Building a deep emotional connection with your customers is the foundation of a long-lasting relationship, and that’s why you should focus on your brand affinity.
If this is the first time you’ve heard about brand affinity, you might be asking yourself: “How can I do it?” Chances are, you’ve probably been doing it, at least a little bit, already without even knowing.
But let’s talk about what brand affinity truly is and how you can strengthen the connection between you and your customers, which will help you ensure the long-term success of your business.
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Brand affinity is a metric that shows how much people care about your brand. It encompasses all the positive emotions and feelings people have towards your business and whether or not they believe you share similar values and beliefs.
These are key to success when building long-lasting relationships with your customers and ensuring that they tell (and rave) about your products to their friends and encourage them to become customers too.
Together with brand awareness and loyalty, brand affinity ensures a solid emotional connection between you (a brand) and your customers.
Brand affinity has many important benefits when you actively cultivate it. These include:
Brand affinity might seem very similar to customer loyalty, but the two concepts contain a few key differences.
Brand affinity is best thought of as the alignment that a customer feels with your brand. The higher the affinity, the more they feel your brand:
For example, a high-tech college student who prefers slightly hipster technology and eco-conscious consumption might prefer Apple over Microsoft. They feel a higher brand affinity with the former as opposed to the latter.
Brand loyalty is different. It’s the personal loyalty or allegiance a consumer has to the brand. But it’s also a conscious choice. The higher a customer’s loyalty, the more dedicated they are to their chosen brand. In most cases, this results in more purchases, repeat subscriptions, etc.
To recap:
As you can see, brand loyalty often follows brand affinity but not vice versa. You can also increase brand loyalty through other means, like making a loyalty program. This is a key tip to remember to effectively build customer loyalty.
At first sight, you might be confused about how to measure the emotional connection customers have with your business.
Popular metrics like follower and subscriber numbers or website views indicate that people know your brand. But to measure how involved your customers are, you need to look at other metrics like:
Now that we know what is brand affinity, let’s look at key strategies to help you build it for the long-term success of your business.
1. Develop a personality for your brand
2. Know your customers inside and out
3. Foster a strong community
4. Excel at customer service
5. Create brand ambassadors
6. Utilize content marketing
Brand personality is crucial to helping you build an emotional connection with your customers. It encompasses a set of human characteristics that help consumers relate to your brand. Also, it helps your brand stand out in a crowd because your brand personality is unique to you. As a course creator, your brand is going to be very wrapped up in you, the educator because your students are choosing to take courses from you specifically.
Here are key elements to consider when creating your brand personality:
Once you establish a strong brand personality, attracting the right audience and building a strong emotional connection with them will be easier.
To build a relationship with your customers, you have to know who they are and what they like. Creating an ideal customer and identifying where your customers live, what they like, and how they shop will help you create content that resonates with them better.
Ask yourself these questions when trying to identify your target audience:
Once you know all the nitty gritty details about your customers, you’ll be able to tailor your brand’s personality and content to speak to them directly. You’ll also get an idea of what their pain points are and how you might be able to help solve those for them. As a result, you’ll see that your audience will become much more involved and emotionally connected to your business.
People are built for community and love a sense of belonging to something bigger. You can provide that to them by creating a community around your brand, where they can interact with your and other members. This is also essential if you’re offering a product like online courses, where you want your students to be able to connect with other people on similar learning journeys.
It will make them feel more appreciated and heard. Which, in turn, will help you build relationships and connections and create superfans who are loyal to your brand.
Ensure you’re engaging with your community and encourage them to engage with each other. If your customers make lifelong friends along the way, they’ll always remember your brand in a positive light, making the relationships stronger.
Even 90% of Americans look at the brand’s customer service before deciding whether they want to interact with the business or not. Excellent customer service is crucial for building a connection with your customers, so ensure you always provide the best experience. If you’re offering courses, then chances are, you’re the customer service. Making you the face of the business and the brand too.
Always be friendly and helpful, and ensure that the customer feels understood and leaves the conversation happy. Also, always address bad reviews in a positive, humble way and understand that most criticism is not personal, and most often, people just want to be heard and receive an apology for their inconvenience.
Word of mouth is still one of the most potent marketing strategies to get new customers. Ninty percent of people are more likely to trust brand recommendation, even if it comes from a stranger. Brand ambassadors are a way to get these recommendations for your business.
There are two ways to create brand ambassadors:
Both strategies are amazing to help you increase brand affinity. The implementation of either or both will depend on how you run your business and your budget. You might also see ambassadors referred to as affiliates, especially if you’re on the Teachable platform.
For the superfans of your brand, you might want to create a referral system or an affiliate program that allows them to earn something back in return for recommending your business to their social circle. Giving them some extra love will only deepen the bond and encourage positive associations they have with your brand, which in turn, increases brand affinity.
When working with influencers, you want to make sure that you choose people with similar values and beliefs. Influencers usually have engaged audiences with whom they have strong relationships, and their recommendations carry a lot of weight.
If you run strategic marketing campaigns with the right influencers, you can create long-lasting relationships that will keep bringing in new leads and loyal customers to your business.
Lastly, use content creation and marketing strategy to build stronger relationships with your customers. The main purpose of content is to provide value to your audience and potential customers. It helps them resonate with your brand and build trust, which is a key component in any relationship.
So, focus on creating high-quality, value-packed, relevant content that your audience finds helpful or inspirational. It can be blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and ebooks. Always use content repurposing to help you transform one piece of content into multiple pieces for different mediums and platforms. Consider giving away some of this content for free to show people just how valuable your paid content likely is.
Also, an amazing way to engage your customers and show them you appreciate them is by using user-generated content in your content strategy. User-generated content means reposting content that your customers share on social media.
Let’s answer some of the people’s most common questions about brand affinity.
Brand affinity is crucial for your business because it ensures that a customer chooses your brand over your competition when making a purchase.
Nowadays, consumers are savvy about the brands they choose to buy from and support. And they also have many options to choose from, no matter which industry it is. So, why would they choose you over someone else?
If you build a relationship with consumers based on shared values and beliefs and you work to ensure that consumers experience positive emotions when interacting with your brand, they’ll be more inclined to choose your brand.
Brand affinity describes the emotional connection between a brand and consumers. While brand preference is an indicator that consumers would choose your brand over any other, even if the other brand offers a better deal.
Brand affinity comes before brand preference and is a crucial component for your business to get to the place where a consumer prefers your brand over everyone else. Brand preference is also a broader concept that includes brand affinity, awareness, loyalty, brand equity, and engagement.
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