It’s a constant problem for marketers: maintaining customer loyalty isn’t just about making repeat sales. Rather, it’s about keeping their attention on your brand between sales and helping them to view your brand as a resource for all their needs. So how do you fill that service gap?

The secret to building and maintaining this connection between your brand and its customers is supplementary content – free resources that go beyond basic blog posts to help your customers accomplish their goals. These resources should supplement the services or products you provide, while also pointing customers toward additional purchases down the road. But that last part is subtle. The most important feature of these resources is that they help customers feel like your company has their needs and interests, not just profits, at heart.

Types Of Resources

There are many different types of materials you can add to your business website as a resource for your customers, and as a marketing professional, your task is to identify the best ones. Some companies, for example, develop a resource page, a single destination with outbound links, basic procedural outlines, or templates and guides.

Depending on your approach, building a resource page is one of the easiest ways to supplement customer content – you can source the majority of it from outside sources, rather than developing it in-house. On the other hand, a bare-bones resource page may not help build your business; it can easily push customers into the arms of another company if you’re not careful.

Another approach to resource building centers on your blog, but of course, there are many different types of blogging. From a marketing perspective, some posts will inevitably focus on link building, industry news, and other SEO topics – this is generally why brands build a blog in the first place, as a tool for improving search rankings through keywords and link building. The problem with focusing exclusively on such topics is that they generally aren’t that interesting to customers. This is why you need customer-focused posts.

Customer-focused posts are typically much easier to understand and much more goal-oriented than SEO posts; they have a simple takeaway that the average user can apply in their own life. This is customer relationship marketing – you’re giving customers the content they’re interested in without forcing a sale or otherwise manipulating that relationship. This kind of post is as straightforward and purposeful as they come.

Building Your Resources

As you embark on building your web resources, there are plenty of examples you can turn to for help. But before you can get started, you need to answer a few questions, such as:

• How do you want to format your resources?
• Do you want to use external or in-house resources?
• Will your resources be part of a blog or a separate aspect of your site?
• How will you point users towards the resources?
• How will your resources support your products and services?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin building your content.

Round-up style resource pages, such as this Blogger Resource page from Minimalist Baker, are the simplest to assemble because they don’t rely on your ability to develop new materials. Rather, as you can see, the page brings together a range of sites that enable readers to take on a task, but which don’t compete with what the sponsor site does. In a way, readers and clients can learn to do what the Minimalist Baker does – or build a blog based on their own interests, but none of those resources compete with the courses and products provided by the site.

If you’re more interested in building resources that directly support your product base, your best option is to turn to your blog. One way to do this is by creating valuable, SEO-driven posts that help guide customers who want to use your products. This post from For Your Party, for example, focuses on wedding planning logistics and how to use the company’s unique products. Such action or user-focused blog posts allow you to naturally embed your company’s products into a broader framework, and it works for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It doesn’t force a sale, but it suggests one, which is the ultimate goal of a resource post – to maintain that connection to loyal customers that will also facilitate sales.

The most complex resources to build are those that guide customers through more complex processes, helping them think through both short-term and long-term goals. This kind of post is most common for software or technology companies, or financial and marketing firms. And because they’re labor-intensive, these are often the resources that aren’t free – they might be eBooks that cost a small fee to download or digital courses.

It is, of course, possible to provide free, big picture resources, but as noted, they can be a challenge to produce. For example, our post on conversion strategies is nearly twice as long as other posts, clocking in at over 8 minutes for a complete read. While it provides a lot of information, most companies can’t afford to commit their limited resources to such extensive posts. It’s a big commitment, and furthermore, it can be difficult to keep readers’ attention throughout such a lengthy instructional piece.

Now, besides those items that are linked via the resource roundup, all of the above examples are of written added value items, but there are other approaches to your resource building, some of which you may already have on hand. Old design templates, for example, are a great example of something you can use as a free resource – maybe it’s a layout you’ve sold in the past, but now are willing to present as a freebie.

Free templates are an especially good way to engage customers, and some companies have premised an entire business around such products. One such company, LayoutReady, provides many free templates that serve as a gateway to their more comprehensive layout services. Many other websites provide free website layouts under the same business premise.

And finally, don’t forget about video content. Though videos aren’t commonly used from a resource perspective, they’re actually a great way to help guide customers through technical operations. For example, if you sell software, you might provide a set of instructional videos to help your users learn the necessary skills within the program.

Emphasizing Experience

Ultimately, the goal of building onsite resources is to develop a comprehensive customer experience, rather than to simply close an individual sale – and this practice is more important than ever. In fact, 80% of companies consider customer experience to be a key strategic objective. So while the sales process should be a good experience – it should be simple to check out, the site should be easy to negotiate – the experience doesn’t stop there. It extends to your blog, your newsletters, to every point of contact with the customers.

For many customers, accessing resources actually make up a greater proportion of their interactions with your company than actually making any purchases; remember, even large companies have to limit their purchases based on budgetary allotments, and small businesses are even more restricted. Even more so than social media interactions (though those can be a resource, too), accessing resource pages helps keep customers fully engaged in new developments, allows them to better understand your products and practices, and makes it more likely that they will make a future purchase. It also builds brand trust.

The most important thing companies need to understand about creating free resources is that you aren’t giving anything away. Rather, you’re building the foundation that facilitates sales. It’s like building a website or an app – it isn’t a gift to your customers as much as it is a venue through which you can display your expertise and build your base. Resources are much closer to advertisements than they are to giveaways or gifts. Once you understand that, building resources becomes a natural part of your business operations.