When thinking of the words “brand loyalty,” you’d automatically assume it means to be loyal to who you are as a brand in terms of core values and mission statements. And while that is the bare necessities of brand loyalty, it goes deeper than that. From your advertising campaigns to the content you post on Instagram or TikTok, who ends up watching your brand from afar? Your audience. Brand loyalty means to be loyal to them – the people who support your brand.
Why is Brand Loyalty Important?
If your audience doesn’t come to mind when thinking about brand loyalty, then you’re not taking advantage of its true meaning. Brand loyalty depends on the relationship you have with your audience and what you mean to them as a brand – those are the things that make them want to buy from again and again.
With a proper relationship with your audience, your brand will thrive against your competitors that are fighting for your target audience’s attention. Here are 5 ways brand loyalty will make you stand out from the crowd.
1. Word of Mouth
Being a brand that’s talked about is one thing, but having your brand spread like wildfire amongst the mouths of your loyal customers is another. Your loyal customers become organic brand ambassadors for your brand. As they share their positive experiences with your brand, those they tell will head straight to you, which will drive organic growth. Bonus points if they’re willing to talk about you online. This not only makes what you do as a brand postable but it’ll also drive engagement to your platforms and boost visibility.
2. Competitive Advantage Against Others
Doing brand loyalty the right way means within your specific niche, your customers are going to stick with you. Competitors may try to target your customers, but if you’ve cultivated the right sort of relationship, it’ll be difficult to sway your customers away from your brand. Even if they’re offered discount prices, your customers are more likely to stick to what they know works for them.
3. Customer Lifetime Value
Over time, your loyal customers will spend the most on the products/services they love from you. From this, not only will your customer lifetime value increase but your brand will also remain steady during economic challenges because you can rely on your loyal customers to continue purchasing from your brand. Your customers hold great value in supporting your brand through different stages of growth.
4. Feedback = Improvement
Having a strong and loyal customer base doesn’t only contribute to how well your business does. As your customers care and shop from your brand, they’re more likely to take time out of their day to provide feedback on products/services that work or don’t work for them.
Providing feedback means they want to see improvement from a brand they enjoy and want to continue having a reason to shop with you. Customer feedback is important to consider when moving forward with new products/services. When a customer feels heard or recognizes something they had an issue with was fixed, it gives them more of a reason to trust your brand and stay.
How to Achieve Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty isn’t easily achievable. Unless your brand is willing to take risks and be open minded, your current and potential customers won’t do the same with you. Here are 5 tips to gain trust from your audience.
1. Create Unique Experiences
Regardless of whether your brand is sold online or in stores, there are so many ways to bring your experience to life with your customers. For example: pop-ups. Brands like Rhode and REFY have perfected their strategy of bringing their brand to their customers for them to try in person.
Rhode isn’t sold anywhere in store, so by using pop-ups, they bring customer’s purchasing power to life with a fun and interactive experience. During a few of the Rhode pop-ups, they’ve brought out a food truck for people in line to try Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze ice cream. Hailey Bieber herself even showed up.
We’ve started to see many brands doing pop-ups, but the ones that are successful are actively thinking about their customers, giving them a time that they were happy they didn’t miss. Whether it’s sales, freebies, limited time products, or the space itself, it gives your audience something to post and look forward to.
2. Utilize Cultural Influence
Relevancy is key when trying to talk to your audience. Relating your brand to big cultural moments shows that you’re on the radar of what your customers know and are currently talking about. Not only will they trust your brand more, but this also gives them the opportunity to talk about you for the things you’ve done.
If we look at the brand Calm, a mental fitness app that creates meditation products, they bought 30 seconds of ad time during the election to give 30 seconds of silence. This reflected who they were as a brand and what their intentions were – to show up for the people.
The result: everyone was a fan. Calm took a risk in making an ad during the presidential election, a risky subject, and made it as neutral as possible while making it about them. All in all, Calm was the perfect example of taking moments and making it yours while still thinking about who their audience is.
