In B2B SaaS, attracting prospects and converting them into paying customers is the be-all-to-end-all. The idea of spending time, energy and money to reduce churn can be hard to swallow—but marrying content and customer marketing strategies is essential if you want to grow and scale your B2B SaaS company.
The numbers reinforce that it pays to retain your customers. On average, a 5% increase in customer retention leads to profit growth of anywhere from 25% to 95%, according to a Harvard Business School report. Customer retention also helps you save money because it’s 5 times more expensive to attract new customers than to keep your existing ones, Forrester reports. And, 65% of an organization’s business typically comes from current customers.
Keeping your customers—and keeping them engaged—involves using customer marketing strategies that include content crafted to nurture and feed your customer base. Sharing insights, case studies and other social proof can all help with customer retention, and enable customers to see how they might use your SaaS for new use cases.
In this post, we’ll share 6 content-centric customer marketing strategies your company should use to reduce churn, along with reasons why they work so well.
6 customer marketing strategies you should be using
1. Case studies
Reduce churn by using case studies in email campaigns targeted at your existing customers to keep them engaged and learning. Case studies exemplify how your offerings provide a variety of benefits to different businesses, creating “product stickiness”—a scenario where customers begin to use your product regularly because they’ve realized value from it.
Case studies also help highlight how your customers can expand their use of your software by illustrating how other customers have gotten results from your various products and services. This information can help your customers realize even greater value from your offerings by trying your software on other use cases.
2. User-generated content
As a SaaS marketer, you can leverage user-generated content (UGC) to build trust and rapport with your customers. Testimonials and software reviews are excellent examples of UGC that fit seamlessly into your customer marketing strategies.
The benefits of UGC are twofold. When you ask a customer for a testimonial or review, you’re showing them that you value their opinion and that you think other companies will, too. Alternatively, offering this kind of social proof from one customer to another lets your current subscribers know that you’re not the only one tooting your SaaS company’s horn.
UGC can help enhance your content strategy, foster engagement with your customers, save time on content creation and grow your content’s reach.
3. eBooks and white papers
Your SaaS ebook and white paper library should provide timely resources to educate your customers on how they can either broaden their use of your products across their company, or discover new ways to use your software.
For example, a customer may have bought your solution because of its integration capabilities with their accounting system or ecommerce website. Using ebooks and white papers as part of your customer marketing strategies helps educate your customers on how to expand their use of your software, making it an indelible and integral part of their business.
4. Data-driven personalization
Data from your CRM or other systems can give a powerful boost to your SaaS customer marketing strategies by enabling you to create highly personalized content for your different customer segments.
Over 80% of consumers want to see personalized marketing, which means that this strategy is not only crucial as you guide prospects through the buyer’s journey—it’s essential to nurturing current customers, too.
You can use data to uncover valuable information about your customers’ needs and address issues within your subscription cycle and renewal process.
5. Consistent content marketing
Consistency should be a pillar of your SaaS customer marketing strategies, in everything from your content publishing schedule to the format of your blogs, case studies, ebooks and white papers. Consistency helps increase your company’s credibility and keeps your brand top of mind for your customers.
B2B audiences, just like most consumers, live busy lives and have multiple priorities. Don’t make them work to engage with your brand. Offering value to your customers on a consistent basis builds trust and lets them know what they can expect from you.
6. Community
The best SaaS customer marketing strategies focus on making customers feel like they’re part of the family. Salesforce often uses the term “Ohana” or “family” when it refers to its employees, partners, customers and broader communities.
Producing content that builds community encourages customers to participate and share in events like user group meetings, and in online forums or on social media.
Community portals can also provide a captive audience to share content that your customers will find valuable, enabling you to increase engagement. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365/CRM User Group community portal is a great example of a SaaS company leveraging its customer and partner ecosystems to amplify its content and execute impactful customer marketing strategies.
Over to you
You’re now armed with 6 content-centric SaaS customer marketing strategies, so your marketing no longer needs to grind to a halt when a prospect converts to a paying customer. Put these strategies to work to help reduce churn in your business.
Get support with content creation
At Uplift Content, we write compelling case studies for high-growth SaaS companies. Get in touch if you’d like a hand.
