Entrepreneurship is the game of pushing the right buttons at the right time. Owing to the fact that startups are risky maneuvers, a wise entrepreneur will play all his cards smartly. This matters a lot especially when your startups require a strong customer base to survive, which is directly proportional to the proficiency of your marketing campaigns. This is the point where you start pouring loads of investment in marketing and advertising, sometimes at the risk of compromising the quality, quantity, or services.
Running my digital marketing agency for years, I have realized that customers can easily be used as a marketing tool. The best way to advertise your brand is to let your customers do it for you. But for this marketing strategy to work more effectively you need to build a strong corporate identity, you need to give reasons to your customers to stay loyal to your brand.
What is Brand Evangelism?
We all have this strange urge to share our buying experiences with others. Brand Evangelism is the finest form of dedication where a customer becomes an ardent follower and a brand’s advocate. Whether it’s a good book or a movie or, a great meal, the customer always likes to share company’s motives and becomes involved in every way possible to promote the brand.
However getting your customers to this point is not an easy job. Here are five ways to make sure that your pool of brand evangelists is constantly rising.
Create a Distinction
Let’s first dissect “I need to buy moments”. What allows you to select one T-shirt brand over another, or over any generic product? The primary reason for why popular brands always succeed in making a cut through customers’ mind is because they create a difference. Being odd here is the key; your brand must stand out among your competitors. That does not mean of making enemies out of your competitors. Your enterprise must define its principles and should depict themselves differently from its competitors or rivals. Make yourself different so that the average consumer can figure out the difference noticeable and falls to try your products or services.
Create a community to Create Value
This is the age where customers are more connected and empowered than ever. An active customer community builds the trust and offers customers a platform to interact and support each other. A sophisticated customer community is a stage where the consumer goes candid in exchanging opinions, sharing experiences and unwinds queries about your products and services. A strong customer community can also help customers achieve personal and professional growth. It provides you an opportunity to encourage event attendance, enable your customers to learn tips from one another and have their questions answered by fellow customers. By giving the customers a chance to say on a product or service you can show them that you are interested in their success. It gives them a deeper connection with the company and creates a high-level engagement with current and future customers. Creating a customer community might appear to be a daunting task, but these days the community can be online. This increases preservation rate and overall profitability.
Give Out Individual Attention
As a customer, we all want to grab the seller’s attention. It makes up feel important and gives us the sense that our opinion matters. While several tools and applications are available, that can keep most customers engaged, but nobody likes to interact with robots. We, humans, are emotional beings and this is why a supports team must be at your disposal round the clock, to assign any one of them to a customer that needs individual attention to purchase your products. It may sound a bit tricky business, but social media channels have made it a lot easier. For the ease of customers, several login tools are available through which customers can sign up to your eCommerce website without any hassle and you can easily reach them out on individual levels and respond them with full attention.
Value Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is classified as a marketing term because it is a source that helps marketers as well as the business owners with the insight that they can utilize to improve their activities, products, or overall customer experience. Acquiring and generating feedback from customers can be tricky but is the most important skill for abusiness builder. It helps your company at all levels of brand building and management. Ignoring customer feedback harms like a double-edged sword. It not only deprives you of the valuable information that you can incorporate to create a better customer experience but also adversely affects your company’s image between customers and the community.
Collect and listen carefully to the feedback about your brand, and sometimes you may encounter useful pieces of information that can be implementable for improving sales. It is also the best way of gauging customer satisfaction, collecting factual data that can be used to making better business decisions, and can also be used to identifying brand advocates.
Offering Rewards and Loyalty Points
Getting new customers onboard is the key to business success, but keeping existing customers is even more important and crucial. Theirs is no doubt that shopper loyalty has huge benefits when it comes to keeping the current customers intact. Especially when your clients are unhappy about something, you can offer them small rewards or loyalty points as a gesture of goodwill. Rewarding is a perfect tool that will quickly help you to win back your loyal shopper so that he keeps on advocating your brand.
Final Thoughts
Well, they say “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Similarly earning the loyalty of customers is not an overnight job. It requires patience and extensive hard work over a period of time. Although these five practices may not guarantee 100% results as they can vary from product to product, certainly have been tried tested and approved by veterans in the field. So I recommend you to put your maximum efforts in all the practices that improve brand loyalty and turn your customers into a marketing tool.