Rather than focusing on acquiring new customers, we are shifting our emphasis to marketing strategies that increase repeat purchases from existing customers. For example, encouraging customers to visit stores multiple times or purchase from various brands owned by the company. Such marketing strategies are increasingly being discussed.
This falls under the broader umbrella of customer retention strategies, relationship marketing, or CRM.
Content marketing is an effective technique within this domain.
Let me briefly explain why.
1) Content is "material"
To get customers to visit repeatedly or make purchases, it goes without saying that a friendly relationship is needed where users feel "it's okay to repeatedly engage with this brand, or even welcome it." Building this relationship comes down to daily "interactions" between both parties. Just like conversations between a long-married couple, without "conversation topics," interactions won't happen.
Of course, new products are the most suitable topics. However, it's impossible for a company to constantly introduce new products just to provide topics for everyday, casual conversations. This is where content comes into play.
Content must be beneficial and persuasive to the audience, while also being "related to the brand" (ultimately leading to a desire to purchase that product). This is the key to maintaining a lasting connection with consumers.
Conversely, if content supply decreases or its appeal wanes, even consumers who have formed a connection will gradually drift away.
2) Content provides insights into understanding customers
Information has the property of gathering once disseminated. By creating a space to receive comments from those who view your content and incorporating mechanisms at the planning stage to encourage active participation, you can gather a wealth of authentic voices. Of course, the equation "content viewer = customer" isn't that simple.
However, unlike anonymous behavioral data, "voices" are qualitative data. Depending on how you collect them, it is possible to discern whether someone is a customer. This is something we've learned from experience: people who feel strongly about a brand tend to share more.
Can everyday consumers really speak so passionately about products or companies? We were somewhat skeptical ourselves just a few years ago. But when we actually tried it, we discovered they express their opinions in surprisingly diverse and rich language. Analyzing this (which is no small task in itself) and then cross-referencing it with behavioral data can lead to unexpected insights: customer needs, how products are used, usage scenarios, and reasons for continued use.
The crucial part is whether you can generate the next solution after discovering something from the data. But this is only possible if a content planning team works alongside the analytics team.
3) Advertising tends to target new customers
Historically, whether advertising strategy and planning should target new customers or repeat customers was a frequent point of debate. However, now that digital has become a fundamental part of daily life and it's physically possible for companies to maintain a constant, 24/7 connection with customers, the primary purpose of advertising methods focused on concentrated, limited-time campaigns is increasingly to gain awareness among those with whom we don't typically interact—essentially, new customers. Of course, it also serves to remind those who had a past interaction but whose relationship has since lapsed. Yet, benchmarking against the daily digital connections we maintain, this too can be considered a form of new customer acquisition.
Overseas, content marketing is seen as a tool for brand engagement.
It's often said that content marketing first cultivates an audience for the content, and only later enters the monetization phase.
When considering customer retention as a new marketing strategy, content marketing should reveal a different perspective.
From the Front Lines of Content Marketing [31]
