Increasing profit is an ongoing mission for most businesses. Content marketing can be leveraged to help your business increase profits in more than one way that people don’t always think about or may overlook.
Here we are going to briefly cover five different ways that your business can increase profit by implementing a solid content marketing strategy.
5 Ways To Increase Your Profit With Content Marketing
- Attract New Customers
- Increase Lifetime Customer Value
- Get More Customer Referrals
- Lower Your Sales Costs
- Lower Your Support Costs
1. Attract New Customers With Content Marketing
The first thing that people think of when it comes to increasing profits is to get more customers.
When you turn your website into a content hub of valuable information that your prospects and customers are looking for, you will begin attracting your ideal customers from a variety of different channels.
Content marketing will give you more website pages, which means
- targeting more keywords and phrases that people are searching for on Google
- having more fuel to engage on social media
- giving you a reason to email your prospects something valuable and spark more conversation while also building rapport and credibility (your new article about something that they are interested in and relates to your products and services)
2. How Can Content Marketing Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value?
Make no mistake, although content marketing can help you attract more prospects, acquiring new customers is hard work.
Another route to increase your profits that doesn’t require increasing your new customer growth, is to increase the value of your existing customers.
Increase Purchasing Frequency
With content marketing, you are consistently publishing new information that allows you to touch your customer database more often. When you publish a new article, you can send an email to your customer segments that it would be most relevant to and keep you front of mind and bring your products/services back to the forefront for them as well.
For someone who may purchase from you once every six months, content marketing can help you inspire them to buy every three months instead. That increases their purchasing from twice a year to four times a year, doubling their value as a customer.
A lot of times people are in need of their next purchase but it gets pushed aside or forgotten for a little while. This lag time is costing you money. Touching base with them will help reduce that lag time in purchasing frequency and increase your profits. How long do you wait between dentist appointments? Even when you know you should go every 6 months, that quickly turns into every 9 or 10 months.
Don’t let your customers treat you like a trip to the dentist!
Build Longer Relationships
When you start communicating more frequently (and with more value) with your customers, they are going to feel a stronger connection with you. Make your customers feel like they are part of your conversation. Building that kind of connection can extend your customer relationships from one purchase to multiple purchases, from months to years, you get the idea.
Increased Customer Lifetime Value Will Also Help You Acquire More New Customers
By increasing your Customer Lifetime Value, you can also now afford to spend more on acquiring new customers, which will cyclically drive your overall profits.
3. Get More Word Of Mouth By Giving More To Share
Do you want your customers talking about you with their friends, family, and colleagues?
Give them something to talk about.
Create content that they are going to love and want to send to someone else.
If you aren’t giving them something to talk about, then you are just crossing your fingers and hoping that your name comes up over coffee one day.
So how can you be more proactive about getting more word of mouth buzz for your business?
Be Proactive About Your Word Of Mouth Marketing
- Publish something awesome that’s relevant to your customers’ problems that you can solve and relevant to your products/services
- Email it to your customers
- Ask them (nicely of course) that if they know someone else who would enjoy it to please forward it to them
Increase Profits By Lowering Costs
Profits are not just tied to revenue, but also to your expenses.
There are several ways that you can leverage content marketing to actually cut down on your expenses, like the time spent by your sales and customer support teams.
4. Save Costs On Sales
Employee time costs money. Employee’s wasting time on low quality prospects or drudging through the educational process of prospects who are not yet ready to buy is not only a waste of money, but will lower their morale and productivity.
What if your sales team was delivered higher quality leads that took less time for them to close?
What if prospects came to your sales team further along their decision making process? And what if prospects that aren’t qualified were weeded out ahead of time?
Content marketing can help with all of these aspects that your sales team would appreciate as well as save your business money.
When you publish content that’s mapped to the customer’s decision making process, you are creating assets one time that are then educating and nurturing prospects to allow them to qualify (or disqualify) themselves as realistic leads, and be more ready to purchase when they contact a sales rep.
Marketing automation technology, like Hubspot, allows you to build these sequences one time and have them running without taking the time of anyone on your team.
Combining your content and technology in this way can be invaluable to your bottom line.
A workflow can be set up to nurture your prospects, and you can communicate with someone automatically until they either contact you directly to make a purchase or their engagement and behaviors trigger a notification to a sales rep that they are a hot lead and should be proactively contacted.
Imagine someone visits your website and likes what they are seeing. They download a lead magnet to learn more about the topic. Now they start getting emails over time that continue to educate them, help them, and position your business as a leader in the industry.
When it comes time to buy, who do you think is going to get that call? That’s right, you are 🙂
5.Reduce Customer Support Time
The key to content marketing is providing information that your prospects and customers find educational, entertaining, or valuable in some way. A good starting point for where to create content for your company is to make a long list of frequently asked questions of prospects and customers.
Again, this content becomes a recurring asset that saves you time. Instead of writing a full email response every time a different client asks you a similar question, you can send them a link to your blog post that has already been written.
If it takes 20 minutes for a customer support rep to field a phone call or your account rep to reply to an email, then you can trim that down to 3 minutes of hitting reply and getting the link to the article on your website.
Having these content assets available on your website will also reduce the amount of support phone calls that come in. Customers are likely to search on Google or browse your website (especially if you actively communicate that you have support answers on your site) for answers before they dial the phone. If you can give them answers that save them the time of calling, then they’ll appreciate it themselves as well.
Want To Learn How Content Marketing Can Help Increase Your Profits?
Content marketing can and should be customized for every business, just like any other marketing strategy. In fact, integrating content marketing into your overall marketing strategy is the best way to get the most impact.
Click here to learn more about how content marketing can help you >>
