Businesses don’t thrive because they secure sales from their customers just once. The point is to bring them back for more. Brand loyalty can prove to be all too elusive for many businesses, and those businesses will always run into a ceiling on their growth. Brands that inspire loyalty in their audience, on the other hand, put the customer infrastructure in place for continuous growth, bringing back customers over and over again and prompting them to become unofficial brand ambassadors who advocate for your products or services. In action, brand loyalty is a powerful thing.
At Fryed Egg Productions, we help our clients become long-term, enduring successes -- not short-term flashes in the pan. We know that building brand loyalty takes discipline and hard work, but that the rewards are well worth the time and effort.
Deliver on your promises
The only sustainable path to brand loyalty is via excellence. No matter how savvy your branding approach, it won’t be enough to develop and keep loyal customers without a stellar product or service. First and foremost, emphasize consistently high quality to your customers. In that vein, you will need to reliably deliver on your promises to them, meeting or preferably surpassing their expectations so that your customers will associate your brand with a feeling of satisfaction and reward.
Provide a memorable experience
Superb customer service is paramount. The easiest way to undermine a fantastic product is to provide shoddy customer service. You should consider the customer experience from every angle and at every step in their journey to ensure that the path is smooth. Make the experience as personal as possible, showing each customer that they are important to you. The customer experience isn’t an obstacle to be navigated adequately -- it’s an opportunity to deepen your brand’s bond with your customers.
Build a community
Crucial to any community is communication. Open up lines of communication and make yourself truly accessible to customers. Don’t make every communication be about driving toward a sale. Instead, seek opportunities to forge bonds with customers. Employ social media and other tools to speak directly with them and share content that they will find compelling, useful or just fun, all while aligning with your brand. Stay connected with customers and never assume that they are satisfied because they are quiet. Seek feedback from customers and respond to it, showing that you value it. Offer previous or existing customers unique discounts and deals. Be a partner to them rather than limiting your relationship to something merely transactional, celebrating their successes and providing support whenever it’s needed. Use data analytics and other tools to make sure that you understand who your customers are, so that you can communicate with them more effectively.
Embrace your values
Customers form strong bonds with brands that share their values. That means you need to establish clear values for your brand and to emphasize adhering to them throughout your organization in everything that you do. If you are unclear who you are, your customers will be, too. Create integrated marketing strategies to ensure comprehensive consistency with your brand, enabling your entire team to “Always Be Branding.” It’s crucial to build your values internally so that your entire team understands and believes in your values and can be guided by them in their daily responsibilities. Be proactive about promoting your values, incorporating them into everything from your marketing messaging to your community sponsorships. Through it all, don’t try to be someone you’re not. There is great power in authenticity.
At Fryed Egg, we help organizations build brand identities that reflect who they are and then develop comprehensive marketing strategies to protect and advance those brands in the most authentic ways possible. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your marketing needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.fryedegg.com.