Why Branding Is Key For Customer Retention

New businesses have been popping left and right, and it has been observed across all sizes of enterprises–from small mom-and-pop stores to multinationals. As such, the fight to stay recognizable and relevant has reached new heights–bringing branding efforts into unprecedented importance among marketing campaigns.

Simply put, branding refers to any feature–mostly visual, but actually applies to any other form–that establishes and pushes your company’s identities. It might be a video, a piece of music, a logo, or even a set of colors that the market will readily associate with your company, your products, and your services. More than creating an impact and drawing new customers to the business, branding is also important in making sure that your customers are not one-off transactions.

If you’re a marketer looking to justify this approach to potential clients, or a business owner looking to incorporate one, here are a few reasons why branding is key for customer retention.

1. Increases chances for Upselling and Cross-Selling

The endgame for every business marketing scheme is to ultimately lead to increased revenue, and branding can help you get there faster. Nowadays, a recognizable brand name lets people associate you with certain elements will keep on reminding them about you and your company–even without your posters and advertisements in place. This puts you in front of their brand recalls and increases the odds of them turning to you for a particular need.

According to the ratings and reviews platform Clutch, good branding can lead to up to 31 percent better shareholder returns and revenue growth in a three-year period. More importantly, it has been associated with three times faster profit growth compared to its competitors.

By consistently advertising your company through a well-defined branding strategy, you get to improve your customer retention rates. As customers return for your products and services, you get more chances for sales and therefore, revenue. Furthermore, customer retention through brand recall improves your opportunities for upselling and cross-selling to your clients. Since they are existing customers who align with your branding, they’re more likely to explore what you offer and even avail of more expensive options. The more products and services they identify from your company–possessing the same quality and attached branding effort–will endear you even further to the customers.

2. Stronger customer relationship 

If you’re the trusted brand, customer retention is almost guaranteed. After all, the relationship between a provider and the customer is built on trust. There is a specific approach to building your company image that relies on evoking emotions from the customers. Called emotional branding, this refers to the development of marketing materials–products, ads, posters, social media content, and more–that specifically target people’s emotions in order to build a relationship with them.

This is a larger scope that sets the company brand for the long run. Unlike emotional advertising, which may be a limited-time campaign, emotional branding has to be something that the company sustains. This way, the company becomes associated with a particular emotion and vice versa.

Also, by maintaining a specific branding for a company, you can start building its credibility across the market. Aside from good products and services, consistency in terms of message and identity will also help build trust between you and your target. This is why for large brands, a new logo or a new slogan is usually met with the public interest.

3. Creates relatability to the company

Although businesses are built and run by humans, people and general see business entities as large mechanical creatures out to get their money. By sticking to a specific branding, you get to add a human touch to the company by creating a point of relatability for the customers.

For example, Nike has used its slogan “Just Do It” for several years now. Together with their iconic logo, these three words have been nearly inevitable, especially in fields and applications where an additional motivation is always appreciated–sports, physical contests, exercising, and other similar areas. By wearing items backed by this logo, customers can then recall their struggle and recall the simple reminder to just do it.

There are different ways of integrating this into your branding. A common approach is publicizing the people behind your company. Although it sounds unnecessary, it actually helps create the feeling that your company is actually built by men and women like your target market. By seeing themselves in your team, people instantly find a point of connection with you. This is why some companies branding themselves as friendly and fresh reflect it with the short bio of their employees, using casual and conversational speech that sometimes includes each person’s hobby.

Conclusion

Branding has become a vital part of ensuring engaged customer engagement, increased conversion rates, and better chances of customer retention. By sticking to a unique identity that the company can live by, as shown through its products and services, it becomes more successful in connecting with its customers. This builds trust, which is an important aspect of convincing them to try out what you offer and keep on trying new products and services from the same provider.