How to Establish Brand Loyalty
Establishing your brand and what you want to represent are important factors to consider when starting a business. How will you bring customers in for the long haul? On top of that, how will people devote themselves to your product or service? Brand loyalty is a positive feeling someone associates with a specific brand, allowing them to continuously purchase products or services from this brand. This occurs despite competition from other brands and overall reception from the public.
When you have a favorite soda, you are unlikely to ever gravitate towards the similarly-tasting competition. When you finally find a makeup foundation that matches your skin tone, using another brand that other people rave over just doesn’t feel right. Buying markers from a brand you’re not familiar with for your child’s latest art project makes you feel uneasy.
While some of these examples might sound silly, they all demonstrate an act of brand loyalty. People can consciously or unconsciously become attached to a brand and stick with it no matter what.
People with brand loyalty tend to prefer one brand over all of the others and continue to invest in it. This isn’t because the other brands are bad, per se, but because their favorite brand has been able to offer something the others haven’t.
What can help draw people to your brand and stick with you through thick and thin?
Be Friendly and Approachable on Social Media
Social media has slowly grown to be the empire for communication, and this is no different for brands and their clientele. If anything, it can be the deciding factor on whether or not people want to check you out.
Make sure to always respond to customer reviews and mentions in a timely manner, both public AND private ones. This applies whether they are positive, negative, or just making general statements about the product or service. Giving off a friendly and approachable stance makes you appear much more personable and displays a true level of authenticity. People will feel much more comfortable when they realize they are communicating with real people, possibly making them more inclined to come back to your business.
You also want to make sure you are truly listening to your clientele. Take their feedback on social media into consideration when developing further products or updating your services. Find the right market and cater specifically to that market on your platforms. If you were making something with an older crowd in mind but are finding that your business is attracting younger people as well, make efforts to include this younger crowd in your marketing efforts. It will be noticed, and people will remember you for it. Brand loyalty comes with time!
Have your followers be engaged with your brand story. Interact with your audience in unique ways such as sharing customer photos (with permission!) and commenting on photos they tag you in. Again, being there on a personal level will make your brand memorable and hopefully one your customers can rely on time and time again.
Have Consistent Branding
What is one of the things that makes a brand most memorable? If you said, “the way it looks,” you would be correct. How a brand executes its branding is one of the key factors in bringing in and keeping loyal customers. Keeping this consistent across all of your marketing channels is also incredibly important to consider.
Take the time to study what aesthetics resonate the most with your target audience. What do you want to accomplish in your message? When you figure this out, keep it the same for everything you put out for the brand. This can be with email marketing, direct mail marketing, your social media, print and digital advertisements, packaging, and so much more.
Is there a color scheme you are drawn to? Do you want to implement customer quotes and inspirational messages? Do you want to develop a tagline or slogan for the brand? Great! Just make sure you implement it in as many ways as you can. Make your brand memorable, one that people are drawn to, and one that people will choose over any other. Stand out amongst your competition in the best way.
Find More Ways of Appealing to Your Clientele
Once you figure out who your target audience should be, you want to work to create a product or service that is going to be most appealing to that audience. After all, you want to keep these people coming back and continuing to invest in your brand.
What are some options you could take?
Rewards
Something that has proven to provide high benefits for both the business and the customer is a good rewards program. While the company may lose a bit of profit for the rewards taken through the program, this is going to keep customers coming back. Ultimately, you’ll see more profits.
Have people gather points on an app with every purchase they make, where they can then redeem points for a free or reduced item. Offer a free reward on their birthday. Give people a bonus for logging in to your service every day. When people have an incentive for continuing to invest in your business, it gives them all the more reason to stay loyal to your brand.
Tell Your Company’s Story
Another great way of appealing to your clientele is by telling a story with your marketing. While this is similar to people being engaged with your brand story via social media, this goes beyond the social media landscape. You want people to truly be engaged with your brand so they do not gravitate elsewhere.
How did your company get started? What are the goals the company and overall brand hope to accomplish? What have you learned since starting the company? How has your clientele taught you over the time the brand has been established? Talk to people like you’re having a casual, everyday conversation when it comes to what your business has done for you. People tend to respond well to brands that take the time to talk to them.
However, be careful to not sound like you’re preaching to a choir or that you’re just inundating people with facts. Instead, you want to sound personable and relatable to your audience. Approach them as a person telling a story over dinner with their friend rather than as a business executive pitching an idea at a meeting.
Conclusion
While there are many other ways to establish brand loyalty for your potential and current clients, these are just a few ways of helping you get started. People should experience feelings of positivity associated with your brand and want to keep investing in it, hopefully sticking with your brand above all others.
Feeling stuck on how to branch out with a marketing plan and get more people to connect with your brand? Contact us today to learn more about what our creative marketing team can do for you.