Content Marketing is for Customers Too!

Most conversations I have with marketers revolve around how to feed the top of the funnel and help prospects become sales-ready leads that their salespeople willingly pursue. It's one of the things I help them focus on doing.

The problem happens when that becomes the sole focus of marketing.

I was catching up on my blog reading and came across this statistic in a post over on Copyblogger in the second in a series of posts about lessons learned by Dan Kennedy, who - in case you didn't know - is one of the most highly paid copywriters of all time.

You ready?

"A staggering 68% of customer loss is due to indifference."

Wow. I have to say that set me back.

It's not that they're angry, dissatisfied or looking for something new. They simply don't care about you and have no reason not to leave except for inertia and status quo.

That's frightening. Go look at your revenues for this year and see where they're coming from. Is the majority from net new customers or from existing ones?

I'm betting that the majority is from your existing customer base. Right?

What would happen to your business if 68% of your existing customers went away? Bet that would be ugly, huh.

Marketers need to create content and nurturing programs specifically to transform indifference into engagement. Actually, the best case is to continue engaging them seamlessly as they become your customers—without ever stopping. Engagement is not just for pre-sale initiatives. And I have news for you, memory doesn't last long. You have to continuously provide valuable ideas to push the needle on affinity.

The issue I see most is that marketers with limited resources are trying to employ prospect content in their customer communications. Not to be harsh, but really, why should they care?

Even if it's content about another product or solution than the one your customer is currently using, the way they think about it will include tie-ins with their current situation - which is already being impacted by the solution you provide.

The secret to customer marketing is to realize that they know more than prospects. You've got to go up-level to add value. And, just because they've pulled out their wallets does not mean they've lost their perspective. They still care more about what your solutions enable than the feeds, speeds and features. It's just that now they care about those benefits as an expansion to the good stuff they're already getting from being your customer.

If you think about it in this light, your customers require content that's different than what your prospects need to choose to buy in the first place.

So, how do you know what kind of content customers need?

• Go ask your customer service reps about the questions they're getting. Then go ask your sales reps what needs they're meeting with cross-sell and up-sell.


• When you do customer interviews for case studies, ask them where they want to go in the future and figure out how you can help. Those are the kinds of customer stories your customers are interested in hearing about.

I talk a lot about creating buyer personas and mapping content to buying stages. Don't limit yourself to only doing this exercise for prospects—do it for customers, too. As you extend the way you look at customers from pre-purchase across the lifecycle, you just may start to get that 360 degree view of the customer that's been bandied about for awhile, but has remained so elusive for most of us.

Just as answering one question can open the door for a new question to arise, solving one problem (original choice to buy) can illuminate a new opportunity or challenge the customer may now be prepared to address. It's just a new problem-to-solution scenario begging for content to show your customers the way forward. Whether that means buying more from you or perfecting the way they use your product to get even more benefits than they thought possible.

Consider that a monthly customer newsletter is not enough.

• Are you offering webinars designed for customers with "insider" tips and tricks?
• When's the last time you created a video just for customers?
• How many "advanced" educational articles do they have access to?
• What kind of online dialogue can you stimulate based on their interests?

What are you doing to shift your content to engage your customers and abolish that 68% indifference that can tank your future growth potential?

Comments

[Kim Cornwall Malseed]

Terrific post, great tips for finding out what content customers want most. I do a monthly customer newsletter for a software company (we have a separate newsletter for prospects, and another for partners), and each month we feature an article written by a customer on how they're using the software to solve problems in ways other customers may not have thought of but could benefit from. Up until now I've interviewed the customers and ghost-written the article and had them approve it, but I'll soon be sending them a video camera for them to record themselves in order to do short videos to go along with written articles. We've gotten very positive feedback from customers on the articles, subscriptions to the newsletter have significantly increased since we started doing this 2 years ago, and the customer writers really enjoy sharing their knowledge.

[Kim Cornwall Malseed]

Forgot to mention, we create a new thread in our online customer forum for each customer article, and have the article author moderate the thread for 2 weeks following publication in order to answer questions and comments from other customers. This interaction is really well-received by customers and it's great insight for us.

[Pratap Singh]

Great post, Ardath. I had written a post a while back about the need for a separate "customer marketing" function that could address some of the needs pointed out by you in this post. You could have a look at it here http://pratapsingh.typepad.com/pratap_singh/2009/08/prospects-and-customers-expectations-and-behavior-are-very-different---prospects-are-influenced-by-perceptions-and-promi.html.

[Cheryl Goldberg]

Great post. I completely agree with what you mentioned here.
When I edited a newsletter for customers of one software company, we used to ask customer support and professional services to write short articles addressing issues that came up frequently from customers or to provide tips and tricks that could help customers use the product better. These were always among our most popular articles.
Awhile back, I did a lot of work for Oracle Magazine, Sybase Magazine and other customer-facing publications. I wrote a lot of industry trends pieces for customers which related to areas in which Oracle had products, but did not specifically mention those products.
Now, one of my consulting clients does a series of marketing communications that specifically offers information on upcoming features and how they can help customers or how to use the product in new/better ways. The purpose is to keep existing customers engaged.
All of these are great ways to stay in touch with, provide useful information to, and upsell to existing customers.

[Randy Duermyer]

Very good points here. Your existing customers are gold and should be treated accordingly. Creating touch points with content can be a great way to continue to gently stress the value you add to the party and strengthen long-term client relationships.

[Ardath Albee]

@Kim - Thanks for sharing a great idea about how to involve your customers in content creation, sharing and participation. I'm dying to know how the Flip video idea works out - love that!

@Cheryl - Thanks for sharing the reminder that our front-line folks have tremendous insight about what's relevant to our customers. Great idea to include them as content providers!

@Randy - Thanks for your comment. I agree it's always good to reinforce the good impression your customers have of you. Indifference is the usual experience when companies forget about engaging customers after the sale.