How To Build Strong Brand Loyalty That Lasts For Years

Todd Kunsman

Marketing Team Lead

14 minute read

Brand Loyalty.

How many of your employees are already on social?

Building brand loyalty is one of the best ways to retain customers, attract new customers, and generate fans of your organization for years. 

When you provide customers and audiences with unique personalized experiences, that in-turn will create ambassadors and raving fans who remember those interactions for a long time.

And those fans also continue to contribute to brand awareness and help create more revenue for your organization. 

Although every company wants to create brand loyalty, it’s not always a simple task. It can take years to build up, but in a second can come crashing down with one wrong move. But there are numerous things you can do in your marketing strategy to help create loyal fans of your company. 

 

What Does Brand Loyalty Mean? 

Brand loyalty is when someone favors a particular brand over others and sticks with the product or service for a long time. These consumers are no longer influenced by marketing as much as they have grown to trust your brand and the quality that is delivered over competitors. 

 

Why is Brand Loyalty Important? 

  • Drives more revenue and repeat customers
  • Increases word of mouth marketing
  • Creates brand advocates
  • Increases social reach 
  • Improves company market share

What Drives Brand Loyalty? 

Typically brand loyalty occurs when a customer continually purchases or recommends your product or service, over a competitor. And the best way to retain loyalty is by creating great products and services, providing superior customer support, and giving exclusives to customers.  

However, brand loyalty can continually be built through empathy, personalization, social media, and quality educational material that improves your target audience’s overall experience and education.

 

Brand Loyalty Statistics

There are plenty of statistics and data around brand loyalty, but here are a few to keep in mind when it comes to your organization. 

  • 82% of customers feel more positive about a brand after engaging with personalized content. (Demand Metric)
  • 54% of customers will stop shopping with a brand if it doesn’t provide engaging content or relevant coupons. (Fundera)
  • 77% of customers have maintained loyal relationships with their preferred companies for 10 or more years. (InMoment)
  • 80% of customers gradually gained loyalty for a brand over time, due to experiences with excellent products, service, reviews, advice, etc. (InMoment)
  • Customers with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will recommend the company at a rate of 71%, rather than the average rate of 45%. (Motista)
  • 81% of customers trust recommendations from family and friends over those from companies. (HubSpot Research)
  •  55.3% of consumers are brand loyal because they love the product, and poor product quality is the number one reason why a brand would lose a loyal customer. (Yotpo)

How to Build and Improve Brand Loyalty

Building brand loyalty is not something that happens overnight, but the consistent efforts by your organization and marketing team can begin making immediate impacts. But without a superior product or service, your brand image and marketing can only do so much. 

In order to build and improve brand loyalty, your company has to be willing to continue to work on it and follow some of these tips.  

Let’s go in-depth on some of the best ways to build brand loyalty that lasts.

 

1. Improve Your Products or Services

While your company may offer products or services, there can always be areas to improve and increase the value for your customers. Your company should not tinker with areas for the sake of doing so but should have a purpose. 

For example, while Coca-Cola may have perfected their recipe for their regular coke product, it doesn’t mean they haven’t improved and worked on other products or promotions in their long history. 

Even with our own product at EveryoneSocial, while it is easy to use, there are things we continually do to improve the product and enable features that make our customers’ lives better. Needs change and technologies improve, which means we also need to evolve, too. 

 

2. Perfect Customer Service

If you want long-lasting brand loyalty, your customer service game has to be next-level.

That’s why 76% of support teams offer customer support outside of business hours, according to a Hiver survey.

But the goal of your company should be aiming to be customer-centric, as the revenue and continued sales depend on it. Your customers are the ones writing you checks, leaving reviews, sharing on social media, and telling their colleagues and friends about your product or services. 

The customer service efforts are really done everywhere in your organization — not just your team that is dedicated to customer service. 

You have your social media marketers who will answer and engage customers, executives who are the leaders of the company, employees from other teams that engage with others, etc. It’s why our team offers so much customer support, training, business reviews, on-going implementation, and more — without our awesome customers, EveryoneSocial doesn’t exist. 

It’s another reason why we have customers who bring on our product to new companies when they transition to different roles. We value our professional relationships with customers, the feedback, and ensure they are the heroes when they use our product and drive real results for their company.

