These days we have the best possible tools at our disposal to provide the kind of customer care that people have come to expect. If you have an online business, you’re probably using social media to connect with customers. Maybe you have live chat on your website too. And hopefully your content marketing strategy includes an awesome blog.
There are lots of ways to step up the customer service and customer engagement game, but let’s focus on content — specifically, blog content that answers questions, provides interesting information about your brand, and inspires new or existing customers.
Here are three reasons why your business needs good blog content:
To Build Brand Loyalty
Do you work as hard to keep an old customer as you do to find new ones? The answer should be yes. It’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.
With this in mind, companies realize that the more customers who engage with their brand, the higher the probability of them buying their products and staying long term. This is especially true for SaaS businesses that are subscription based and understand the value of keeping a customer for a lifetime. Live chat software company Freshchat is one such company, whose blog addresses issues like how to retain customers and improve brand loyalty.
To Let Customers Know You Care
Meaningful and regular blog posting shows that you want to write about topics other people may be interested in learning more about. You could do market research to really dig into your customers’ passions and use the findings to write evergreen articles as well as posts about current topics.
Use your own blog, social media, and guest posts on other people’s influential blogs to answer common questions, communicate about new products or services, and provide set standards on those products and services. You’ve probably visited a business’ website only to find they don’t update their blog very often or noticed the content they do have is sparse and not well written. It could be construed that they don’t care enough to keep a robust blog. Customers are less likely to feel enthusiastic about a brand that seems apathetic.
To Provide Value to Customers
There are well over 400 million blogs out there today, which means users are still consuming blog content. In the U.S., 42 percent of people ages 18 to 49 read blogs. Blogs are more sophisticated than they were in the early 2000s, when simple 400-word posts without photos and videos were a big deal.
Granted, there’s more to a good blog than word count. You should be focusing on quality over quantity. Also, ask yourself if you are providing value to the reader.
“Value comes in many different forms; a reader might be looking for advice, entertainment, instructions, humor or another of the many different forms of value,” according to the WordPress-hosting platform Kinsta. “Recognizing what your readers come to you for is vital to crafting your content in a way that provides that value.”
If you’re writing about how to install a toilet in your home, you’ll probably need more than just perfectly written instructions on how to do it. Great blog post content on a DIY project should include video with detailed but easy-to-understand instructions. Video has become easier to upload and edit online for free than in years past, so don’t be intimidated to add that element.
Using content as a customer service tool is a great way to show your customers that you care, they can trust you, and you have valuable content to share. As customer service blogger Shep Hyken says, your business should “be as easy as ordering a pizza.” That means it should be as convenient as possible to order your product and get customer questions answered. So what are your thoughts? How can your business be “easy” for the sake of your customers?