Having a community of loyal followers for your brand can do wonders, especially when it comes to increasing your business sales and brand awareness. The saying goes that for a business to be truly successful in launching any of its products or services, all it takes is to have 1,000 true fans who will follow your brand and support whatever you are introducing to them.

Gaining loyal followers for your brand is easier than you think. It all depends on how you communicate with your potential customers about your business and brand. Before anyone starts following you, they need to know – “Why they should be following you?” “What information are you going to reveal to them when they follow you?” “What sort of products and services are you going to introduce to them?” and “How you are going to make their lives better”.

The way you answer these questions can be subtle or direct. Of course, it depends on the tone of voice that you wish to portray for your business and brand. And that’s entirely up to you…

But to increase your success rate in getting more loyal followers for your brand, here are some proven strategies that you can use:-

Stay Connected With Current & Potential Customers

To encourage more people to become your followers, you need to start interacting with them.

You can always conduct surveys to get their feedback and opinions about your products or services. You may also wish to do this before organising any social media competitions so that they will be a hit!

And with the help of social media, all you need to do is pose interesting questions related to your industry or business and wait for people to respond to your questions. And when people respond to your questions, they become active listeners and can start to engage with your brand.

Through social media, you now have the opportunity to reply directly with your current and potential customers at a much personal level compared to years ago.

Social listening tools also make it possible for you to get information about what people are saying about your brand. With this, you can respond appropriately to those comments to boost the reputation of your brand.

When replying to people’s comments and feedback about your business, send them a personalised message to let them know you care about their opinions.

By doing this, they will feel valued by you and will likely want to know about your business and brand more. So they will start following your brand.

Show Your Personality

No matter how you look or what your personality is, always remember that you’ll be amazing to other people!

People love connecting with other humans. So if your brand doesn’t have a face, people will not be likely to follow it. So try as much as possible to show your face to your customers and potential customers. It can be an image of yourself or a video of you speaking…Anything that will let people know that they are not interacting with a ‘wall’.

And try to create content yourself so that it genuinely comes from you and is based on your opinions.

Do not be afraid to express and show the world what you really are. You need to let them know the real you and connect with your personality.

You will attract loyal followers who resonate with what you have to say and can connect with your unique personality.

You can show your face in your social media covers, advertisements and marketing materials. The opportunities are endless so be proud of yourself and let your personality shine and help you gain more followers!

Use Email Marketing To Stay Memorable

Most people find out about a brand by accident because they were searching for solutions for their problems. Then find some free content, consume the content and forget about the brand.

So how do you avoid this from happening? One of the ways is by using email marketing.

By collecting a list of email subscribers for your business, you will get to interact with your subscribers through email so that your brand will be always on their minds.

However, you need to use your email list wisely, or else you will get massive unsubscribes!

To get more open rates and engagement for your email campaigns, you need to create emails that are compelling enough so that people will open and read them.

You can also throw in some bonuses for your email subscribers such as by giving coupons, discount vouchers or special members discount to your subscribers so that they will feel encouraged to try your products and services.

Be Consistent In What You Stand For

While showing your personality to your target audience, you would also want to convey a message to them that tells them about your values and what you stand for.

People are inclined to follow brands who have values that are aligned with what they believe. So by communicating the values that you stand up for, you are going to attract more loyal followers.

For instance, if you’re a nature-loving type of person, you would want to ensure that the way you run your business is eco-friendly. Be consistent in what you believe in and convey the message to your audience that you are doing your best to preserve nature.

It’s unwise to strongly uphold a value one day and before you know it, go against that value. For instance, if you are in support of sponsored blog posts, don’t just come up with an article or any sort of content that condemns working with sponsors.

Because when you do this, your audience will stop believing in you and your brand. They will think that whatever you say is just mere ‘talk’ and you don’t mean what you say.

So the moral of the story is – always be consistent in showcasing your values and beliefs.

Show Appreciation By Using User-Generated Content

Once you start getting followers for your brand, you’ll notice that some followers are the type who love to contribute direct and indirect content for your business and community.

For instance, whenever you do a social media or blog post, you might get people commenting on your content. It may be a form of conversation to you, a suggestion or a compliment for the content that you have shared.

These are what we called user-generated content. When you use user-generated content as inspiration for creating your upcoming content, products or services and acknowledge where the inspiration came from, your followers who contributed the content will feel appreciated.

And when this happens, these followers will continue to follow your brand and turn into loyal followers!

Always strive to have an active community of followers who are ready to share insights and comments for your business and brand.

To encourage more user-generated content you can run competitions too.

Constantly Provide Value

As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons people will follow you is because they are interested in the information that you are providing to them. To make them follow you, you must constantly share meaningful content with them that they can use.

For instance, you can share information, valuable resources and access to workshops that they can obtain to grow in a specific area that they are interested in.

There are multiple ways you can share your valuable content. You can share your knowledge and skills through blog posts, YouTube videos, podcast sessions or any other sort of methods that you feel most comfortable with.

But one thing to take into consideration is where is your target audience hanging out? That’s a research that you will need to do. And this will determine the method/s of sharing your valuable content.

Once you found this out, continuously provide value to them through the method/s that you have chosen.

Surprise Them By Introducing New Things

Although it’s good to ask your followers what they want, sometimes what they want is not what they need.

So when getting requests of what they want, use these requests to inspire your next content but at the same time, think of additional information that you can provide to go above and beyond to help your followers.

For instance, you can provide a blog post on a specific topic and at the same time suggest other relevant resources, tools or reading materials that your readers can go to for developing their skills in a specific area of interest.

Reward Them For Following You

A really important thing you may also want to consider is having a rewards program for your followers.

For instance, once they have signed up as your active email subscribers, you can give them access to exclusive deals such as special discounts, early access to your pre-launches, referral commissions, free samples or any other rewards that you can think of to make them happy.

When you reward them for becoming your followers, it will make them feel special. And when they feel special, this will make them want to become your loyal followers.

Ready To Map A Solid Plan For Getting Loyal Followers?

Now that you know the different strategies to get loyal followers for your brand, let me ask you a question, – “Do you have a solid plan to get more loyal followers for your brand?’

Because without a solid strategy, you will not be able to get a clear idea about what are the steps you need to take to start growing your followers. When you do not know what to do, you’ll waste time and effort doing stuff that won’t contribute towards helping you to gain more followers.

If you need assistance in mapping out a content marketing strategy to help you gain more loyal followers through your blog and/or email campaigns, I’m here for you. I provide copywriting services for coaches, consultants and trainers to help them generate more leads and conversions through non-salesy copy that sells.

To learn more about my copywriting services, click here.

I hope that this article will be able to give you some insights on how you can get more loyal followers for your brand. Followed any of these strategies and found them helpful? Or do you have other strategies to share? I’d love to hear in the comments section below!

Resources:
https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/7-ways-to-build-a-loyal-customer-following.html
https://heartifb.com/10-ways-to-build-an-insanely-loyal-following/
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-effective-way-to-build-a-loyal-following
https://www.business2community.com/loyalty-marketing/how-to-build-brand-loyalty-on-instagram-02093963
https://neilpatel.com/blog/establishing-audience-loyalty/
https://medium.com/@jordanaspen/how-im-building-a-loyal-following-81c619e6a932
https://coschedule.com/blog/loyal-social-media-followers/