Loyalty is critical for businesses, but to gain and maintain loyalty, brands must stay ahead of customer expectations. Today’s customer thinks differently about loyalty – it isn’t about point cards, a free coffee, or email newsletter promotions. Successful loyalty programs are about the relationship between brand and consumer and the experiences that help build that connection. Which is why brands need to defy conventional loyalty notions to continue to win the hearts and minds of consumers.
Influencers are leveraging their credibility and relationships to help humanize brands’ interactions with target audiences. They are also in a unique position to deliver an experience that is authentic and defies conventional advertising.
Brands have the opportunity to tap into the creator economy to build meaningful collaborations that provide brand awareness and affinity as well as increase customer loyalty.
Influencers understand your buyer at a deeper level
The right influencer can understand your customer at a deeper level because they are your customer. With that personal understanding and influence, they are great at identifying what their audience wants, and they can help you predict whether your offering will resonate with their audience, or how best to create content that most effectively connects the product and brand to audience groups.
What brands can do:
Shift loyalty messaging from mass to individualized to create truly personalized customer experiences. Influencers have followings of online communities who share similar interests - from beauty to gaming. Brands can tap into niche communities and show how much they understand their consumer with personalized offerings and rewards that entice specific audiences.
From incentivizing transactions to incentivizing loyalty
An influencer's audience is made up of people who are already interested in staying up-to-date on what's new. These audiences are spending their days immersed in social media, following their favorite creators and providing their attention, so it makes sense to reward these engagements with exclusive access to new products or collections.
What brands can do:
Connect influencer marketing with loyalty objectives. When brands are providing influencers with PR packages to promote brand offerings, why not have an influencer remind shoppers about loyalty programs, as well as highlight the benefits they provide? This can be done by tying a loyalty promotion to a particular product range or collection, announcing new product launches, and/or providing an extra perk of an exclusive offer. Furthermore, some brands are successfully leveraging influencers for production, which provides the opportunity to create exclusive content to promote loyalty efforts. Increasingly, consumers are more responsive to this type of authentic and credible content.
The experience economy
The best way to ensure that your most valuable consumers remain loyal is by providing them with memorable experiences and rewards. Influencers can help deliver this, and your customers would likely love nothing more than to hear about up-and-coming events from them, or perhaps even meet them.
What brands can do:
Incorporate experiential rewards.
Tie a positive memory to your brand with a one-of-a-kind experience offered by influencers. This can range from contests, to meet-ups, to product launches. Collaborate with influencers to promote and excite audiences.
Loyalty for good
Today’s consumer is more informed, more connected, and more empowered to make their own decisions than ever before, and they expect brands to support and action on behalf of causes that matter most. Influencer partnerships can provide a visible platform for your company to join causes that align with key values. It’s up to marketers to help connect those dots by partnering with influencers who share those values.
What brands can do:
Align influencer values with brand values. This can be done by matching charitable donations, supporting LGBTQIA+ and POC creators, as well creating experiences that benefit the community at large.
At its core, influencer marketing is about driving awareness and building a relationship between a brand, an influencer, and their audience. Over time, this type of relationship can become a trusted one that results in increased sales, loyalty, and new customers for your business.
As loyalty programs change from transactional perks at check-out to relationship building experiences, an influencer marketing campaign that’s authentic, targeted, and focused can be one of the most effective initiatives a marketing team undertakes. Brands have massive opportunity to creatively engage with these attentive communities through experiences, rewards, and exclusive offers delivered uniquely through influencers and their communities.
As a society, we find ourselves in a moment of transition with a heightened need for experiences that defy convention to foster more meaningful connections. Ahead 2022: The Return to Why explores the motivational shifts leading the most impactful changes across media today. To learn more, download the report here.
