Create a Lasting Impression: Brand Loyalty

Building a successful online business is highly dependent on how well you grow your brand. Just like any other business, an eCommerce business needs customers to thrive. Attracting and retaining customers is much easier when you have a strong, recognizable brand. 

An online business and brand are challenging to build. It requires some serious effort to create a suitable product line, a powerful marketing strategy to accompany it, and a genuine customer service team, just to name a few. But when your business is customer-centric and rooted in a respected brand, it’s got the potential to rise to the top in its market. 

Let’s look at how to create a lasting impression with your brand and, in turn, incite brand loyalty with your target audience.

Understand Brand Loyalty 

What is brand loyalty? A simple definition is when a customer consistently chooses to buy your brand over your competitors. Thus, brand loyalty is all about the way your customers perceive your brand. 

In other words, they’re loyal because they see your brand as one that is positive, providing high-quality products/services and a customer experience that they can’t find anywhere else. This keeps them coming back for more. It can also result in customers deepening their relationship with you by using new products/services, engaging with your brand more on social media, attending customer-related events, and so forth. 

With a better understanding of brand loyalty, you can move forward with making it a priority in your business. Start by solidifying your brand’s story.  

Solidify Your Brand’s Story 

Your brand story is the narrative you tell about your brand that encompasses the facts about your business and why it was built, as well as the feelings you want your brand to evoke in others’ Lasting Impression. 

Without a solid brand story, consumers don’t have a foundation to build brand loyalty. Likewise, it would be difficult for anyone to be loyal to a brand that doesn’t have any meaning or direction behind it. 

So, take the time to define your brand’s story. Explore your answers to the following questions to ensure your brand’s story is intact: 

• What is your mission?
• Why did you start your business?
• What is your background as the owner?
• What are your brand’s core values?
• What products/services does your business offer?
• How do those products/services help your customers thrive?
• What is your brand’s personality?
• What makes you different from your competition?

After solidifying your brand’s story, conduct some thorough target audience research. 

Lasting Impression Dive Deep into Your Target Audience 

If you don’t know your target audience, you can’t build a brand that they want to be loyal to. Instead, you must dive deep into your target audience’s demographics, behaviors, feelings, motivations, and so forth to build a brand that resonates with them.   

Answer the following questions about your target audience to have a better chance at creating a lasting impression on them with your brand: 

• What is your target audience’s demographic information? For example, age, income level, education level, job title, race, where they’re located, and if they’re a homeowner. 
• What brands do they engage with that offer similar products/services?
• What motivates them to make a purchase?
• What are their pain points? What challenges are they facing today?
• How do they consume content?
• What are their favorite social media platforms?
• What other digital channels do they engage with?
• What motivates them to be loyal to a brand?
• What are their unique buying behaviors?

As you define and get to know your target audience, take it a step further and create buyer personas for your ideal customers. 

Lasting Impression Create Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional character you create that represents someone likely to visit your site, purchase, and form a long-term relationship with your brand. 

You can create better brand loyalty for Lasting Impression when you speak directly to your ideal customers and create an emotional connection with them. The best way to do this is to create buyer personas to reference when deciding how to grow your brand. 

Your buyer personas should include:

• A name 
• Demographic details
• Personal and professional interests 
• Specific behavioral traits
• Their concerns, challenges, and pain points
• Why and how they’re driven to your products/services
• What a long-term customer relationship would look like
• Their emotional triggers 
• Who are their role models?
• What are their aspirations?
• What are their abilities and talents?

Also, ensure you’re putting in just as much effort studying your competitors. 

Take Notes on Your Biggest Competitors 

Your biggest competitors present a huge opportunity to learn about how to create brand loyalty within your industry and among your target audience. 

Here are a few things you should take notes on when it comes to your competitors: 

• Is their target audience the same as yours, or does it differ slightly?
• How are they connecting with their target audience?
• What marketing techniques and channels are they using and not using?
• What are they doing and offering that you aren’t?
• What gaps can you fill for their target audience?
• How do they connect their online presence with their offline presence?
• Are they providing a consistent brand experience? 
• How are they approaching content?

After you’ve immersed yourself in the research phase, start constructing your plan for building brand awareness and recognition, beginning with your choice of platforms and marketing channels. 

Choose Your Platforms and Marketing Channels Wisely 

What platforms and marketing channels will you use to grow your brand? Take your time answering this question, as you want to ensure that those you choose are best for your target audience and your brand goals. 

Examples of platforms and marketing channels to choose from are: 

• Email marketing 
• Website
• Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin
• Video marketing 
• SEO 
• Referral marketing
• Influencer marketing 
• Paid advertising 
• Direct mail 
• In-person and virtual events 
• Brick-and-mortar location 

Your marketing channels and platforms are likely to include digital choices, so you must spend time establishing an online presence. 

Establish an Online Presence 

The world is moving toward technology more and more. So, an online presence for your brand is required if you want to deepen brand loyalty with your current and potential customers. 

Explore the digital platforms you’ve chosen above and learn how to navigate them effectively. Study how you can leverage them to further your connection with your target audience. Learn how they use these platforms so that you can implement the functions they use in the way you display your brand online. 

