Building Brand Loyalty – How to Stay Top of Mind With Your Customers

How do you build an enduring brand with loyal followers? How do you focus on mastering loyalty marketing initiatives, and stay relevant and consistent with an amplified global competitive landscape?

Brand loyalty is built on the foundation of every interaction your customer has with your service. The key to brand loyalty is to always meet or exceed expectations with every customer encounter. When customers become loyal, they not only buy your product/service, they become emotionally attached to your brand. They may recommend your brand to their friends and family, develop an emotional connection, and act as a brand evangelist. These recommendations known as “word-of-mouth” marketing, continue to be most effective, as they can articulate the value proposition of your brand, and address an emotional connection that resonates well with others.

To help ensure your customers will remember your brand, below are five (5) steps to building brand loyalty:

1) Establish brand storytelling – Create stories that communicate the personality, values and experiences of your brand.  Build your brand story by determining what sets your company apart from your competitors and what establishes a unique identity for you (unique selling proposition – USP).

2) Connect with your customers – Be present at touch points which matter most to your customers and provide an emotional connection. As brands are battling for higher affinity, connect and engage with your customers online on a regular basis.

3) Anticipate their needs – Don’t start selling to your customers, listen to their needs and focus on what your customers want. Your customers are looking for the next experience, so offer them additional value or incentives (i.e. loyalty cards or programs), as these customers are typically more profitable and will most likely reciprocate by staying loyal to your brand.

4) Be consistent – Consistently delivering the same message and performance through all lines of business is reassuring and helps keep your brand top-of-mind. Being consistent helps re-affirm your customers’ trust and credibility in your brand, and helps provide clarity of distinction from competitors.

5) Deliver personalized experiences – Digital marketing enables us to connect with customers in different ways. Drive a strategy of conversational marketing that orchestrates one-to-one seamless messaging across all channels. Profile, segment and analyze your customer base and past buying patterns and create personalized, two-way interactions with your customers that are relevant and customized. Don’t group your customers as stats. Keep your focus on building customer relationships.

To establish brand loyalty you must live by your company’s core principles and go above and beyond customer expectations. Go the extra mile to set your brand apart from anyone else. Determine your company’s inside advantage. Find something uncommon about your offering, and find a way to become well-known to your core customer base by offering a differentiation. Focus on creating more brand loyalists and “brands that create an intimate emotional connection that you simply can’t do without ever.” Your existing customers are the most valuable to your business, so start to create an emotional connection and reward them.

How much effort should you invest in growing brand loyalty? Do you believe that if you attain brand loyalty, everything else will naturally follow?