Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer Journey: Retention Stage

Lead generation and nurturing are important for new leads, but if you’re not pursuing those strategies with existing buyers, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit.

How do you generate and nurture leads once you’ve already made a sale? By turning your new buyers into brand evangelists. And how do you do that? You have to earn it.

During buyer persona interviews, spend some time assessing the buyer’s current situation. Try to determine how buyers want to continue to be marketed to, and what they’re excited enough about to (potentially) evangelize to their own networks.

To drive retention content, ask the following:

1. How has your experience with our product been since you started using it? Anything you really like?
2. Have you seen any measurable results?
3. How have others on the buying decision team responded to the product being in use?

Once you have some answers, turn them into a content strategy for existing buyers. The goals of your strategy are two-fold. First, you want to retain them; second, you want them to act as magnets within their own networks, showing so much satisfaction with your offering they recommend it to others.

How to Create Content that Drives Customer Retention

• Keep providing value. How are you communicating with buyers post-purchase? Are you continuing to offer educational content around your product and promoting it to them via segmented delivery? If buyers seem unimpressed with your attempts to “stay in touch,” find a way to be more relevant.
• Bring buyers into the fold. If you sense that buyers would make good interview subjects for blog posts or participants in Twitter chats, reach out to them with specific requests. People generally enjoy talking about their experiences and are flattered when asked to offer advice or help.

Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than keeping existing ones, so the content you produce for this stage of the buying cycle is significant. Keeping these customers on a separate lead nurturing track can also contribute to your pipeline in terms of leads generated via referrals and shares from within the existing customer base. It’s important to see the value of creating a content strategy for existing users, simply because it really pays off.

Have you enjoyed this buyer persona series? Share what you've learned from my blogs in the comment section!

Stephanie Kapera is a special projects coordinator for Kuno Creative and the co-founder of Up All Night Creative, a Raleigh-based content marketing agency that helps B2B and B2C companies develop magazine-quality web content. Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Photo credit: Pandorea