In addition, ensure you create an exceptional user experience on your website to further your digital presence. 

Create an Exceptional User Experience 

The way you design your website is crucial to igniting brand loyalty. Although many people may be introduced to your brand on other platforms like social media or email, they’ll eventually end up on your website to learn more, and hopefully, make a purchase. 

With that being said, the way you design your website should be all about the user. Your user experience must be seamless, providing visitors with a site full of helpful content that is easy to navigate and a pleasure to engage with. With an exceptional user experience, customers are more likely to revisit your site and become loyal to your brand over time. 

At the very least, ensure your site:

• Is scannable
• Is full of helpful content 
• Has seamless navigation
• Concentrates on what users want 
• Has a simple purchasing process 
• Displays customer reviews prominently 
• Has your contact information visible
• Directs users to your other platforms  

Additionally, don’t spend all of your time and effort on your online presence. Build your offline presence as well. 

Don’t Neglect Your Brand’s Offline Presence 

Solid brands have an offline and an online presence. They’re committed to serving all people within their target audience, which means those who don’t spend much time online. So, ensure you’re spending adequate time building your brand’s offline presence. 

You don’t necessarily have to open a brick-and-mortar location, but you can: 

• Host in-person events 
• Implement direct mail campaigns 
• Utilize billboards and other forms of offline marketing 
• Try pop-up shops and shows 
• Create unique business cards, flyers, and posters 
• Design brand merch 

With your online and offline presence, high-quality content is a must if you want to incite brand loyalty. 

High-Quality Content Only 

We’re living in a world that’s saturated with information. There is so much content to consume that you must do all you can to stand out so that your ideal customers actually consume your content and choose it over your competitors. 

The best way to stand out is to hold yourself to a high standard for the content you create and produce. Don’t just write words on a blank page and call it a day. Instead, include images, videos, and other visuals in the strategy. Create adaptive and interactive content that your audience can engage with. Spend time on the details in any piece of content. 

Brand loyalty also requires you to have personal connections with your target audience. Those personal connections are fast-tracked when you’re empathetic, understanding, and authentic with your customers. 

Empathy is Everything 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. If you can understand and share the feelings of your target audience, you can drive brand loyalty. 

Always ensure you present your brand positively and communicate with your customers with the same positivity. Even if you make mistakes and share those mistakes with your target audience, do it with grace and understanding of how your customers will feel.  

In addition to empathy, you also want to lean into personalization. 

Lean into Personalization

Experts define personalization as “ the process of catering to an individual’s needs and desires. In marketing, this means catering to your customer in particular.” Your brand must tailor its actions to the needs, desires, and behaviors of your customers.  

Learn as much as you can about your target audience, not just at the beginning of your business but throughout its lifetime. Your ideal customer’s life, needs, and wants will evolve, and that affects your personalization techniques. The last thing you want to do is personalize content with old information about your customer. It will turn them off and deter them from your brand in the future. So, ensure you’re keeping up with your customers. 

To lean into personalization effectively and learn as much as you can about your audience, business, and brand, you must use data analytics. 

Data Analytics is Your Friend 

If you aren’t using data analytics tools, you’re definitely three steps behind your biggest competition. There is only so much data you can collect and process manually. Manual data collection is time-consuming and ultimately takes you away from the other tasks that need your touch. 

Data analytics tools not only can collect and process vast sets of data, but they also can sift through the data and identify critical insights that can be used to inform your business and brand decisions moving forward. 

Google Analytics is an excellent tool to start with, but don’t be afraid to research additional data analytics tools that align with your brand loyalty goals. 

Another step in the direction of creating brand loyalty is focusing on brand consistency. 

Focus on Brand Consistency 

Simply put, brand consistency is vital if you want to incite brand loyalty. Brand consistency is when all of the materials you put have the same visual elements, customer experience standards, core values, and brand promise. They also possess a consistent brand voice, tone, and style recognizable no matter where someone interacts with your brand. 

Even something as simple as adding the same e-signature to all your emails, blog posts, website content, social media content, and so forth gives customers something they can expect whenever they encounter your brand. And that ultimately builds trust and enhances the customer experience enough to ignite brand loyalty. 

So, develop brand guidelines that you can hand out to all of your teams. These guidelines should detail what your brand is about and how you want it presented to the outside world. This will ensure no matter what content is produced and where it’s published, customers will know it’s coming from your brand because your core brand principles remain at the forefront.  

Conclusion 

You can absolutely create a lasting impression in your industry by focusing on building a solid brand that encourages your ideal customers to become loyal.

Ultimately, building your brand is never done. Continue to learn how to strengthen a brand and implement techniques like those above that support your brand awareness, recognition, and loyalty goals. 

Author Bio:-

Indiana Lee lives in the Northwest and has a passion for the environment and wellness. She draws her inspiration from nature and makes sure to explore the outdoors regularly with her two dogs. Indiana has experience in owning and operating her own business. Feel free to follow her on Twitter @indianalee3.

Features Image Source: Pixabay