The Retail Brand Strategy You Need to Adapt to Grow Loyal Customers

3 min read

by Michael Deane

The most successful brands in retail have a strong and enduring relationship with their customer base. To grow loyal shoppers, first you need a recipe for a successful retail brand strategy.

Here are the key steps you need to take to develop your retail brand and earn more loyal customers.

Know Your Customer’s Pain

If you want to develop the most helpful customer experience in your field, you need to intimately understand the challenges your prospects face. It’s key to work on developing the structures, processes, and systems needed to generate rich customer insights.

To get a better understanding of how you can solve the pain points of your target audience, here are a few ideas:

●      Carry out regular customer surveys. It’s one of the best ways to get first-hand feedback.

●      Have regular meetings with customer service and sales reps.

●      Email or call your best customers directly. This will help you learn how you can improve, but it will also help you see what you are doing well.

You need to take the time to listen emphatically to your customers and learn from them in order to start creating helpful customer experiences.

When you are running a retail business, it’s easy to obsess over margins, profits, and sales. But, if you think about your customers first, you’ll increase all three. Amazon has become number one exactly because of its customer-focused foundation.

Naturally, to be able to pinpoint your customers’ pains, you need to analyze the data you have gathered. When you pinpoint their problems, rank them in order of severity.

Stew on the information that you gather. Think about how you can generate content that will help them handle these pains. Find ways in which the shopping experiences you offer and your brand as a whole can solve your customer’s problems.

Think about how you can improve your customer’s life. This will help you summarize the purpose of your brand.

Verbify Your Pain Youtility

Your “pain youtility” (you plus utility) is the problem-solving value you offer to your prospects. You need to isolate the most important way you can help your target audience. That’s how you’ll get your pain youtility.

Every successful retail brand has a pain youtility. Here are a few examples:

●      Huckberry: Helping urban outdoor enthusiasts save time so that they can enjoy their favorite hobby.

●      Casper: Ensuring people get a good night’s sleep by taking the stress and anxiety out of the pursuit for the best mattress.

●      Lush Cosmetics: Making it easy for environmentally conscious shoppers to find sustainable cosmetics and personal hygiene products.

You can focus your marketing efforts on creating content that addresses your target audience’s problems once you isolate your pain utility. By focusing on your pain youtility, you will ensure that your content is customer-centric, helpful, and valuable.

If you can prove the value of your brand through your pain youtility, you won’t need to slash prices. So, make sure to settle on a verb that summarizes your brand. It will help you direct all of your efforts toward the same strategic goal.

Every action you take should act on this verb. To make sure that you won’t diverge from your goal, you can create a “don’t” do list. For instance, you won’t be focusing on “exposing,” or “entertaining” if you know your purpose is to “educate.”

Think Like a Publisher

As hinted at by the previous steps, content generation is key to a successful brand strategy. Having a brand verb won’t cut it. Your team won’t be able to execute your brand and marketing strategy if “educate” or “help” is the only thing they’ve got.

Their natural instinct may be to sell and turn straight to default advertising mode. Don’t go down this road. Before the time comes to sell, use your content to inform and entertain your target audience.

To prevent your blog from turning into an infomercial, stick to these content marketing fundamentals:

●      Banish misconceptions and overused phrases from your communications.

●      Develop a tribe of evangelists.

●      Differentiate your story.

●      Create demand with your content.

Help Your Customers Grow

Mediocrity is one of the biggest problems with modern retail brands. A brand that offers nothing more than temporary convenience will soon be replaced by a similar brand.

You need to figure out how you are helping your customers grow if you want your brand to stay relevant. Times change, and so do the members of your target audience. The brands that endure are the ones that emphasize the quality of choice instead of quantity.

Is your value proposition in line with your brand’s promise, and vice versa? If you want to earn loyal customers, your brand needs to stand for something bigger than itself.

The modern consumer requires a brand that inspires them to savor the moment and discover the greater meaning of life.

Utilize the Best of Both Worlds

It’s not a stretch to say that the real world and the digital world have blended into one. No major name in retail has a presence that is strictly offline or online.

To increase the level of engagement, many retail businesses have incorporated the digital into their offline presence. And the most successful ones have pulled it off without losing the original look and feel of their brand.

To enhance the customer experience, many brands are utilizing in-store technology. For instance, Polo Ralph Lauren installed interactive fitting mirrors in one of their exclusive shops. Ikea has launched an AR (augmented reality) app that lets users see how IKEA’s products will fit inside a room.

But, you don’t need to introduce something groundbreaking to unify your offline and online presence. For instance, you can use print ads along with your digital strategy. Thanks to QR codes and personalized URLs, you can create an invaluable source of customer information as well as improve customer-brand interactions.

Takeaway

You need to think above and beyond making a sale if you want to build a proper retail brand. The best way to grow loyal customers is to build your own retail brand strategy. And you can do that by listening to your target audience, responding to your customer’s pain points, verbalizing your problem-solving value, and generating the right content.

About the author

Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.