If Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither is brand loyalty. Some famous brands are so iconic that no matter who you are, or where in the world you may live, you’ll have encountered the name, recognize its iconography, and know what it does.
4 Tips to Build a Business Around Brand Loyalty
For smaller businesses, brand loyalty is also a potential reality, but the process of building a recognizable brand occurs on a smaller scale and usually targets a smaller audience.
As you’d expect, it also takes time – a fact that makes many business owners impatient as they wait for returns on their brand building investment.
In this article, we’ll examine some tips that can help you to fast-track the process.
1. Piggyback on Your Suppliers’ Brands
Your suppliers may have well-known and trusted brands that add to your business’s reputation.
If you are an International truck company for example, you stand to benefit from decades of cost-effective and reliable trucks and a brand you can use to attract customers with a fondness for International trucks.
If you are a sporting-goods supplier, you are certainly not Nike, but that doesn’t stop you from affiliating your business with the Nike brand – as long as you do, in fact, stock Nike.
Tap into an existing market that has loyalty to the brands you offer by highlighting this fact through signage, advertising, and even social media hashtags.
After a while, people in your area will associate your business’s name with their favorite brands, so while you’re promoting your suppliers’ brand, you are promoting your own brand at the same time.
It’s an elegant solution towards building a brand even when your business doesn’t have decades of reputation to back you up!
This may seem like basking in reflected glory, and that’s just what it is, but it’s smart to make use of your suppliers’ brands to draw clientele.
Once you’ve done that, your product range and service offering can get to work in creating a positive customer experience that is rewarded with loyalty.
2. Nurture Your Clients
Once a person has supported your business, they’ll be happy to do so again – provided they had a good experience as customers. So, once you gain a client, customer service is a good start towards gaining brand loyalty and repeat business.
Consider your customers’ journey. Whether they first experience your business online or off, you need to ensure that you’re delivering an experience that’s even better than what they may initially have expected.
However, memories are short, so keeping your business’s name uppermost in converted customers’ minds will be important.
Explore the possibility of offering a unique discount to returning clients, or try to get them signed up to your newsletter so that you can send them exclusive offers that ordinary passing trade doesn’t enjoy.
If you do opt for newsletters, strive to offer useful information on topics (or products) that will interest your readers.
Nobody likes clutter in their mail or SMS inboxes, but if they know that the information you offer is worthwhile, they’ll be happy to explore the contents of your latest mail or SMS campaign.
Selling to the converted is much better than trying to generate interest among the potentially uninterested. By taking good care of existing clients, you will build brand loyalty and gain repeat business.
3. Be Where Your Customers Are
We all know that having a physical store located conveniently for clients helps to make it easy for prospective customers to support your brand, but that goes for social media too.
Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest allow you to post tempting images of your business and what it offers.
Facebook offers fruitful territory to remind consumers that you’re there for them too.
A little paid advertising on social media platforms will be helpful, and it may not be particularly expensive, while it allows you target specific demographics very precisely.
Remember that brand awareness is the first step towards conversion, and once that has occurred, brand loyalty can develop, so don’t be discouraged if few actual sales are initially generated.
It’s worth looking out for affiliations that can benefit your brand too. If there are local events that may be relevant to your brand, find out whether there are any opportunities to advertise your market presence there.
And when you decide to support or undertake charitable initiatives, it’s only fair that your brand should get some of the kudos.
While your primary goal may simply be supporting your community, putting your brand out there not only gives you an opportunity to grow brand awareness, but sets an example that may gain further support for the initiative to which your business contributes.
In addition, people who are passionate about the causes you support will be inclined to choose you or recommend you, and since these are the aims you hope to achieve by building loyalty to your brand, it’s a case of “mission accomplished.”
4.Earn a Reputation That Gains Loyal Support and Recommendations
None of these strategies will work in building brand loyalty if you aren’t offering the basics that customers want – and perhaps a little more. For example, if a customer needs an item you don’t have in stock, offer to order it.
It’s more than most outlets would do, and makes your business’s brand memorable even if the customer doesn’t take you up on the offer.
The basics must be in place: deliver on your promises, take positive action when you receive negative feedback, and find ways to connect with your clients so that they feel valued.
But you can go beyond that too.
For example, you can incentivise happy customers to tell their friends by offering discounts or rewards for referrals, and the ubiquitous “loyalty cards” can be used to stimulate repeat purchases.
When building brand loyalty, you aim to impress clients so that they will always return to your business when they need your products or services, and you want to make them excited about what you do and the way you do it so that they’ll want to tell friends and family about it too.
Why Brands Gain Loyalty
A brand is akin to a business’s “personality.” The process of gaining brand loyalty is a bit like making friends who introduce you to their friends as someone worth knowing.
Any business can say it’s “the best,” but when its customers start saying it, they’re more likely to be believed.
As momentum grows, people who never supported your brand before become aware of it, and they might recommend it to others because of its reputation even though they, themselves, have not done business with you before.
It takes time and it takes a commitment to business excellence, but the potential rewards makes building brand loyalty a worthwhile process.
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