Getting the reader’s attention is not an easy task. There is a lot of content available on the Internet, which means a war being waged for each person’s attention.
In this sense, it is interesting to ask: how to gain the reader’s loyalty? How to apply resources in a way that ensures better experiences and greater return for companies?
The answer begins to be formulated when we carefully look at the definition of “loyalty”. In this way, it is possible to start discussing how to improve results and retain visitors on the website.
With a better understanding of loyalty and knowing who that reader really is, companies can optimize their Content Marketing to offer value and engage people towards the buying decision.
This article will discuss what it means to build loyalty and provide some awesome tips on how to achieve this result.
Here, you will see:
- What does it mean to build loyalty in a reader?
- Why are these readers so important in a content strategy?
- What are the 7 major tactics to enable readers’ loyalty?
- Why is it important to monitor these users?
Keep on reading!
What does it mean to build loyalty in a reader?
Let’s start from the definition: what does building reader loyalty really mean?
Intuitively, it comes to our mind that this means ensuring that someone returns to the texts we produce.
This answer is correct, but to limit the definition of fidelity to this would be to oversimplify the question. In order for companies to reach this level, they need to understand better what building loyalty in the reader is all about.
We have already said that even when trying to define it, it is not an easy task. After all, a consumer’s behavior today is drastically different from what it was, precisely because it is in its 4.0 phase.
Besides, users behave unexpectedly and distinctly, making it hard even to trace a journey in some cases.
Despite the challenges, some insights help clarify how it is possible to reach a high degree of loyalty.
So let’s start with a study. Data from Smartocto indicates that a loyal reader is the one who:
- reads five times more than average users in a given month;
- visits the company’s website four times more than average readers in a month;
- in one session, consumes 29% more than the average reader.
In other words, they read more, always come back, and stay on articles for longer in a single visit. They consume more in terms of quantity and pay full attention to what you say. But what can you do to make these people behave this way?
Optimize the experience
First, a remarkable experience. An experience that makes people remember your site after their first visit is already enough to facilitate loyalty.
To generate this impression, companies need to speak the same language that customers use. This includes using their tone of voice while maintaining the brand’s identity.
Good content makes the reader the protagonist of the text. Even if it is not a story, the visitor starts to enter that universe and imagine themselves as part of that. They feel special and understand that it was produced with special care, precisely to help them.
Personalize the communication
Sometimes, the article is so personalized for the person reading that they feel touched. This is because you explore their pains and desires and create a friendly environment to present solutions.
In the introduction, they feel that someone understands them. In development, they learn a little more about the subject of interest. Finally, in conclusion, they get to know some practical ways to deal with their problem.
Treat the reader as a human being.
In this sense, it is necessary to understand the reader as a human being, with values, desires, tensions, and things that keep them awake at night.
The opposite is to treat them only as a buyer, which is not recommended.
By humanizing the user, companies can generate an intimate and deep connection, seeking to present a consultative and directed voice.
Thus, when you develop a strong strategy, full of texts with these characteristics, it is easy to reach the reader’s heart, make them read more, and build loyalty.
Besides, the reader stays longer on the website and feels obliged to share with other people because they really see value in the content.
Offer social currency and practical value
In his famous book “Contagious”, Jonah Berger develops what he believes are the principles that make any campaign or content go viral.
Among the aspects, he highlights: “social currency” and “practical value”. Understanding both is important to advance in the comprehension of how to retain readers’ loyalty.
As with the viral effect, loyalty depends on something you offer the visitor. It has to be something valuable, that goes beyond what they already know. Otherwise, they will not consider it worthwhile to continue reading.
Besides, it needs to be presented simply and directly, so they can put it into practice as soon as they finish reading. When they see themselves in front of texts with those characteristics, consumers can’t resist.
In the same way, it is necessary to have social currency, that is, to be so interesting that it makes people want to share in order to make them look cool among others.
This has to do with the theme of their interest, as well as the form of the content.
