Regardless of what you sell, whether a product or service, sales are the lifeblood of all businesses. If you’re not getting new customers, you’ve got no bottom line.
Pretty straightforward right? Well, not exactly. A lot of businesses forget about ‘marketing to customers’ and instead, focus all their attention on marketing to new prospects.
Research shared by the Harvard Business Review shows that acquiring new customers costs businesses up to 25x more than retaining customers they already have.
Hence why we’re writing this post: to help you understand what you NEED to be doing to market to your customers. We want you to be able to use the strategies below to increase your customer lifetime value by keeping them as customers for as long as possible. How? With strategic content.
Before we start exploring the Content Marketing Strategy you first need to understand the principles of after-sales content marketing. Otherwise, it’s like trying to light a fire without a match — difficult and inefficient.
When it comes to after-sales content marketing, there are three questions you need to ask yourself about the content:
- Will the content solve a problem?
- Can the content teach someone how to solve problems in the future?
- Does the content excite the reader/viewer/listener?
These three questions are something you should ask yourself for EVERY piece of content you produce.
Unlike pre-sales marketing, where your content addresses why your product/service should be purchased, after-sales marketing should be content that helps the customer solve a problem using your product that they have just purchased.
Your content needs to leave consumers happy that they’ve found it because it solves a problem, provides additional information to deal with similar challenges later on, and delivers it in a way that’s interesting.
After-Sales Content Marketing Strategy #1: Guides
Guides are a great ‘add-on’ to include in the sale of any product/service. By providing a detailed guide that tells customers all they need to know about your product/service, you are helping ensure they get the best out of it.
You want your guide to answer any and all questions customers may have about your product or service before they even think of them. By providing those answers upfront to the customer, you’re preventing, minimizing, or eliminating the feeling of ‘buyer’s regret,’ as you’re displaying a high level of competence that puts their mind at ease.
Remember, most people are highly visual, so keep the text to smaller chunks and use images and diagrams to illustrate points where possible.
After-Sales Content Marketing Strategy #2: Blogging
Blogging is similar to guides, but with the added benefit of being valuable for both after-sales and pre-sales activities.
As your blog is available for the world to see, you want to write content that’ll appeal to both customers and prospects alike. When providing useful information and strategies via your blog, you’re displaying the wealth of knowledge you have about your market.
This helps customers who have already purchased from you feel that they’ve put their trust in the right company. It also shows prospects that you’re knowledgeable and attuned to their needs. Constantly adding fresh content to your blog has the side benefit of helping you with SEO and your search engine rankings as well.
A great example of using your blog for both pre-sales and after-sales customer delight is when a travel company writes content about the different types of adventures you could have on a holiday in a certain area.
This shows potential customers what they could be doing whilst also giving customers ideas on what they will be doing on their holiday. It’s a great mix of pre- and after-sales experience.
After-Sales Content Marketing Strategy #3: Video
Stats show that nearly 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube daily. Videos are a powerful way to provide customers with information in an easy-to-consume manner.
Depending on the product/service you offer, one of the most effective layouts is are how-to videos
These are a great way to explain how to use your products in a visual manner. By outlining any possible ‘issues’ customers may have, it allows you to cut down your customer-service time by showing how to avoid those issues.
When it comes to video, you need to ensure that the content is informative and entertaining. Don’t fill them with ‘fluff’ because you think they need to be longer; short, sweet and concise are all they need to be.
If video isn’t something you’ve done before, then take the time to read through our guide on making a video studio at your office to get started.
After-Sales Content Marketing Strategy #4: Email
Email is the most important thing any business has. Your ability to keep in touch with customers via email is imperative to business success. Read our Email Marketing Best Practices post to ensure you’re ‘doing it right.’
Use your email marketing wisely. Provide relevant and helpful information via your emails so as not to annoy customers.
Email is a great way to show how another product/service you offer might be able to complement another product/service your customers have already purchased from you.
Amazon is great with this strategy. If you buy a pair of shoes from them you’ll end up getting an email displaying their best-selling socks. Everyone who buys shoes also needs socks, so it becomes an easy cross sell.
Think about about how you can do this in your business and present the offer in a way that you’re not ‘selling,’ but rather helping the customer get more out of their current purchase.
Final Thoughts
For a business to succeed it needs to be focused on two areas:
- Lead / customer generation
- Customer retention
The overwhelming majority of businesses purely focus on lead/customer generation and forget about customer retention.
By putting into place a simple after-sales Content Marketing Strategy, your business can benefit from an increased customer lifetime value simply because you’re helping your customers better and keeping in touch.
Whilst after-sales content marketing may seem time-consuming, the pros outweigh the cons — especially when you capitalize on our Pronto Marketing Custom Blogging add on. You won’t have to worry about planning your content calendar or writing a bunch of articles about your business’s products and services. Our expert in-house writers will do it all for you..
