5 creative subscription marketing strategies to stand out from the competition

Strong marketing strategies can help your subscription business stand out in a crowded market. As more brands add recurring revenue to their roster, stores that offer subscriptions need to get creative with their marketing strategies to stay competitive, attract new customers, and retain their current subscribers.

This blog post will dive into five subscription marketing strategies your brand can start utilizing today to win over new customers and engage with existing customers in innovative ways. 

The role of marketing in subscription business growth

To effectively grow and scale your subscription model business, it’s crucial to develop a thoughtful marketing strategy that centers both your current and potential customers’ needs. After all, your marketing impacts every aspect of the customer experience, from before a shopper is aware of your brand to the moment a current customer recommends you to a friend. 

By investing strategically in your marketing strategy, you can ensure that your brand is seen by the right individuals who are likely to subscribe to your products—and stay subscribed. What’s more, you can ensure that your current customers have a positive experience with you that compels them to stick with you over time. The latter is critical for the health of a subscription business and its reliable recurring revenue stream.

Beyond acquisition and retention, your marketing can affect a variety of other key areas of your business, including: 

• Average order value
• Customer lifetime value 
• Customer churn
• Customer loyalty 
• Brand perception

5 best-in-class marketing strategies for your subscription business

In order to attract the right customers to your business and retain your existing customers, it’s important to approach your marketing from a variety of different angles. Below, we dive into six key tactics to build a winning marketing strategy that will set your brand apart.

1. Center your value proposition

Your value proposition is one of the most important pieces of copy in your subscription marketing strategy. This distillation of your brand’s unique value provides your customers with a “reason to believe” in your products or services, as well as your brand as a whole. 

Not only does this help you attract customers—it can also help with your customer retention. By infusing your value proposition into key areas of your brand experience, you remind your existing customer base why they signed up for your service in the first place, and why they should continue to stick with you.

To craft a compelling value proposition, use the following strategies:

• Make it clear in your value proposition how your products should be used and why they should choose your brand over others.
• Clarify the unique value that you bring to the table, be this through cost savings in your pricing strategy, quality, time-savings, an important cause, or something else.
• Specify why customers will benefit from sticking with you over time—this is crucial to the success of the subscription-based business model.
• Incorporate your value proposition throughout the customer journey in key areas, such as on your About page, in your customer portal, and even on your packaging.

2. Create valuable content for your subscribers

One of the best ways that brands can engage with their customers and build trust is by sharing useful content—whether they do that through social media, the customer portal, or simply on their website. Subscription businesses are all about creating community. With the right content, your value as a brand will go beyond just your products and services and help you forge stronger customer relationships.  

So, subscription marketing strategies should include sharing content that’s relevant and valuable to subscribers. It’s crucial to research which topics are most important to your customers, and find out where your target audience is spending their time online. Focus your content creation efforts on the right channels, and you’ll see great results. 

Subscription businesses should consider:

• Sharing important information in their customer portal
• Creating fun and informative content for social media, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and more
• Writing detailed landing pages on their website
• Creating an online community for customers to interact with

3. Use SEO to your advantage

SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the most important marketing strategies for getting your brand in front of the right people. In fact, research by BrightEdge shows that over 53% of website traffic comes from organic search, making this a key area for investment in future customer relationships. 

By tailoring your website performance to ensure that it ranks well in search engines, you can make potential customers aware of your brand at a critical moment in their shopping journey. And by helping the right people find your products or services as they’re searching for solutions to their problems, you set the stage for them to become repeat customers with you.

To ensure your SEO strategy is set up for success, consider the following strategies:

• Research what your target market is searching for online and identify the most valuable keywords you can target in your SEO efforts.
• Avoid overcrowding your copy with the same keywords over and over—this is called “keyword stuffing,” and it can actually hurt your rankings in search results.
• Make sure your website contains quality, reputable links—both internal and external—that are relevant to your target audience.
• Identify opportunities for short-form content on your website, such as a company blog, where you can schedule out posts that are optimized for search and relevant for your target audience. 

4. Consider free loyalty programs

Free loyalty programs are a natural investment opportunity for subscription businesses, as they boost value for customers and incentivize them to stay subscribed. Unlike membership programs, loyalty programs are free to join, which allow brands to engage more deeply with a broader audience and tap into their feedback.

For customers, the benefits of loyalty programs are often immediately clear: For no added cost, they can receive discounts, free items, and other benefits based on actions they may already be taking, such as making repeat purchases. 

For businesses, it’s crucial to identify the benefits that are most valuable to your unique customer base. Pinpoint your goals for the program, whether you’d like to increase LTV and AOV or boost your repeat purchase rate. 

Finally, be sure to communicate the process and details of your loyalty program clearly for your customers in key areas. You can consider a separate landing page for your loyalty program, or even a module for your loyalty program in the customer portal.

5. Leverage influencer marketing

Subscription businesses should take advantage of influencers as brand ambassadors and use them to share your product—in a natural, organic way—with your target audience. 

Subscription-based products require a level of commitment from buyers, and having an influencer recommend them can make all the difference. In some ways, it’s like having a trusted friend tell you about a recent purchase they’ve been loving.

Great subscription marketing strategy will utilize influencers that have an audience that closely aligns with the brand’s desired audience. Encourage influencers to share their experience with your products or services on social media or their blog, and see how fast you acquire new customers who will stick around because they trust your brand. 

Creative marketing that works for subscription businesses

With the above strategies, you can take your subscription brand’s marketing strategy to the next level. Implementing some or all of these tactics will help you reach new customers while increasing trust among existing customers. Plus, you can stand above your competitors with these innovative marketing tactics.