That’s why the interactive content stands out as a great strategy to build loyalty. After all, who doesn’t like a post that engages and entertains while teaching something relevant?
With everything we have just discussed, it is possible to reach a definition.
To make the reader loyal is to offer something they do not expect from anywhere else. It is treating the user as a human being, not just a buyer. Besides, it is to prioritize their experience.
Why are these readers so important in a content strategy?
Once you understand why you should keep your readers loyal, you have to go further and find out why these people are so important. After all, is it really worth making sure they return to the site?
The answer is intuitive. In a content strategy, it is very important to develop a loyal audience, which consumes and always returns to what the company produces.
These visitors will engage with the brand and, in the future, will become clients. After that, they will even be defenders of the company, promoting its services and products.
Once the contents are strategic and personalized, touching the most important points to the buyer persona will make them feel invited to take action.
This action will take the persona through the sales funnel, which will help in the conversion process. It is a natural process, as the reader notices value and feels the need to establish a commercial relationship.
In other words, it is necessary to see the people who read the contents not only as clients but also as stakeholders. Each decision must reflect their interests and be designed to please them. Remember, they will help form the base of the company, enabling the creation of authority and credibility in the market.
In this sense, trust is an important factor in ensuring someone’s loyalty to a brand. The person needs to feel benefited and understand that it is worthwhile to establish a negotiation.
In fact, 94% of people understand that this feeling is fundamental to lead them to visit a site. According to the same survey by Outbrain, 87% say that trust influences satisfaction, and 90% rate trust as the main reason to recommend a company.
In an approach that uses the retention funnel, readers that are always engaged will be precisely those most likely to be retained as enthusiasts.
In this way, you will be able to sell more often to them, because you will have already established a closer relationship.
What are the 7 major tactics to enable readers’ loyalty?
We have then come to the infallible tactics you need to know. We will develop them with practical examples in the next subtopics.
1. Post regularly
It is never too much to say this when it comes to a Content Marketing strategy: frequency is very important.
There’s no point in posting once and abandoning the blog because it won’t bring the expected results.
It is essential to work with editorial planning, preparing the posts according to your audience’s needs. In this sense, it is interesting to create a series of posts that, together, deliver value to the readers.
For example, if you are talking about Digital Marketing, why not prepare other content for each of the components, such as email marketing and social media marketing?
This way, you create a constancy, developing the topics, and ensuring the blog as a relevant source of content to your buyer persona.
This well-organized strategy will help the company produce more solid and in-depth texts that will convey the ideas you need to disseminate, generating practical value, and keeping the audience loyal.
Remember the numbers we presented in the first topic: loyalty is about reading more and visiting more than one blog post per access. If many posts are interesting to the reader, they will certainly not deprive themselves from consuming it.
2. Having a well-defined identity
Here, we have to emphasize the importance of branding. It is important to know what to talk about and have a good sense of how to communicate with visitors. You must work on your identity both visually and in matters of text — tone of voice, language, and voice.
Developing a good brand identity is important because it will help fix your website and its image in the reader’s mind.
Thus, their whole experience will be affected by the impression they will have of your company, which will help in loyalty-building.
An identity that stays in the memory is a key to generate confidence since people tend to trust more in what they already know and in what they are already familiar with.
Furthermore, identity is what separates you from the rest of the brands that create digital content.
In this endless battle for the reader’s eyes, you can make them associate your brand with certain aspects and remember it even in an unintended way — thinking about your site when they see a color, for example.
By the way, it is worth watching this interesting video about the way the brain works. It approaches the mind’s tricks and how we work with quick reasoning to save energy, always prioritizing what is familiar.
3. Optimize your blog
To ensure the conveyance of the company’s cultural elements, as well as its values in the form of identity, it is essential to work on optimizing the site and the blog.
Here, we are talking about technical issues, which involve improving aspects such as usability, user experience, speed, stability, and scanning of content.
