How to Target Existing Customers With Your Business Content Strategy

Businesses often get started with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by focusing on gaining new visitors to their website. This is a natural place to begin, but content marketing shouldn’t stop there. Not targeting your existing customers may be costing you potential revenue from repeat business.

A customer’s lifetime value is simply the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with them—and creating content specifically for existing customers can improve this value. This builds more reliable income for your business in the long-term.

Are you ready to create a content marketing strategy that helps stabilize your sales? Keep reading to learn how to optimize your content to serve the customers you already do business with!

Key Takeaways

• Existing customers are far more likely to convert to a second sale than a first-time shopper.
• Anticipating customer questions with your content strategy helps build a long-term relationship, and leads to follow up sales.
• You can optimize customer reviews by providing official references for details about your products and services.

Why You Should Target Existing Customers With SEO

Stephen Stills got it right when he told us all to “love the one you’re with”. Well, maybe we can’t speak for your personal relationships, but it’s just as true for business. The evidence shows that the best customer is the one you already have:

• Adobe reports an existing customer is nine times more likely to convert to a second sale than a first-time shopper.
• According to RJMetrics, your best customers spend five times more per order.

[Tweet “Existing customers are nine times more likely to convert to a second sale than a first-time shopper.”]

You can work this information to your advantage by targeting your existing customers with content that caters to their needs. This makes you more likely to get back on their radar and close another sale.

How to Target Existing Customers With Your Business Content Strategy

Now we’ve discussed why you should target existing customers with your content strategy, it’s time to learn about what kinds of content helps existing customers come back for more.

Let’s take a look!

Step #1: Write About Your Products and Services

What sets your customers apart from everyone else is their unique familiarity with your products and services. Developing a keyword strategy around your products and services can be a powerful way to make sure customers wind up back at your doorstep when they need extra help.

How to Anticipate Your Customers’ Questions

Your keyword strategy will largely consist of thinking ahead and anticipating the right customer questions. Treating your customers like a VIP in your content not only wins them over with the gesture, but helps them get more value from the money they spend with your business.

You can probably think of a few general questions right away. Think about anything you’ve ever purchased:

1. How long will my purchase last?
2. What should I expect after buying something like this?
3. How can I make the most of this purchase over time?
4. What are the steps for proper care?
5. How can I tweak this to be more effective for my situation?

After covering the basics, you need to get more specific about what your business offers. It may take some investigative research to find what topics your customers are already searching for:

• Talk to your support team to get a feel for customer sticking points. You may also discover new follow-up services to offer.
• Visit product forums and support sites to see what information is already being discussed. You may discover bad information needs correcting with official documentation.
• Evaluate review sites. This will help you figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are from your customers’ perspective.
• Analyze your search traffic  to see what questions people are querying before finding your site.
• Scout social media for mentions of you or your competitors. See what questions are being asked, or what discussions are being had.

Listing all of these topics in one place will help you identify  which content is most likely to attract the right kind of attention. Once you have this list in place, it’s time to go ahead and create the content.

How to Write Effective, ‘Non-Salesy’ Copy

For this to work, you’ll need to incorporate the topics and keywords you’ve created into content that sounds normal. Here are the basic steps to follow:

1. Write a killer headline addressing the key point of your topic or question.
2. Create an actionable outline to help the reader solve their problem.
3. Vary your keywords naturally. Don’t just repeat the same exact phrase throughout.
4. Write for regular humans. Ultimately, if real people can’t appreciate what you’ve written, neither will search engines.

While you’re writing this content, you’ll be talking a lot about your own business. It can be tricky to do this without sounding like a snake oil salesman, or generally putting off the customer. In order to cultivate a personable approach, make sure to:

• Put the focus on the customer and their needs.
• Be honest about the customer’s options.
• Write personally, as if you were talking to a friend.
• Talk about what makes you unique.

Step #2: Optimize Your Customer Support and Reviews

Your content strategy is about driving sales for your business. Your site is not the only one out there publishing content about you online, and it can seriously impact your sales. This is because 90% of customers report being heavily influenced by reviews.

[Tweet “90% of customers are heavily influenced by reviews.”]

You can’t control the way everyone talks about you, but you can control the way you’re represented on thesethird-party review sites. Be sure to keep all of the following elements up to date:

• Your logo.
• An accurate list of your services.
• The description of your business.

However, review sites aren’t just good for controlling your appearance. What gets discussed on other sites can work in your favor by publishing the right kind of content on your own site. For example, Apple’s support pages are jam-packed with official information about their products, giving people detailed content to link to and discuss further.

Whether you offer a product or service, you can get started simply by listing FAQs and testimonials on your business website:

Finally, our last piece of advice is simple—don’t forget to focus on your customer’s needs!

Conclusion

Focusing on new visitors with your content strategy can be a strong place to start with SEO. However, don’t forget to pay some attention to the people most likely to follow through on a sale—your existing customers.

By optimizing your content for existing customer relationships, you have a much better chance of boosting sales. You can do this by:

1. Creating a keyword strategy to target your customers’ questions about your products and services.
2. Keeping third-party review sites up to date.
3. Publishing references on your site, such as FAQ pages, that can be included or referenced on external support sites.

How does your current content strategy take existing customers into consideration? Let us know in the comments section below!