Your business profits the most from those who are loyal to your brand.
Facts prove the point – 65% of your business comes from your loyal customers, while as much as 80% of your financial gain comes from 20% of your current customers.
To build a loyal customer base, it’s essential to constantly nurture your brand image and strengthen the positive perception of your brand in the minds of your customers.
The brand image goes beyond the quality of the products and the services you offer and includes some other things as well, such as your brand reputation, its goodwill, and prestige.
Read on to learn how to use your brand image to install loyalty in your customers.
Determine Your Target Audience
The key to creating a strong brand image is knowing who exactly you are creating it for.
Aim for attracting a smaller group of potential customers, the target audience that you need to precisely define. Your goal is to ensure that they will spot you in the crowd, become aware of your existence so and can easily distinguish you from your competitors. Your every touchpoint with your customers is there to build their loyalty.
To be able to achieve these goals, you need thorough research of your target audience so that you can gain a better understanding of who they are and what kind of brand they would be attracted to.
You need to get the most data you can of their demographics, as well as their other relevant traits, such as their relationship status, occupation, income level, their needs, desires, interests, habits and pain points. Consider creating buyer personas to represent each one of your customer groups.
This way, you can build your brand image and tailor it to address their inner-most needs, and which is even more important for building loyalty – anticipate them.
Build a Strong Brand Personality
To be able to keep a positive brand image that installs trust and loyalty in your target audience, you’ll also need a strong brand personality.
If your brand personality shares the values of your customers, they are more likely to do business with you and become loyal.
According to Investopedia, there are five main types of brand personality: sophistication, sincerity, excitement, ruggedness and competence, each with its own set of common traits. While Chanel, with its sophisticated and elegant personality, aims to attract a high-spending customer base, Dove is a perfect example of a sincere persona with its kind and thoughtful approach.
A significant part of your brand development strategy should be internal branding. For the best results, you need staff that shares your brand values and mission and can deliver the promise of your brand.
Invest in Eye-Catching Brand Identity
Brand identity consists of visible and visual elements of your brand, such as your name, logo, typography, colors, and shapes, etc.
When deciding on the design and visual elements, you will use in your campaigns, ensure you tailor them to your customers’ preferences. This way, you are more likely to be considered credible and trustworthy, earning their loyalty and respect.
Be Consistent
Consistency is what your customers will expect and love in a brand. They want their experience with your brand to be the same, no matter what digital channel they use to engage with you, or which one of your brick and mortar stores they visit.
One of the ways to ensure consistency is by creating guidelines and making them accessible to all your employees as well as for all external experts that you will outsource your marketing tasks to.
Ensure that your brand guidelines include details on your logo, typography, colors, brand imagery and social media assets, as well as your brand story and its mission and the tone of your brand voice.
Aim for Top Service
Touchpoints between your customers and your brand can be very diverse – starting from the article you’ve posted on your blog, a Twitter post, an in-store purchase, or a customer complaint.
If you’re aiming for a loyal customer base, you need to make sure that each of these interactions has one thing in common – the quality of the service you provide.
Make it your goal to add real value to the lives of your customers, by focusing on their genuine needs, and addressing their pain points.
Some of the ways you can achieve this goal are:
- Offer a sudden discount to a customer and making their in-store purchase unforgettable
- Resolve your customer’s issues with your product during the first contact
- Solve one of your customers’ problems with your educational content piece
- One of the bulletproof ways to maintain your positive brand image and keep your customers loyal is by delivering excellent customer service. Recent research shows that 73% of consumers find a good user experience to be a key reason behind their brand loyalty. They also expect their user experience to be speedy and efficient, provided by friendly and knowledgable employees, who understand their needs and are helpful
- If you’re aiming for a loyal customer base, you need to make sure that each of these interactions has one thing in common – the quality of the service you provide.
As 73% of customers consider good user experience to be a crucial reason for their loyalty, focus on delivering top-notch customer service – speedy and efficient, provided by friendly and skillful employees, who understand their needs and are helpful.
It might take a while and effort to establish a strong brand image, but if you play it right, you’ll build a loyal customer base, that is vital for your business success.
About the Author
Raul Harman is the editor-in-chief at Technivorz blog. He has a lot to say about innovation in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. Connect with him.