It is no use following the first tip if you do not organize your site so that the persona finds the texts. It is necessary to allow users to move between one page and another in a fluid way, as well as between the various sections.
Everything must be responsive too, to ensure an even better experience. After all, responsiveness is not a differential anymore, but rather a requirement.
4. Speak what your client wants to hear
This tip is closely related to Seth Godin’s famous marketing definition. According to the guru, marketing professionals are people who tell lies to others.
It’s not that it’s about distorting the truth in a manipulative way. Rather, the professionals’ work in this area is to sell a story to the client, according to what they already want to hear, even if it is not the conventional “truth” established in the market.
So, the recommendation is: say what your client wants to hear. As Godin teaches us, people only accept new ideas that are associated with what they already think.
Convincing a human being to abandon these ideas requires a lot of effort. You must take what you already know about your client and build a strategy based on it.
In Digital Marketing, this is translated as making the contents reflect the buyer persona’s desires. Always work with ideas based on their perspective.
Think of the world as they think. This way, you can predict their engagement with the post, and they will certainly come back to consume more content.
5. Use a link building strategy
Another tip is to reinforce your link building strategy, especially the internal links. This will be crucial to ensure that the user stays longer on your blog and navigates between various contents.
Good link building will make people want to enter each page and create a desire to continue deepening their knowledge and learning more about the subject.
Again, this recommendation is a complement to what we talked about publishing several posts with good frequency.
After all, it is necessary to ensure that these texts are connected in a relevant way so that the persona reads all of them.
In other words, a good link building strategy makes the constancy of the posts make sense. Thus, it is necessary to organize the reference keywords for the links and, if appropriate, create tables to help marketing members connect to some pages.
6. Use interactive content
We have already briefly mentioned the interactive contents, but we would like to highlight them as an important recommendation.
Interactivity consists of creating posts that engage readers by actively participating in their experience, creating a dialogue with the company.
Think, for example, of an interactive infographic in which the parts are segmented according to the users’ choices.
Quizzes, interactive ebooks, calculators, and questionnaires are other examples. The major goal of using this approach is to streamline the content to not wear out the audience.
With this kind of material, your marketing team will be able to make the experience more interesting and satisfying, being less rejected by visitors.
It is also possible to collect data about them. In a quiz, for example, users give information about their problems to find solutions. This data can be used to segment future campaigns.
7. Improve your copywriting
Investing in more efficient copywriting can be the solution to build reader loyalty to your blog. In this sense, it is worth mentioning the use of resources such as mental triggers, like:
- authority;
- social proof;
- urgency.
The idea is to emphasize the text and generate a strong connection with those who are reading it.
By working this skill effectively, your team will produce effective pieces that will lead people into making the decisions and carrying out the actions you expect, towards the completion of the purchase, at the end of the funnel.
Why is it important to monitor these users?
When putting all this into practice, it is interesting to develop a way to control and follow up visitors to the blog. Thus, management can have a clear vision of the results and the approaches’ performance.
Such monitoring is fundamental to generate visibility and transparency. With this strategy, the company can understand the engagement of readers and make decisions focused on improvement.
The act of monitoring the blog is a data-driven posture that should become increasingly common in organizations.
So, how does one do this? A good tip is to use Google tools for website analysis. One of them is Google Analytics.
In it, you visualize data such as the average visiting time on each post, rejection rate, exit rate, publication sharing rate, and the number of visitors. You can also check the most viewed articles.
Thus, it is possible to understand the number of loyal readers, according to the principles we presented at the beginning of this article.
Another application that can be used is Google Search Console. With it, you can check the searches that led people to the site, for example, which is important to map keywords and organize the SEO strategy.
Making the reader loyal is important to ensure that users follow your website and blog as well as become loyal buyers of your products and services.
It is essential to work with the tips mentioned to ensure efficient and powerful content that will be irresistible to your buyer persona.
As we said, interactive content is one of the best ways to attract more people and engage them.
Did you like the article? Then keep learning about how to use interactivity in Content Marketing!
