consuming your content. For example, if you publish new content every Monday and Thursday of the week, readers will fervently wait in anticipation for when they drop.
In that case, you must assign writers to create personalised content weeks in advance so you can guarantee that new posts will go live this week without fail.
Therefore, by consistently creating quality blog content weekly and on the clock, you show your trustworthiness to your audience and customers. Due to your ability to deliver the goods through your blog, this encourages them to continue advocating for your brand.
Promote it Properly
Once you've published your blog posts, it only makes sense to attract more readers to them by sharing them online.
One of the many ways your blog content can get traction is by posting them on your Facebook Fan page, Twitter, and other social channels.
You can also send out an email blast to your subscribers promoting your latest articles. Write a short email about what the post is about a link to it so they can visit the page and read your article.
You can even use your blog posts as answers to questions on Q&A platforms like Quora and forum boards relevant to your niche.
Target Keywords
Aside from actively promoting them, you can get more people to read your content passively. However, you can only do this if you know how to research for keywords to optimise for each post.
Keyword research is in the realm of SEO. In a nutshell, you must find a search phrase related to your blog post topic that lots of people search for and has little to no competition.
Using a keyword research tool provides you additional details about the keyword such as monthly searches, keyword difficulty, and more.
Once you've decided on a keyword for your post, you need to optimize it using the best on-page SEO practices.
Once done, you increase the chances of your article being found on search engines like Google much easier. This way, people who haven't heard about you will be able to search for your blog posts and convert them into believers of your brand, if not customers!
Conclusion
If you notice in the article, there is a common thread among the types of blog posts you must publish in relation to customer loyalty.
Because you want people to remain customers, you have to give them a reason to stay instead of moving to another brand or service.
One reason you could give to them is trust.
The quality of content on your blog will determine whether customers will continue to put faith in your brand. So if you create high-quality content that effectively communicates your brand to customers, you shouldn't have a problem losing them at all!
