Posted by Are you loyal to any brands? Do you go shopping, even if they’re located on the other end of the town? Do you choose these particular brands even if they’re expensive?
What makes you loyal to some brands or products despite them being more expensive or harder to find? Why do we go out of our way to support our favorite brands?
We will explore this and more questions in the post below.
Building brand loyalty
Let’s start by understanding how we can create a positive emotional sentiment around your brand. It’s a big question and many marketers have tried to growth-hack the idea. Something that differentiates brands that inspire loyalty is this: They make the emotional engagement a priority.
Here’s how to make that possible:
Build an emotional connection with your customer
Brand loyalty is all about emotion. What’s emotion? Emotion is how your brand makes someone feel. It’s about the experience you can create for them, the pleasure the product can provide, the quality of service, and ultimately how they feel when engaging with your brand.
Content marketing is an effective strategy to build this emotional connection. High-quality targeted content lets you build a rapport with customers.
Ways to build brand loyalty
Use these three ways to build brand loyalty:
- Engage with in-depth educational content. Such content helps build trust and forges an emotional connection especially for industries with complex products like SaaS.
- Build a community of customers through the content platform. It is a way for customers to engage with each other so they can share thoughts.
- Reward customers for engaging with the content through points, services, and special invites
As a business, you can benefit from loyalty, customer passion, and commitment toward your business. Improving customer experience can help win loyalty and most businesses are calling it a priority.
Nearly 46% of businesses call customer experience a top priority in the next five years.
What’s content marketing?
Content marketing is any strategy focused on creating valuable content in the form of content that can be posted to social media, infographics, and videos in front of a targeted audience online.
As a business, content marketing is your best way to gain credibility and improve brand awareness. Businesses see it as a way to improve their customer base to engage and attract the attention of their target audience.
Creating and sharing content can both improve and sustain customer loyalty. Engagement is when someone shares your content, comments on it, or likes it on social media. This amplifies the reach of your content.
The question is how exactly does content improve customer loyalty? To answer the question, you should know how to transform content into something that can help build customer loyalty.
1. Start with your target audience
You can only build a good relationship with someone if you know and understand them well. The same is true for your target market. If you want to build a strong relationship with customers, you must lead the way by getting to know them well. Learn what makes them click and what their needs, desires, and wants are.
Understanding their behavior and then needs helps you create value by focusing the content on information they’re going to value. This makes it possible to capture their attention and get them to act.
Start by understanding the nature of your target audience through an audience persona and then build more personas for different segments of your target audience. The personas can define your content marketing so that it’s going to be easy for you to create valuable and engaging content from scratch. You already have a lot of information with you to build these personas. Use that.
Building a person often boils down to collecting and analyzing information around your target market.
Demographic and geographic characteristics, such as:
- Geographic location
- Age
- Gender
- Race
- Education
- Religion
- Marital status
- Income
- Profession
- Family details
Psychographic Characteristics
- Hobbies and lifestyle
- Goals
- Behaviors
- Interests
- Challenges
- Likes
- Dislikes
Once you have determined the buyer persona all that remains is aligning the content marketing objective with the information you gathered about each persona and using that to create content specific to that persona.
2. Strive to be unique
Most businesses use content marketing. In fact, 78% of CMOs feel that content marketing is key to success. Your competition is using content as a tool to build customer loyalty.
Being honest in your content is one strategy that helps you become successful. Authenticity attracts loyalty. A smart audience can differentiate valuable content from the poorly written content. Valuable content strives to be authentic and is backed by research.
To break through to your audience, engage with a tone that’s distinct to your brand.
For instance, consumer brands do well with a casual or funny tone. Once the tone is decided, stick with it. You stand out that way.
Don’t imagine that you need to do all the hard work on your own. Here are a few tips to outsource content marketing effectively.
3. Publish quality content consistently
Building an audience is long, slow as well as challenging. You cannot attain your goals in a few days or weeks of trying. The truth is on the web, there’s already plenty of content that’s similar to what you’re trying to publish. There are also content giants who have been building content over several years contributing to their authority. Years of being on the content flywheel have massively improved their SEO. To develop a loyal audience you need to stick with content marketing.
One strategy that has always worked for me is this: Create and publish more and more valuable content to get growth, generate visitors, page views, and followers. Customers tend to trust brands that regularly create new content. Even better, if you produce customized content.
Ideally, use a content calendar. A content calendar makes it super-easy for you to stay on top of things.
I think having a blog is a great strategy for you to start using. Blogging is a great way to show up in front of your audience again and again. Regularly publishing fresh content helps you shore up great rankings on search engines. Content helps you build trust.
You’re not limited to publishing blog content. Publish ebooks, guides, demos, podcasts, videos, and vlogs. Choose whichever method your target audience will resonate most with you.
That way they’re more likely to engage with your brand
The overwhelming majority- around 92% of brands create blog posts. 66% of brands reach out to customers with emails.
Always involve customer service teams, and other front-office teams to brainstorm content ideas. They understand customers’ pain points better. They know about the questions customers have and their reservations about your brand better than most people.
Provide real value and do that consistently to connect with customers on a deeper level.
They’re way more likely to remember that, admire you, and trust you.
What’s the future of content marketing strategy?
- Giving customers free and exclusive content that helps them learn more about your market or service can help you position your brand way ahead of competitors and help them become more loyal towards you.
- If you’re a company selling subscriptions for a SaaS tool you can offer free content through your blog, through the podcast, through newsletters, or a YouTube channel.
- To get more value offer access to them with an online resources center through new videos and through more emails.
Final words: The power of customer retention marketing
Traditionally, businesses used word of mouth as one of the most effective ways to share insights with a large audience. It’s one of the most trusted channels today to get the word out about your brand.
The buyer’s journey has three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision making.
The end goal isn’t to make a sale. It is to create loyal and long-term customers. Retention and advocacy are at the bottom of the sales funnel. But they should be at the top.
Be authentic, personal, and honest with bold statements. By creating and publishing new content to your site and to social media platforms you will build trust with your audience. You will get an army of loyal customer advocates.