What Is Brand Affinity And How To Increase It?

Do you know what customers think and feel about your brand? Are you sure that your company shares your customers’ values? 

Over 75% of customers are ready to share their data to improve their experience. A well-established brand knows how to keep customers over the long term by building meaningful relationships. 

According to Microsoft stats, by strengthening brand loyalty, a company will benefit from long-term rewards – brand loyalty helps to increase customer lifetime value and, hence, boost sales.

So how does it work? Let’s go into detail and find out how to deploy effective strategies to increase your brand affinity.

What Is Brand Affinity

Brand affinity is about meaningful relationships between a brand and a customer. Brand affinity develops when a client starts feeling an emotional bond with your company. 

It’s not only about price and quality, as these metrics are rational. This is more about sharing the same values and being part of a close-knit community that shares ideas and life challenges.

For this reason, brand affinity and brand loyalty are different things. While loyalty concerns a pragmatic decision to buy from a company because it’s beneficial for a client, affinity is about affection for a brand. 

For example, there are ‘Nike’ people and ‘Adidas’ people; ‘Android’ and ‘iOS’; ‘Pepsi’ and ‘Cola’ - the list can go on. All these competitive companies offer high-quality products, but different people stick to various companies because one brand speaks to them more than the other. 

More than half of clients buy from brands that ‘get them.’ See? It’s all about feelings, but these feelings make your customers choose your brand repeatedly.

So are you still wondering whether brand affinity is worth investing your money in? Let’s dig deeper and find out.

Why Brand Affinity Is Essential For Business Success

The leading companies like Netflix, Apple, Patagonia, and Redbull spend a significant share of their budget increasing brand affinity. Why is it so crucial to creating a sense of community that shares similar values? Why are meaningful long-term relationships with clients regarded as the number one priority? 

Well, the stats speak for themselves.

Think about an easy analogy with parenting. Almost half of the mothers are more eager to buy a product if other mothers ‘liked’ it. Same, more than half of customers are likely to buy a new product from the company they trust. Interest, trust, and understanding - are all about strong brand affinity. And here’s what you can get from it.

• You Can Increase Sales

By creating binge-worthy content, customers spend more time with your brand. They watch, listen, and read, but most importantly, they want to spend time with you. It’s not about digital advertising that brings sales to a particular product. It’s about increasing your sales by having your clients cherish your brand, feel emotionally involved with it, and buy more because your brand resonates with your customers' values. You’ll constantly be collecting data about your clients, making it easier to increase repeat purchases.

• You Can Boost Brand Loyalty

Companies are struggling to gain and retain brand loyalty, resulting in better profitability from their regular clients. As brand affinity is about emotional connection, it dramatically strengthens commitment. By regularly listening to your customers' feedback, showing them that you care about their challenges, and offering them interactive content, you’ll create a family-like community that trusts your brand.

• You Can Strengthen Brand Awareness

There is a misconception that brand awareness will help to grow brand affinity, but it works the opposite. People knowing about your brand doesn’t equal people loving your brand. The social media of a typical client is flooded with ads, so imagine how difficult it is to stand out and be memorable. 

You will increase brand awareness with great brand affinity, but you will do it the smart way. This won’t be just someone talking about your brand; this will be your fans mentioning and recommending your brand to the like-minded.

Source: Freepik

Deploy These Strategies To Increase Brand Affinity

So you’re probably wondering if the brand affinity is so crucial, what should I do to increase it? Here are five proven strategies to adopt to create meaningful relationships with your customers.

• Learn About Your Customers

Most startups fail because there’s no target audience for their product, but there’s an illusion they can persuade people to love it. For this reason, it is essential to know your audience, understand what drives them, and just get them. Collect information from as many sources as possible, including employee anecdotes. 

The best source to see an accurate picture of your target audience is CRM systems. By examining data from existing clients, you can easier predict what interests them and attract a more like-minded audience. For example, if you use Salesforce, you can benefit from quick Salesforce export to Excel and enjoy a detailed and comprehensive analysis of your customers.

• Actively Engage With Your Clients 

As soon as you get to know your customers, create a deep connection with them. The way to meaningful relationships is through constant and active engagement. Your interaction should be like a conversation with a friend. Social media is your key to success, so use all the benefits of cutting-edge technology. 

Keep the conversation going via Instagram stories, comments, and direct messages. Boost engagement with giveaways, but don’t overuse them so as not to create an audience that is only waiting for free stuff. What is more, don’t hesitate to visit your customer’s pages and like their posts back for better social reach.

• Define Your Brand

Be specific, clear, and consistent. When you close your eyes and think about your brand, what comes to your head? Are you sure this is the same thing that comes to your customers’ heads? Because it should be. For building and increasing brand affinity, it’s imperative to create a unique personality. 

Keeping your brand unique and consistent is even more critical. As you aim to build decades-long relationships, changing your brand values, logos, fonts, style, and other personalized features will feel like a rollercoaster. And no one likes relationships that feel like a rollercoaster.

What is more, don’t forget to include your audience in the relationships. Your brand should speak through everything: posts, messages, writing style, stories, surveys, design, etc.

• Build A Community Around Your Brand

Keeping customers over the long term is not enough to bring real value to each client individually. Creating a sense of community is the next step. By uniting people with shared ideas, life stages, and values, you create a group of people who like to spend time with each other. 

They like to belong to this community, as there they can share their challenges and find answers to their questions from other like-minded people. And the thing that unites them? Your brand and your brand values.

Virtual community events are an easy and effective way to bond with your audience. You can create different classes, invite speakers, offer training courses with certificates, conduct tutorials, and share advice - don’t limit your creativity.

• Foster Brand Loyalty

There’s a misleading idea that just by keeping your regular clients updated with new products and discounts, you’ll keep them loyal to your brand. Well, this strategy is a good one and has to be deployed. However, it’s not enough, as hundreds of other similar brands may offer discounts.

To foster your relationships, you need to be applicable to your audience. For example, an effective strategy today is creating explainer videos. By creating interactive content that is visually appealing, educational, and customer-centric, you build the trust that you need for brand loyalty. These videos show that you care about your customers' troubles. Explainer videos help customers solve their problems. In other words, your brand becomes their friend in need.

Summing Up

Building a sense of belonging and fostering solid and lasting relationships with your customers is the new holy grail of becoming a successful brand. While increasing brand affinity may still sound like a wishy-washy concept that is difficult to measure, in our guide, we did our best to offer you proven and practical strategies you can deploy right now.