If you want build brand love, you need to take action every day to provide value to your customers.
And these days, that goes beyond just delivering what was ordered.
What you do matters much more than what you say or think.
You need to invite them in, ask them how you can better serve them, and then over deliver. You are looking to move them from being a customer to being an advocate. It’s okay to ask for referrals if you’ve taken a genuine interest in a customer and delivered them value.
And word-of-mouth is so much easier these days with social media and the Internet, that you have to go the extra mile to stay relevant. Otherwise, some new technology will replace you, or some bad review will hurt your reputation, or you simply will not keep up with the customers expectation and another hungry company will.
There are some great ways to brainstorm new ideas to tap into brand love. All of them center around making your products/services better for your customers.
Ask yourself and your team these questions:
- What would make your product 10x better? Now what would make it 100x better?
- If you could only be truly great at one thing what would it be?
- What’s the one thing you could change today to immediately make your product better?
- What would make a customer want to buy twice as many? How about 10x as many?
- What’s the best thing a customer could tell their friends about you? Why would they do that?
You have to think about your product or service as something that has the opportunity to massively improve.
If you only think in terms of small changes, you’ll never stay ahead of the competition. And more importantly, you’re customers won’t notice the difference.
If you want to tap into that brand love, you have to find ways to create experiences that are both extraordinary, and far better than the expectation.
Once you’ve found some great product improvements and experiences. You can start to think about your customer relationship. You need to make sure the customers know about these special attributes and give them a chance to share the story.
Some specific practices can help you on your way for this step.
Every business needs a CRM, a customer relationship management tool that manages your customer contact information and communication.
It collects your customer information, and provides opportunities for automated quick responses, newsletter updates on your business, prompts for feedback, collects survey data, promotes new services, and saves you from a ton of email clutter in the process. A couple of the big ones are Hubspot and Active Campaign, but you can Google it and see what works for you.
Every business needs to collect, evaluate and understand its sales data.
You know which products and services are the most popular. You know what times of day, week, month or year, you are the busiest. You know where you are having trouble with sales.
Use that data to create promotions and experiences that your customer will care about. Encourage them with a cold beverage on a hot day. Provide live music or entertainment during hours where it makes sense. Hire more staff or implement technology solutions when you consistent have long lines. Create seasonal products that get people excited.
There are so many ways to be timely, relevant, and engaging that your customers will notice. You just have to take the time to put all this information down on paper, so you can build out a strategy to implement it all. And that may seem daunting, but there are plenty of great consultants (like me of course!) out there that can help you get organized.
That’s the architecture of the plan; Brand Truth, Brand Image, Brand Love.
There are many ways to approach building a brand. I hope this is useful to those businesses that are having trouble finding the time to hone in on a strategy.
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