Creating Content to Keep Customers

There seems to be an increasing focus when dealing with content creation on engagement, and rightfully so. To be blunt: Creating uninteresting content is a waste of time and money. However, engagement can’t be the end all be all of content creation goals. Your content has to help you retain audience, and keeping audience helps to keep customers. So what, exactly, is content that helps you retain audience? There are several types of content to work into your marketing plan as well as some listening strategies to consider.

The single biggest thing you can do to help your content marketing is to listen to your audience. This means not just simply waiting for reactive feedback on your content, but also consider passive listening. If people are not engaging with your content, they’re telling you something – namely that they don’t find the content particularly interesting. Waiting for reactive feedback from your audience on your content is waiting until it’s too late. Your audience isn’t going to announce in a loud voice, “This isn’t the kind of content I want to hear from your brand, and, as such, I’m not going to be a customer again.” Waiting to get that feedback means you’re going to be building audience all over again once you change.

There are also some kinds of content that will help retain audience specifically: namely, email. With every other content distribution method, the audience isn’t guaranteed to see your content specifically. However, with email, you know for a fact that your message is being delivered, especially if you’ve done the legwork of segmenting your audience. Email segmentation is a crucial method to make sure that the content you’re giving your audience is hitting the mark and keeping them coming back for more. Customer service content is also going to help to keep your audience around. Rather than waiting for a customer to have questions about your brand, put that information out yourself before they have to ask for it.

There’s always likely to be some audience turnover. It’s the nature of the beast. However, staying focused on listening to your audience and creating content with a specific eye on keeping those audience members around is going to serve you well. If you plan on waiting for your audience to tell you what they want, you’ve waited too long.