HOW TO USE CONTENT MARKETING TO PROTECT MARKET SHARE
Smart marketers know the value of a defensive strategy in protecting market share. Before a competitor is on the horizon with intent to storm the gates of your business, you need to protect your business with an economic moat. Popularized by Warren Buffet, an economic moat refers to a business’s ability to maintain advantages over its competitors in order to protect its market share, profitability, product positioning and mind share.
Key to a strong economic moat is content marketing. Here’s why:
Customers who are engaged with a brand are five times more likely to choose it over any other (Rosetta). A strong offense is key to protecting market share, and content marketing can make it happen. Content marketing can help you get prospects and customers engaged with your brand long before a competitor is on the horizon. Plus, it can help keep them engaged even when competitors abound.
While protecting your market share is a defensive strategy, it also leads to economic advantage: According to a Harvard Business School study, increasing customer retention by 5 percent results in a 70 percent increase in profits. Here are three tips on how you can use content marketing to protect your brand’s market share:
Segment and Resonate
To protect your market share, think smaller. Take a good look at your larger brand audience and identify smaller sub-niches or micro-markets that you can market to with helpful content. Start by looking at your most profitable demographic and search for an underserved segment. Then develop content themes specific to these segments. By doing so, you’ll shore up an important sub-audiences’s brand loyalty.
An added benefit to developing content for niche markets is that you will attract more qualified prospects with your content, and niche content can be more effective in gaining search engine attention.
Differentiate to Enhance Brand Loyalty
An important factor in protecting market share is enhancing brand loyalty. There’s no better way to do that than by making your company the go-to source for information your customers need to make their businesses run better or their lives easier. To do that, package the data you already have into easy-to-read custom content that delivers business insight. Add white papers, how-to articles, checklists and infographic content development into your editorial calendar. And make sure that content is direct, thorough, efficient, effective and interesting.
Make Your Content Easily Accessible
What good is custom content if your audience can’t find it? Provide your readers a place where they can easily find all your content and come back to it. Dedicate specific sections of your website – like content hubs for training or customer support – to your existing customers. Check to be sure your website navigation is clear, easy to use and intuitive to your audiences’ search requirements. Do in-depth keyword research before you write content for your website and blogs and make sure those keywords are applied. Be sure the social share buttons on your website and blog link to your specific social channels.
Practice Active Listening
To deliver the type of content your customers want, you must listen. Be sure to track customer visits and interaction with your content to understand what content is most valuable. Monitor social media to learn what your customers are talking about with regard to problems and concerns in your industry. Listen to see how your competitors are addressing those problems. By listening carefully, you’ll discover what content you need to create to maintain competitive advantage over your competitors and protect your market share.
Want to learn more about how content marketing can help you protect your market share? Click here.
