As an agency or marketer creating content for your clients, you’re constantly thinking up creative ways for them to stand out from the crowd of competitors begging for their customers’ attention. At Lemonlight, we strive to create compelling, high-quality video content that does just that. While a lot of emphasis for video content is put on virality, what’s more important than getting millions of eyes on a product or service is nurturing a strong customer base guaranteed to be loyal to the brand, no matter what content, new product, or service your client is promoting.
Building brand loyalty can be a lifelong challenge for most businesses, but it makes all the difference when it comes to their success. When discussing building brand loyalty with your clients, what tactics do you typically recommend? Is video among your suggestions? If so, great! If not, this article is for you.
Whether you know it or not, video content is a great way to build brand loyalty – as long as you’re making the right types of videos.
How Does Video Increase Brand Loyalty?
Brand loyalty is a choice a consumer makes to support a particular brand over all the rest. This is most often because the consumer perceives it to be the highest quality brand, or the most trustworthy of the relevant products on the market, and often will forego a cheaper product in place of the one they’re loyal to. When it comes to brand loyalty, perception is everything, and once a consumer perceives a brand to carry the superior product, it’s not easy to shift their opinion.
Video content is a great way to build and support a customer’s brand loyalty because of its ability to attract a customer’s attention (brand awareness), stick out more in that customers’ mind (brand recall), and positively affect their perception of that brand’s quality and trustworthiness (brand association).
1. Video Builds Brand Awareness
Video is inherently evocative, as it uses both sound and moving images to capture and hold our attention. When your clients use video on their social media platforms, websites, and industry pages, they effectively introduce new customers to their brand, educating and inspiring them in a more engaging way than they could using any other medium. According to Mist Media, just having a video on your client’s website increases the time customers spend there by 88 percent.
Brand awareness helps build brand loyalty in one the most obvious ways – you can’t be loyal to a brand you don’t know. By building brand awareness, even if a potential prospect doesn’t buy from your client right away, when they see your client’s video show up in a Facebook ad, they’re familiarizing themselves with the brand. After about five to seven touch points, they might be compelled to buy just from your videos alone.
Consider creating these videos to help your clients build brand awareness:
- Commercials or Promo Videos: These serve as short introductions to a brand and their product or service.
- Educational or Industry Videos: These videos educate the viewer on a specific issue facing your client’s industry or the business itself.
- Before and After or Product Videos: These videos show your client’s product in action and let the product speak for itself.
What type of video is right for your brand? Take this five-minute quiz to find out!
2. Video Increases Brand Recall
Once your client’s prospective customers are aware of your client’s brand, the next most important step toward building brand loyalty is establishing brand recall. Brand recall refers to the ability for customers to recognize and refer to a brand from memory. This could be name recognition, where a memorable brand name like Google can transcend the brand itself and actually become a verb, or visual recognition, where even a certain color combination can illicit brand recall, like red and yellow reminding McDonald’s lovers of the golden arches.
As an agency, you know firsthand how powerful a good advertising campaign can be for brand recall. For instance, when you hear the word Geico, you probably recall, “Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance!” While commercials are a great advertising tactic, there are plenty of other videos you can create to illicit brand recall in potential customers.
Consider: Video has been proven to deliver more information about your client’s brand than any other medium available, and video’s combination of moving visuals actually helps consumers retain information better than just reading it.
A brand video is a simple piece of content that communicates a brand’s core value and style to a consumer, and if you get really creative, like Dollar Shave Club did when they created the most referenced marketing video of all time, it can build brilliant brand recall. Other options to help your clients build up their brand recall include:
- Day in the Life Videos: These videos actually show a company in action and can build a deeper connection with the viewer.
- Customer Testimonials: These videos feature others talking about a brand, and can be quite memorable for viewers as long as the testimonials themselves are compelling.
3. Video Positively Impacts Brand Association
Finally, brand association is what customers think of in association with a brand when they do recall it. For example, what do you think about when you think of McDonalds? What about Starbucks? Each of us has built-in assumptions that come to mind when we think of a company, and with video, your clients have the power to alter, change, or improve those assumptions. Oftentimes, the difference between a customer being loyal to a brand or not comes from those brand associations. If prospective customers think of a brand as overpriced, or as too cheap, or as being poor at customer service, they carry a negative association.
In the same way you can use video to build brand awareness and brand recall, you can use it to instill certain attributes to a brand. Think back to Geico – if you remember that tagline, you likely associate Geico with easy service and savings. That’s exactly what brand association is. Throughout the buyer’s journey, there will be multiple touch points necessary to convince a lead to buy. It’s during this lead nurturing process that you can use video to instill positive brand associations.
Using video to nurture your client’s leads is effective for two reasons: It keeps your client’s brand top of mind, and creates value for the leads, which is a positive brand attribution in and of itself. Videos you can create to provide value include:
- Product Review Videos: This is where a third party reviews your client’s products and provides input.
- Customer Spotlight Videos: These videos highlight a customer and how they were positively impacted by the brand’s product or service.
- FAQ Videos: Here, a brand answers questions their prospective customers need answered before they’re willing to buy.
- Event Videos: These videos show your client hosting or attending an event where they interact with others, creating social proof that others know and care about their brand.
The Ultimate Key to Brand Loyalty? Creating Positive Customer Experiences
Beyond building brand awareness, recall, and association, the best way to create brand loyalty is to help create a positive customer experience for customers. While your client is ultimately responsible for how they run their own business, the customer experience doesn’t begin or end with the transaction.
With video, your client can create a positive customer experience from the beginning of their customers’ buyer’s journeys just by having a wealth of information available that answers their questions quickly and easily. Customers trust and are more likely to buy from businesses that have video content on their website, and with good reason – if you can get all your questions answered by a source you trust, why wouldn’t you move forward with a purchase?
However, the best time to build brand loyalty is AFTER the customer buys. You can enhance a customer’s experience by sharing videos that show them how to get the most out of their product or service, or videos that inspire customers and keep them engaged with your brand. This not only provides a positive experience for your client’s customers, it provides extra value for your client, like using post-purchase video to ask for referrals or share updated promotions.
Some videos you can use to create a positive customer experience include:
- Welcome Videos: These are videos that welcome a new customer into your client’s customer community, making them feel part of a larger brand family.
- Thank You Videos: These videos thank a customer for their purchase.
- FAQ or Tutorial Videos: These videos answer questions or show customers how to use their newly purchased product.
- Tips and Tricks Videos: Share some simple tips and tricks that make customers feel like they’re getting access to exclusive knowledge.
- Referral Videos: Use these to promote a referral program that benefits both your client and their customers.
By including any or all of these videos into your client’s marketing funnel, you can create a richer, more positive experience for your client’s customers that better incentivizes brand loyalty and has a higher chance of turning customers into brand evangelists.
Adding video to your client’s marketing strategy can bring them more return visits and purchases. This is not only crucial for building brand loyalty, it’s a critical metric when it comes to measuring agency success.
Interested in Using Video to Build Brand Loyalty for Your Clients?
If you don’t offer video services to your clients right now, we’d love to partner with you! Video is an incredible marketing tool that not only increases brand loyalty, but attracts more customers, increases sales, boosts SEO, and benefits your clients with all sorts of other statistics.
We fully believe that in 2018, agencies can no longer afford to ignore video marketing, but we know the barrier to entry for launching your own video production team can be expensive, time consuming, and challenging to learn. That’s what we’re here for! Reach out and schedule a call with our creative team today to discuss ways in which we can work together to benefit our most important resource: our clients!