DOI: 10.25625/nbywmd
title: How to Generate More Customer Loyalty, Advocacy, and Lifetime Value at Scale

description: Content is certainly a generic term. Each time a prospective and existing customer sees or hears a piece of your business or organization’s content, they should have a micro experience with it — a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful. The word “meaningful” is also generic, so you should come up with a few specific adjectives that are aligned with your brand values Remember, people do not care about your products or services; they care about their needs and wants. Your products or services are a means to a customer’s end. Therefore, memorable and meaningful should be perceived through the lens of your ideal customers’ eyes, not through the lens of your business or organization. Or, as marketing and brand storytelling expert Bernadette Jiwa wrote: “Don’t see your content as a big old sales funnel. Treat it more like a flame, a campfire that people want to come back to. Intention is everything.” Ultimately, the goal of content experiences is to create “defining moments” for your prospective and existing customers, such that the more defining moments they have with your business or organization, the more money they will spend with you (customer loyalty) and the more they will recommend their family, friends, and colleagues do the same (customer advocacy). A defining moment is created from one or more of the following elements: Elevation: boosting sensory appeal, raising the stakes, or breaking the script Insight: gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of yourself, someone else, or something Pride: a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from achievement, practicing courage, or being recognized Connection: creating shared meaning and deepening ties Once you have wrapped your head around how to deliver content experiences to your ideal customers, the next aspect to think about is the “content tilt” — or how to differentiate your content experiences from those already out there. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of the book, Contect Inc., describes the content tilt as “your unique perspective on your content niche, which creates an opportunity for you to attack, lead and, ultimately, own the category. Without ‘tilting’ your content just enough to tell a truly unique story, you risk blending into the rest of the noise and being forgotten.” In order to avoid this risk, there are four potential ways to successfully tilt your content strategy: Focus on content that is different styles, angles, topics, and subjects. Focus on content that is different in formats, and how it comes to life on various channels and platforms. Focus on content that covers certain topics and subjects to different extents and details (content depth). Focus on content that covers a different range of topics and subjects (content breadth). Finally, you need a marketing strategy for your content experiences. First, identify the channels that are optimal for delivering the types of content experiences you plan to produce for your ideal customers. For instance, do you want to launch a third-party website (separate from your existing one) like General Mills did with Tablespoon, which also has separate social media and email marketing channels? Or, do you want to overhaul your current website and turn it into a content destination, like Red Bull and Virgin? Either way, you may want to get your website indexed instantly by Google. Will you develop a content production network like American Express did with OPEN Forum, using a combination of internal and outside content creators, or do you want to keep the entire content production process in-house? Furthermore, how are you going to distribute content through paid media? How much will you invest, and through which channels will you advertise? Today more than ever, marketing systems and strategies (or what we call “content amplification”) are necessary parts of content marketing because organic reach is dying a slow death across almost every social media platform. Additionally, content amplification enables you to save money by limiting how much you invest in paid media, since content amplification is, in essence, earned media. In the Attention Economy, consistently and continuously commanding your ideal customers’ attention through content experiences is just as valuable as attracting paying customers. Here’s why. Since social media is an integral aspect of developing a community and distributing content experiences today, it is important to embrace the network effect that is produced by each social media network. In other words, everyone knows someone who will be ready, willing, and able to buy your product or service at some point. By focusing on creating and distributing successful content experiences to your ideal customers, you will maximize earned media over the long run, which means more people in your target audience will both engage with and share your content. The result: an increase in organic reach (earned media) and a decrease in your reliance on paid media as a means of reaching more people. By maximizing earned media, your business or organization will be exposed (via more people sharing more of your content) to other people who are in the market for your product or service, even if the people who originally shared your content never buy what your business or organization sells. Some businesses and organizations also develop a content sharing network — the distribution equivalent of a content collaboration network. In short, it is a group of people, businesses, and/or organizations that you can count on to consistently share your content. The key to developing a robust content sharing network is to be selfless when creating content experiences. In other words, involve as many people, places, and non-competing businesses and organizations in your content experiences, as opposed to content that largely involves your business or organization (whether directly or indirectly). By involving others in your content experiences — through co-producing it or creating content about them, within the context of your business or organization — they will share this content with their audiences. While content experiences should be centered around the multidimensional identities of your ideal customers and how they intersect with your brand , your content experiences should also seamlessly merge with your — because, ultimately, your content experiences must reflect your business or organization. There should be an obvious, almost intuitive connection between your content experiences and your brand, including your brand purpose, mission, credibility, values, personality, tone of voice, , , “ ,” and customer “ .” In doing so, your business or organization will thrive where many are struggling: Customer cost-per-acquisition and customer loyalty is at record highs and lows, respectively, because consumers have unprecedented access to information about products and services, and more options from which to choose where they should buy them. As a result, consumers no longer value products and services like they once did during the Service Economy, when products and services were not nearly as commoditized as they are today — thanks to this unprecedented access to information (the Attention Economy).