3. Practice Social Listening
Going back to the topic of customer feedback, brands can’t effectively take criticism and apply it to themselves without social listening. Giving their audience a chance to voice their concerns or praises means actively listening to what they have to say.
Whether it’s reading the comments section of your content across platforms, catching up on customer support emails, or watching content people make about your brand, these are ways to understand how people perceive your brand. Plus, it gives your brand a chance to fix what’s wrong to appeal to even more potential customers.
Cancel culture is a strong movement people online choose to participate in when there’s a lot of negative talk about a brand. The Korean beauty brand Tir Tir was on the verge of being canceled when they sent PR packages to influencers to try their foundations that came with an extended shade range. The problem was, their extended shade range did not match the skin tone of many of the black beauty creators they sent their products to. Many customers of Tir Tir were outraged with the lack of range and their false promises.
Digesting many pieces of feedback, Tir Tir went back to the lab and produced an updated range with more shades only a few weeks later to show that they care about making inclusive products for everyone. Tir Tir is a prime example of doing right by their customers, giving them what they want once they ask for it and, as a result, their customers continue to stay loyal.
4. Community Creation
Building a community with the people who love your brand strengthens your brand loyalty, trust, and recognition. It not only makes your audience feel heard but it also lets them feel like they’re a part of the brand. A brand’s identity is what strengthens the core of that community, and everyone takes part in loving and appreciating who they are.
Looking at REFY, Co-founder Jess Hunt is all about wanting her audience to be a part of what her brand has to offer. In other words, influencer trips are out, community trips are in. Through REFY’s Instagram group chat, Jess Hunt invited some of the closest community members of REFY to an exclusive retreat, a testimony to their commitment of connection and authenticity. This retreat was nothing but a real life experience of what the brand exemplifies from their aspirational values to branded style.
Jess Hunt acknowledges that her community members are her influencers, because they’re the ones who show up for the brand and tell others about them. This also ties back to a pop-up they had where they let their customers test out their new concealer product before it was released to the public.
As someone who went to this pop-up, I can speak to how this event was meant for community members to personally have people from the brand find their shade and take professional headshots with the concealer on. The purpose this served was to feature them as models for each concealer shade on their website. REFY makes their community feel almost like family.
5. Storytelling > Selling
If you didn’t know, people nowadays love storytelling. When promoting new products or services, it’s not just about selling anymore. People want to see true connections from the brand employees to the product itself. Yes, it’s important to know who the product serves and what problem it solves. However, it’s the motive and message behind it that sells the product.
EGC or employee-generated content is on the rise and now is the best time to utilize this strategy. Why hire models and spokespeople to be in a campaign when you can use your employees, the people who are the brains behind your brand, to advocate for who you really are?
Employees of your brand are the most genuine when it comes to showing up because they know basically everything about what you have to offer. Making testimonials, participating in trends, or shooting behind the scenes content means more to your audience than you think.
Storytelling also means making connections to the problem you’re trying to solve through your product versus acknowledging it and making claims your product can fix it. Lili Reinhart’s new skin care line Personal Day is doing what other celebrity skincare brands aren’t doing. She acknowledges the impacts acne has on mental health and uses her relationship with acne to sell the product instead of her celebrity status. Not only can her brand feel trusted, but her community can feel safe and heard with her brand knowing she advocates for those who’ve struggled like her.
Key Takeaways
- Be as memorable as possible. Compared to your competitors, what are you doing for your customers that has them talking about you to family and friends?
- Taking risks and being open-minded helps customers realize how far you’re willing to go for yourself and for them.
- Hearing is not the same as listening. Taking accountability when needed is the only way to go up.
- Influencers are out, communities are in. The best brand ambassadors you can get are from the people who shop with you the most.
- Telling a story versus selling a story are two different things. Sure, you can solve a common problem but what does that problem really mean to you?
