How a Blog Can Help You Generate Returning Customers

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Have you been resisting starting a blog for your business? If so, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to generate loyal, returning customers who can’t wait to consume more of your content and buy your products.

Even if you don’t know how to create or edit a website,starting a blog is easy when you have a helpful guide. The hardest part is pinpointing your topics. However, when you’re running a business, your topics are easier to define. When you create a business blog, you’ll want to focus on topics that are important to your customers, especially new customers looking for tips, tricks, and general information.

Blogging for business is an essential customer retention strategy

It’s understandable if you’re hesitant to start blogging for your business. When you think of blogging, you might picture someone traveling around the world documenting their adventures and meals. However, not all blogs are casual. Business owners and entrepreneurs have been using blogs to build their businesses for years with great success. In fact, blogs help businesses increase customer retention rates, especially when combined with email marketing campaigns.

Since customer retention is inherent to customer loyalty, when you increase customer retention, you automatically increase customer loyalty. Most businesses achieve this by publishing high-quality, informative blogs and then sending the content out to their email list. However, blogs can support many other customer retention strategies.

If you’re on the fence about starting a blog for your business, here are four reasons it’s a critical move.

1. Customers love fresh, useful content

Creating loyal customers requires repeat interactions in some form. It doesn’t mean you need to email them every day or even every week, but there needs to be some kind of interaction even if it’s one-sided. For example, Costco’s loyal customers don’t have mutual interactions with the brand on a regular basis, but many frequently browse the Costco website to see what’s new. If Costco never sold anything new, their customers wouldn’t shop there as often. People want new products. The same applies to blog content.

Your customers want to see:

  • Company updates. Did you sell the company? Is there a merger on the horizon?
  • Philanthropy. Are you donating time or money to a cause?
  • Teasers for new products. Are you working on something new?
  • Changes to your products or company policy. Are you acting on customer feedback?

Online, you’re always selling something, whether it’s a product, your trustworthiness, your brand, or your ability to solve people’s problems. Once your customers visit your website and know what’s there, they won’t have any reason to return… unless you publish fresh content.

When your customers know they can count on you to produce fresh, new, useful content, they’ll have a reason to come back. They’ll probably even sign up for your email list. That alone will build the foundation for customer loyalty. You’ll have to work hard to establish their loyalty, but that begins by getting them to return to your website.

2. Your blog can serve as an ultimate reference resource in your industry

Ultimate resources draw repeat visitors and authoritative brands generate loyal customers. Creating an authoritative blog will help you earn customer loyalty by establishing your reputation as an expert in your industry.

For example, the following blogs are known authorities in their industries:

  • Moz.com – Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Interestingly, Moz.com is worth $44.9 million.
  • NeilPatel.com – Marketing
  • HowaCarWorks.com – How cars work

These are just a few examples of businesses that have dominated their niche with a blog.

3. When you dominate your industry, you’re seen as the expert

Some blogs dominate their industry simply because they provide the most information in their niche. The status of expert may or may not be entirely accurate, but search engines don’t know any better – when a business ranks their content above other sites, that business gets more traffic. If that business happens to have a plethora of in-depth content, people will come to see that business as an authority in the industry.

Today, it’s hard to dominate your industry without a web presence. To achieve expert status, you need a website and a blog with high-ranking content.

4. Blogs can help customers make decisions

When a customer can’t decide whether to buy your product, having a blog can help you land the sale. For example, say someone visits your site and has several questions about your product that aren’t answered on the product page.

The potential for landing that sale will improve if you provide a link to a FAQ page that answers all of the pre-purchase questions people might have. Provided you advertise the link in a way that catches that visitor’s attention, they’ll click on it expecting to find answers to their questions.

That same FAQ page can also link to in-depth blog posts that expand on each pre-purchase question. For example, say you’re selling inflatable rafts and people want to know what kind of terrain it can withstand being dragged across. Will it pop if you approach a rocky shore? Will it pop if you drag it across sand filled with driftwood?

Your FAQ page might list the summarized answers, but you can go into detail about each potential condition on your blog. For example, you can write a blog post detailing an experiment you did where you dragged your raft over a rocky shore multiple times to see how it would fare. You’ll probably get more sales from skeptical customers who see your raft remains intact after being dragged over a rocky shore. However, those same customers might bounce if all you do is state your raft won’t pop.

4 blog topic ideas to get started

Here are 4 topic ideas to get started with your business blog.

1. Additional product uses

List several creative (and safe) ways your product(s) can be used that aren’t directly related to the product’s main use. For example, if you’re selling pool noodles, you can write a blog post about the most popular pool noodle hacks that are completely safe as alternative uses.

2. Explain the nuances of your product

Every product has nuances that not every customer will understand. This is true even for some of the most popular products on the market today. For instance, most people still don’t know there are tabs on aluminum foil boxes designed to make the roll easy to dispense.

3. Solutions for common mistakes

Explain the common mistakes people make using your product and provide solutions and troubleshooting advice.

4. Product limitations

A blog post listing the limitations of your products will help your customers understand your product better, and your honesty will build their trust.

Launch your blog to generate customer loyalty

It’s not hard to win people over. Industry experts do it by publishing high-quality, useful content on a regular basis, and you can do the same. When you launch your business blog, you’ll have an ideal foundation for generating the customer loyalty you deserve.

Larry Alton
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Larry Alton is an independent business consultant specializing in social media trends, business, and entrepreneurship. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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