IS CUSTOMER RETENTION THE SECRET TO CONTENT MARKETING ROI?

Borussia Dortmund is a popular soccer team that plays in the German Bundesliga and despite a sub par 2014/2015 season, 54,907 of their 55,000 season ticket holders renewed for the upcoming season.

Yes, you read that right, only 93 people out of 55,000 opted not to renew which amounts to a 99.83% renewal rate.

That is the type of customer retention and loyalty that every single company out there dreams of, so how did Borussia Dortmund achieve this?

COURTESY OF BUNDESLIGALOUNGE.COM

I’d love to tell you it was all because of content marketing strategy, but honestly I don’t speak German so I have no idea what is going on, on their Twitter, Facebook or Instagram feeds, but what I can tell you is how we’re proving content marketing ROI with customer retention here at NewsCred.

Clients that subscribe to the NewsCred blog:

• Have a renewal rate that is 41% higher than that of our overall client base
• Are 33% more likely to be upsold
• Pay 24% more in monthly recurring revenue than the average client

As a sales person I regularly engage with prospects looking to implement a strong content marketing strategy and whenever I ask them how they are measuring the success of their content marketing efforts it always boils down to four things: thought leadership, demand generation, SEO, and brand awareness.

These four things are extremely important, but customer retention is also a powerful metric that content marketers can look to to prove the ROI of their efforts.

From a demand generation standpoint people are almost entirely focused on new lead acquisition, but according to a Bain and Co study, “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%.”

It’s been said countless times by hundreds of marketing leaders that acquiring new customers can cost six to seven times more that maintaining your current clients, so while new lead acquisition is extremely important, retention is a powerful way of impacting your bottom line and proving the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS WITH CONTENT MARKETING

How many of your current clients engage with your blog? How many follow you on your various social channels or regularly await your newsletter each week? Whatever that number is, write it down and focus on growing it.

Our Client Development Managers here at NewsCred will regularly share blog content with new clients during onboarding and encourage them to follow us on our various social channels because it allows us to be more than just a software platform to them.

Our sales team will even ask prospects over the phone if we can sign them up for our newsletter. Through our content we can be the sherpa in their journey of launching or optimizing their content marketing strategy. If our sales team is in talks with them, a newsletter in their inbox three times a week is a great reminder to stay in touch.

KEEP YOUR CONTENT MARKETING HELPFUL

We focus on retaining customers with content specific to their industry and pain points, product updates, training, and special customer-centric events, webinars, and mailings. Content marketing should always be a way of making your brand useful to an end-user beyond what your product offers.

We regularly publish content around marketing best practices because our mission is to make prospects and clients better marketers and move the needle on good content marketing across the industry. Were not looking to simply provide you with a “system of record” marketing platform, we want to empower marketers to be better at their jobs and we do this primarily through the content.

If you look at a brand like Red Bull that is viewed as one of the kings of content, you’ll notice that they are a media company that just happens to sell an energy drink. I absolutely love the Red Bull brand and it’s because of their ability to consistently be useful to me when learning about new music artists. Great marketing is great storytelling and by putting a focus on telling your brand’s mission effectively you can build a symbiotic relationship with your clients.

The core idea of inbound marketing is to create a steady stream of valuable and relevant content that your audience really cares about. In doing this you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can eventually convert into paying customers, but there’s a massive role that this “steady stream of valuable content” can also play in customer retention. By reducing churn, creating brand advocates, and increasing up-sells you can vastly impact your company’s bottom line and further prove the positive impact of your content marketing efforts.