 

3. Harness Brand Voice and Company Values

Finding your brand voice helps keep everything consistent, but also memorable. You want audiences to not only connect with your brand but also feel identifiable and relatable.

This entails having the same brand voice across social channels, content, visuals like ads or videos, the company website, and how employees talk about the company. 

Using strong storytelling and emotions can help your brand connect better with consumers and employees.

Think about some of the most iconic brands today (like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks). Each you’ll find has great storytelling and a brand voice people identify with. 

Besides brand voice, your organization should clearly define company values. But not only define them but live and breathe them every day.

Your company values reflect your business beliefs, principles, and decisions that define who your company is. This will influence employees, future hires, and relationships with customers, stakeholders, and business partners.

 

4. Build Brand Ambassador Programs

If you have not heard about the power of brand ambassador programs, then you are missing out! But it’s never too late to get started and can impact brand loyalty and awareness, 

A brand ambassador program is a type of social marketing strategy that utilizes your company message, content, and particular influencers to improve areas of the business like sales, brand recognition, and corporate reputation.

The overall goal of a program like this is to build relationships and partnerships with people who genuinely like your content, company, and product or services”

You can create programs around customers (customer advocacy) and employees (employee advocacy). It’s a way to get the people that matter most to your organization excited about the brand, content, rewards, and more. 

For customers, it’s a great way to build rewards and loyalty programs that offer customers discounts, sales, and opportunities to connect with your brand. 

For employees, it helps build an internal community and gets everyone involved in the company they work for with content, news, and more. Building brand loyalty internally is just as important to your business.

Plus, it encourages employees to share and distribute content to their social networks. Creating more trust in your brand and getting the word out to employees’ social networks. 

Related: Learn how Cloudera activated an employee advocacy program to increase employee engagement, for sales enablement, and increase brand awareness. Read the customer story here

5. Master the Art of Consistency 

I already alluded to the value of consistency when I wrote about brand voice above, but it’s important enough to live as its own step. 

Merriam-Webster defines Consistency as:

The quality or fact of staying the same at different times especially: the quality or fact of being good each time.

So why does this matter to building brand loyalty? Well, when your company delivers and focuses on consistency across products, services, customer support, and content — people become raving fans.

Audiences and consumers become accustomed to your quality and over time, they trust your brand even more.

The challenge is ensuring your company and teams continue to deliver in every way possible. As if the consistency becomes lost, gradually you can lose loyal customers and competitors can take more market share. 

 

Brand Loyalty Examples

While you certainly have examples of brands that have built some seriously loyal customers and employees, here are some additional examples.

Study these brands as you look to build brand loyalty in your organization and figure out how to improve your results. 

 

Apple

Naturally, I have to include Apple. It’s hard to ignore the power of their branding and how loyal Apple customers are to their products. The company has always focused on the customer and getting feedback to create better products. 

 
Apple's Instagram bio.


And they have creative marketing, which gets their consumers involved like their #ShotOniPhone campaign.

 

The Coca-Cola Company

Another company with incredible brand loyalty is Coca-Cola. The company has a defined voice, mission, and company values that have continued to connect with people around the world for decades. 

The company also built a community through the “Share a Coke” campaign, and they even had customized cans with names on them, too. They built a community where everyone is welcome.

 
Coca-Cola's LinkedIn Post.


Amazon 

You’d have to be living in a completely remote world to not know the e-commerce juggernaut, Amazon. And their brand has become widely recognized for putting so much power on customers and the service they provide. 

The company has leadership qualities on its website and the first principle is “Customer Obsession.” 

 
Amazon leadership principles.


The Motley Fool

The Motley Fool, a private financial and investing advice company, has been around since the early 90s. While investing and finances can sometimes be boring or not that exciting, The Motley Fool has built a brand of fun and sometimes bit over-the-top marketing. 

Their about page includes this sentence right at the top:

At The Motley Fool, we take our purpose seriously, but that doesn’t mean we take ourselves too seriously.”

The Motley Fool LinkedIn post.

As you were reading these examples, I’m sure these or a few other brands came to mind that you are loyal to.

What made you loyal to them? What are they doing well that has you as a supporter? Those types of questions can help guide your organization in the right direction. 


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