Does it surprise you that over 66% of marketers say they measure content success in lead generation?
It shouldn’t. The average business generates over 1,800 leads per month at $200 per lead (over $360,000 per month total). Lead generation was the number-one priority of marketers in 2020.
Even if you’ve never thought of content marketing as a route for customer acquisition, it’s true that brilliant content drives lead gen. After all, content is the experience that you provide at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Not only does content attract new leads at the beginning of their journey, but it also fuels an incredibly important process in the flywheel model: the referral cycle.
A perfectly strategized content campaign can woo the end-stage buyer who’s often left by the wayside—the customer who’s already bought in.
The problem with the sales funnel is that it grossly overlooks the customer’s value. The sales funnel ends when the prospect buys in. The lead generation cycle moves on to the next potential buyer, leaving you to do 100% of the legwork to bring in those leads.
What if your buyer’s journey included nurturing the customer long beyond the point of purchase?
In the flywheel model, nurturing the customer triggers a transformation into the promoter.
Promoters are your biggest fans. They love you, and they’re begging for an excuse to be your walking billboard.
A promoter keeps the conversation focused on you by:
That’s only a small slice of what the promoter does to spread the word about your brand and product. They might wear your merch, give your product as a gift, or simply chat about it organically to the right people.
The end result is the same. Prospects hear what your promoters are saying and start trickling down the flywheel as they embark on the buyer’s journey.
If you need more proof, a promoter’s lifetime value is up to 1,400% higher than the CLV of a customer gone sour.
If you want to feed the forward momentum of your flywheel, you must deliver exceptional experiences to every buyer, no matter where they are in their journey.
Even customers!
The funnel may drop customers unceremoniously at the door post-purchase, but the flywheel pushes them along to promotership.
It takes a delight-focused content strategy to make customers feel like they’re truly part of your brand (and to keep promoters feeling the love).
Read more: Keep buyers moving along their journey by dropping in with the perfect high-conversion content to dominate each buyer’s stage!
You can make your customers and promoters feel like you’ve let them in on something really special by filling your content roster with the trappings and trimmings of an exclusive club.
That can mean premium content offerings (all free, of course) includes:
It’s extremely important to listen to what your customers and promoters want and need.
The buyers who are already on your side want you to:
Don’t let your late-stage buyers think you’ve forgotten them!
The number-one reason customers switch brands is because they feel underappreciated. Don’t underestimate the power of a loyalty email or a quick “thank you” after a repeat purchase.
Believe it or not, your customers and promoters want to hear from you. It’s not disruptive marketing if you’re offering them the value that they’ve opted into (by buying into your solution and landing on your social media and email lists).
Sixty-six percent of Americans feel that the most important part of a good experience is having their time valued and respected. So show that respect by keeping it relevant and concise.
You’ve already got the customer, so don’t scare them away by packing your lead magnet workbook with 10 pages introducing the problem. They already know the problem; that’s why they’re here.
Instead, get right to the point—does every word impart value? Now’s the time to put on your hack-and-slash editor persona.
Leading pet e-commerce retailer Chewy puts delight into the hands of their customers and promoters by sending heartfelt handwritten cards for occasions like holidays and pet birthdays (addressed to your four-legged friend, of course).
In 2018, the pet retail giant sent 11 million handwritten cards. More recently, Chewy has been shipping out over 1,000 surprise pet portrait paintings to pleasantly unsuspecting customers, generating unbelievable goodwill toward their brand. They even send sympathy flowers to families that have lost a pet.
You don’t have to commission surprise paintings to generate an emotional connection with your customers, but a handwritten letter or personalized email can go a long way.
Your content can overlap 100% with the experience your customer wants to have, and it can still fail if you let friction get in the way.
Friction comes in the form of obstacles: A landing page with a bad design that makes it hard to find the opt-in, an email with a broken link, or an offer that can’t be claimed.
It saps away the kinetic energy that propels your promoters’ constant stream of word-of-mouth, and the subsequent prospects that follow. Don’t let friction make its way into the content experiences that you create for late-stage buyers.
When your promoter base is stable and happily chatting away about your brand, your job is not done. Pro tip: It’s never done!
Promoters have a thirst for delight. When you quench it, they reward you with leads and prospects, all from organic connection, social media, product reviews, and other forms of word-of-mouth.
Delivering delight is a never-ending scientific process that includes an inbound marketing strategy, content production, campaign execution, and results analysis.
Not only do you need to know what your promoters want and how to deliver it, but you also must be able to gauge performance and know when your promoters have evolved to require a new approach.
At ContentBacon, we’re constantly conceptualizing out-of-the-box ways to nurture and delight prospects at every stage of the flywheel, including these critical post-purchase buyers.
We cultivate customers and pump up promoters by delivering:
Outsourcing means your promoters and their delight-filled experiences are in the hands of inbound veterans who know all the secrets to generate endless leads and referrals.
Don’t leave your promoters hanging. Book your free call to learn how the ContentBacon team can get you started on a full flywheel approach!