7-minute read
You need customers, and that’s true whether you run a production company, a content agency, a creative studio, or a craft business. The old adage is worth repeating: it costs much more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. So how can you create a digital strategy that balances acquisition with retention?
The good news is that those two goals are not mutually exclusive. With the right approach and the right tools, your website and social media platforms can act as both lead generation machines and retention assistants. After all, most people just want to feel valued by your company. If you can deliver useful value, you’ll gain (and keep) customers easily.
Here are some strategies for growing your reach and retaining your audience. Try to balance innovative, untested ideas with time-tested suggestions to improve your overall success rates.
Use the right type of content to tempt the algorithms (and the psyche)
Videos are proven to be far more effective than photos at triggering social media algorithms. For instance, native videos tend to perform better on Facebook than re-sharing links from other platforms. This is built into Facebook’s algorithm, which prefers natively posted content to external links.
On the other hand, photos perform better on Instagram. This is more to do with user psychology, as Instagram began as a peer-to-peer photo-sharing platform. People are more likely to engage with content that resembles their friends’ content.
Of course, you can’t just follow the whims of algorithms or the intricacies of the human brain. You need to take an active role in selecting the visual content that aligns best with your company. To grow your reach (and keep them interested), you first need to understand the type of content that performs best on your chosen platforms. Then you need to apply that knowledge to the creation of branded visuals that provide value and speak to the key sales proposition of your business.
Capture leads and then nurture them carefully with an integrated pipeline
Lead nurturing is one of the most important parts of running a successful business. Yet many business owners stick their heads in the sand, afraid to face the technological challenges and workflow implications that lead generation often provokes. Let this article be the sign you were waiting for!
It can be easy and affordable to implement lead-nurturing within your company. You just need the right tools. Integrating a tool like HubSpot into your website is something we love to do for clients. We can seamlessly embed HubSpot tools into your site to give your sales and marketing teams more information about your visitors.
Don’t try to DIY your lead-nurturing process. It’s one of the best ways to grow and retain your audience, so make sure you use the best tools available. Make doubly sure that you’re not complicating the jobs of your salespeople. Lead-nurturing tools should make it easier, not harder, for your team to understand customer preferences and communicate with them.
Find a solution like HubSpot that can snag new leads so you can follow up with them later. Business owners often feel a strong sense of urgency to sell, sell, sell. But with lead-nurturing, it’s very important to play the long game. You can use this same tactic to retain existing customers by simply offering different content.
Don’t be too proud to use contests and paid marketing...
Let’s take it back to human psychology for a moment. Everybody likes free stuff. Everybody wants to see content that feels like it was made specifically for their eyes only. That’s why contests and paid marketing work so well in pretty much every industry. Of course, some rules do apply.
Contests get people excited, and they lead to a public perception that your company is generous. Instagram influencers have been using giveaways to grow their audiences for years. For instance, to gain an entry into the giveaway you may need to follow four accounts and tag the company in a post.
If there’s a strong alignment between the prize and your target market, then contests are a great way to grow your following with real people who may be interested in what you sell. However, if you choose a prize that is unrelated to your industry, then you risk wasting money on increasing a vanity metric (your follower count) rather than building relationships with the right audience.
Paid marketing has become a dirty word recently, but you shouldn’t overlook this tactic if you’re trying to grow your audience. Done correctly, paid marketing allows your company to target people who will be excited about your content.
On some platforms, paid marketing is the most popular way to grow a company’s reach. For instance, 76% of content marketers on LinkedIn use paid marketing for B2B campaigns. Use this strategy shamelessly if you’re just starting and need to find your crew.
...but make sure you can deliver value to new followers
Here is the caveat to the above section. Yes, contests and paid marketing are a great way to attract new followers. But what will you offer them once they arrive? Don’t fall into the trap of focusing too much on growing your follower count at the cost of providing value. If you fail to provide something useful (or at least entertaining), all of that marketing spend will be money down the drain. They’ll enter your contest and then simply unsubscribe.
Any holistic growth plan needs to balance the generation of new leads with the retention of existing customers. The right tools can help you do both. It doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need to know is that it’s possible, and we can take care of the rest. We’ll assess your sales team’s capabilities and build an integrated website that supports their workflow.
Reach out to Hubtheme for expert assistance. We support companies who want to grow with easy, integrated, and beautiful technical solutions that can turn leads into customers and salespeople into rockstars. Ready to grow your reach and retain your audience?
