Almost any marketer can cite some statistic about how efficient and valuable it is to retain a customer versus going out and acquiring a new one. There are a bewildering number of stats, but they all agree: it’s cheaper to retain than to obtain, and your current customers are valuable.
We are talking about customer retention in this installment (part three) of a five-part discussion about what business objectives you can expect a well-developed and executed content marketing strategy to accomplish.
Installment one: lead generation
Installment two: direct sales
Frankly, content marketing is well suited to client retention. There are more channels for engaging customers than ever (e-newsletters, blog postings, how-to videos, magazines, online forums and events, to name a few). Engaging customers and creating content to solve their problems is at the heart of content aimed at client retention.
The rub is in measurement. Isolating the role that content plays in retaining customers versus the other aspects of a customer’s experience are tricky for even those of us who are relentlessly trying to do just that.
Share of Wallet
For many marketers, customer retention is about share of wallet -- being able to sell a new product, or cross sell services to an existing customer. Tracking sales to existing customers is crucial. If a new content strategy and execution is put in place, you can track performance before and after, and all other items being equal, take an educated guess about the role of content in that sale. But to be scientific means creating control groups with current customers, and providing content to some, and not others, then measure the results.
Measuring Knowledge
Hammock has experience in creating a multi-media strategy aimed at customer retention, then measuring it. As part of the delivery of the content, we conduct recurring surveys to customers of one of our B2B healthcare clients. We are able to determine customer knowledge about solutions provided by the client, before and after content was delivered. The dramatic uptick in customer awareness about such services lays the groundwork for a cross sell.
Engagement Starts with Listening
One basic measurement we don’t often see till we start working with a client is whether their customers value the content provided to them, and what actions does it cause them to take. Do you know how your customer values the content you deliver? Does it meet their expectations for what you should be providing them? Measuring engagement can be done in lots of ways, and it’s not going to tell you whether they will buy from you again, but by listening, you can learn a lot to inform your strategy.
