As a business leader, you are proud of the brand you’ve created or are responsible for managing. You and your team put a lot of time, effort and energy into creating a wonderful brand experience for your customers, partners and prospects, and you’re hopeful that they feel a strong connection to all that your organization has to offer. In the long run, you expect that this connection will lead to long term relationships, repeat business and/or referrals to other prospects with similar needs. 

That connection you’re looking for is known as brand loyalty, and in marketing, it’s the secret sauce that takes an organization from simple success to superstar levels of achievement. 

But for many brands, when we speak of loyalty, all that comes to mind are points systems and coupon programs. Brand loyalty is a lot more than that, and if you leverage it well, it will cultivate long term customers who become advocates for your brand, and an extension of your sales and marketing team.

TL;DR

In marketing, brand loyalty is the secret sauce that takes an organization from simple success to superstar levels of achievement. 

The Psychology of Brand Attachment

Before we can talk about building brand loyalty, we need to understand where it originates. A customer cannot be loyal to a brand that they are not attached to. Their attachment to a brand stems from their emotional connections that are driven by their experiences. 

As a business leader, you need to consider all the touchpoints a customer (or prospect) has with your organization, and how those touchpoints come together to create the brand experience. From initial marketing messages to sales outreach, and right through product use or a customer service request, each of these experiences with your brand helps your customer learn who your brand is. They see how valued they are to your organization, and learn the personality of the brand they are interacting with. 

All of these experiences build an emotional connection to your brand (ideally a positive one). Even in the B2B space, where decision-making tends to be more rational and logic-based, the experience of the brand has a human element. It is a human who reads emails, watches webinars, interacts with your team and makes decisions for their organization. All of these touchpoints relate to the brand experience and affect decision-making. 

The more you can recognize who your customers are (think about customer archetypes), how you can help with their needs and the ways in which you align with their values, the better the emotional connection you will build. The personal experience a customer has with your brand builds the foundation for ongoing brand loyalty. 

From Satisfaction to Advocacy: The Loyalty Spectrum

As you’re evaluating the touchpoints that relate to your brand experience, consider that you may have satisfied customers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have loyal customers. In some cases and industries, just keeping customers satisfied can be a challenge, but if you want to create loyal customers, you need to think a level up from this. 

There is a baseline expectation for your customers based on your organization, your history, the industry you’re in, and what other brands they buy from. Meeting those expectations is required just to attract the customer. Think about the traditional marketing funnel. Each of your customers goes through a series of stages just to decide if your brand is right for them:

1. Awareness: Learning that your brand exists

2. Preference: Creating an affinity for your brand over others

3. Attachment: Determining that your brand is the right match 

At this point, you have created a satisfied customer. They have seen who you are, what you do, determined that your brand lives up to their expectations and are satisfied with what you’ve offered. This is a great step, but it doesn’t guarantee that your customer will come back the next time they need to purchase. It also doesn’t mean that they will necessarily refer you to others they know with the same needs. 

If you really want to build loyalty that can help elevate your business, you want to take customers to the next phase: ADVOCACY.

In the Advocacy stage, a customer truly embraces your brand into their daily life or work as an extension of themselves. An example of this might be your mobile device. Most people have a preference for their mobile operating system, whether that’s Apple, Android, Windows or something else, and when it comes time to replace their hardware, they will gravitate towards the same system they are accustomed to. This device is an extension of themselves, and if you ask them about it, most users have a strong opinion of the brand they use. 

So how can you move satisfied customers to become brand advocates? 

Factors That Build Brand Loyalty

Let’s go back to that satisfied customer who has an attachment to your brand. How was that level of satisfaction attained? Typically, it’s not one area of brand experience that will build this. While your product or service might be a perfect fit, if the customer has a negative experience with your sales team or finds your marketing confusing, this could easily turn them off and push them to a competitor.

Consistency across the touchpoints in your organization is critical to developing a strong sense of brand satisfaction. It creates a unified brand experience for the customer, so that they can identify and recall the brand personality and relate to what you offer. To create this for your customers, remember to align the online and offline experiences for your customers, and make sure that your entire team is trained on your brand mission, vision and values so that they speak as one voice to the customer.

Another important area to build brand loyalty for your customer is to recognize who they are and personalize their brand experience as much as you can. Today’s technology creates an expectation for customers that you will know who they are when they call, be able to identify their interests in email and acknowledge their past purchases when logged into your website. Depending on your industry and offerings there will be some variance here, but the important concept to remember is that it’s OK to recognize them for who they are, and you can create a better brand experience for them if you leverage the data you know about them to remove friction from their interaction with your brand. Of course, keep in mind privacy concerns and only utilize the data that your customers have provided, e.g. using surveys or past purchases to suggest similar products are fine, however using third party cookies to suggest products may be considered intrusive or even creepy. 

Finally, ongoing open lines of communication with your customers can be one of the most effective ways to build loyalty. Showing your customers that you are there for them in all aspects of their brand experience, from before the purchase through the longterm after the deal has closed, shows loyalty to their needs and a commitment to their satisfaction. This can be as simple as ongoing surveys, customer service automated check-ins by email, or just a simple note at their purchase anniversary or at a holiday to remind them that you know they exist and appreciate their business. These small gestures go a long way in building a relationship with your customers that is beyond the transaction. 

How To Measure Success

Once you’re dedicated to building loyalty with your customers, it’s important to put some measurement systems in place to help your program see success. While traditional methods like collecting Net Promoter Scores are very useful, there are also simpler methods that can provide solid performance measurement opportunities. 

Smaller organizations tend to benefit well from qualitative feedback from customers. Whether you use an automated customer feedback survey, run regular customer interviews or periodically implement focus groups for new offerings, the in-depth answers you receive from these types of measurement systems provide an understanding of how customers perceive your brand. When you can see your brand through their eyes, you gain direct insight into where you can meet their needs better, or adjust any inconsistencies between touchpoints. 

Implementing a system to track customer lifetime value (CLV) can also provide valuable data on the levels of customer loyalty and advocacy achieved during a particular period. While this doesn’t work for every brand, if your organization offers something that has opportunities for repeat purchases or ongoing service relationships, the CLV helps you see if you are meeting the potential for your brand, and identify those customers who could provide qualitative feedback to improve your programs. 

It’s All About The Customer

If you’re ready to move beyond the transactional relationships that are short lived and expensive to acquire, it’s time to look at how you can build customer loyalty into your organization’s DNA. Now is the time to create a base of more-than-satisfied-customers who are passionate advocates that will help take your brand to the next level. By building genuine connections with these customers, you will not only gain additional opportunities from them and their networks, you’ll likely learn a few things that will elevate your offerings for everyone who interacts with your brand. 

Do you need to take your brand to the next level? We have more than two decades of experience in creating, building and elevating brands to reach their maximum potential. Contact us today for a free discovery call to see how we can help you create loyal customers that will grow your brand and reach.