How Does Content Marketing Support B2B Customer Retention?

Customer retention refers to the activities that are carried out by the companies to keep customers connected with them and reduce the number of customers exiting the purchase cycle. The aim is to retain customers by creating brand loyalty and customer loyalty. B2B customer retention starts when the customer first contacts a company and then continues through the relationship that the customer holds with the company.

Customer retention helps you in increasing your revenue because it is easy to grow relations with already existing customers and improve the services to meet their constantly changing demands. Customer retention is therefore a much easier practice as compared to customer acquisition. According to reports by Fundera, 80% of the profits made by a company are sourced from 20% of the existing customers of that company.

But what is one of the most prospective and cost-effective ways of increasing and improving customer retention?

The answer is content marketing!

Read below to find out how you can use content marketing to improve B2B customer retention.

Content Marketing for B2B Customer Retention

Among the several B2B marketing strategies, content marketing in digital marketing is one where the company creates and publishes relevant content in forms of podcasts, videos, articles, and others to attract, engage and finally retain potential customers with the company.

Besides, content marketing can also help you in creating brand awareness about your organisation and establish and improve relations with new as well as already existing customers. Delivering relevant and quality content at each stage of the sales and even after that can help you create loyal and long-term customers.

Did you know that as compared to the traditional outbound processes of marketing, content marketing costs about 62% less? Furthermore, Neal Schaffer claims that it also helps in generating leads three times more than traditional marketing methods. Here’s how you can use content marketing for supporting and improving B2B customer retention:-

1.   Be consistent in publishing quality content

Okay let’s be clear that this is the most common and one of the most important customer retention strategies when it comes to content marketing! If you are consistently publishing quality and unique content in your blogs, you can stay better connected with the audience who are your potential customers.

Besides, well-researched and engaging blogs can also increase your ranking in search engines by bringing in more organic traffic on your website. Consistently publishing blogs and other forms of content such as guidebooks, podcasts, e-books, demo videos, and more can help you improve customer retention by creating customers that trust your brand as you continue to offer value through your content.

2.    Educate your audience 

This content marketing practice is similar to the first point we have mentioned. You must always aim to provide valuable information to your audience and continually educate them. However, publishing and creating content in the form of blogs, articles, videos and other mediums mentioned in the first point is not the only way.

You can also continue to educate your audience by offering newsletter and other similar weekly or monthly subscriptions. You can also create training programs for short durations related to the nature of your business and offer them for free on different sets of purchases. This can help you keep your customers and audience invested in your organisation and increase customer loyalty, thus increasing customer retention.

Another report by Fundera has claimed that about 54% of customers leave a particular brand if the brand does not offer engaging and relevant content.

3.    Connect with your customers

To improve customer retention in the B2B marketplace, you need to make sure that your customers are heard and feel that the company cares about them. Therefore, you need to stay connected with the customers because losing even one customer in the B2B market can have a huge impact on your business.

To stay connected, you can use text and email notifications, conduct surveys and contests, and create social media groups to stay in touch and keep them updated on the latest happenings of your business and the industry. In case you come across any issues or complaints, ensure that they are resolved immediately. This can paint a positive picture around your brand and your company is taken as professional and considerate.

Here’s some useful information: Among all B2B buyers, 95% claim that content marketing is a great way to understand and evaluate any company or business’s success.

4.    Storytelling for Customer Retention Marketing

A really engaging way of using content marketing for customer retention is storytelling! Although storytelling is a more common practice in B2C companies, B2B businesses have seemed to flourish by using it as well. As part of storytelling, you can post successful business stories, customer feedbacks and testimonials, and case studies.

The stories and testimonials should be more solution-based and should reveal your potential in dealing with challenges and problems. This can help build a positive and a reliable image for your products and services in the minds of your customers and build trust in your brand.

5.    Improve your company’s onboarding

You need to ensure that the onboarding process at your company is easy and smooth. If there are any glitches in the process, fix it right away! The onboarding process should consist of emails, links or one-on-one interaction modules that can help your customers understand your products and services completely and explain to them the proper way of using your products or setting up the services in detail.

Besides, you can also have chat options such as chatbots or 24×7 customer calls and services available to help customers find solutions to their questions if they get stuck at any point or wish to get more information about any of your product or service. Do not forget to acknowledge the businesses making purchases with you and always thank them. This can help your customers feel valued and can help you in improving customer retention.

Here’s some useful information that can prove how beneficial content marketing is: According to OkDork, about 71% of decision-makers in the B2B industry are likely to reach a purchasing decision on the basis of corporate blogs they read and come across while exploring companies to do business with. Furthermore, longer articles have a higher chance of getting shared online than articles with lesser content and limited information.

We hope that the article was useful in understanding how content marketing can help you improve customer retention in your B2B marketplace and considerably increase your revenue and bring more success for your company!

Image Source: www.uplandsoftware.com

Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.