Brand Lover, your marketing strategy's best friend

Brands increasingly need loyalty, to have customers who regularly buy their brand for the simple reason that it is that specific brand. They trust and bet on it without questioning it. Brands need brand lovers.

what are brand lovers?

They are users who are emotionally linked to a brand, so much so that they always choose the same brand when they have to buy a specific item within a category. For example, there are those who, every time they change their mobile phone, go for Apple and don't want to know anything about any other brand. They also tend to like to publish everything related to it on their networks.

They will always speak well of the brand and defend it against other people who do not have the same positive opinion of that brand. And they will do this precisely because they love it, without anything in return. That is why they are different from influencers, who do it with a contract behind them, perhaps even without liking the brand at all.

5 steps to identify brand lovers

1. They speak well of you and recommend you
   If you have good feedback from your users, especially on social networks, by checking mentions and hashtags, you can easily identify who they are, they reply and comment on your publications, they upload information about your brand to their social networks and much more.
   
   
2. Community
   Brand lovers are not independent users, they are a large community where they interact with each other. There are usually accounts of "fans" of your brand, which as a company you should take care of because the audience of this type of accounts is also your audience.
   
   
3. Be an active listener
   

   After the first two points, we could say that brand lovers are everywhere, but even so, as a company you have to actively listen, pay attention to your comments, your mentions and hashtags. There is also a very good system to keep this listening, which is to identify brand lovers from search alerts in search engines.

4. Value them as ambassadors
   A very useful tool for your marketing strategy is to consider your brand lovers as ambassadors of your brand as they will be better at promoting your brand than any other influencer who is already known but doesn't love your brand.
   
   

   To know which brand lovers can be useful for your marketing strategy, you should evaluate several KPIs:

   • Influence

   Different from reach, the brand lover's influence consists of the number of people he is influencing, i.e., an account of fans of the brand coca cola can have more influence than an influencer with three times as many followers, of which a large majority may hate coca cola, so it is much more effective to have less reach but that all his reach ends up being influenced by him.

   • Implication

   You can establish a scale to indicate whether the mentions and references made by that brand lover to your brand are effective and, above all, whether they are sufficient.

   • Reach

   Although it must be influential, the reach is also very important because the more reach you have, the more possibilities you have to reach more potential customers.

   • Engagement: We need the brand lover to arouse engagement among his followers. If the specific brand lover has thousands of followers but not even half of them interact with him, it won't work for us, we need him to arouse interest among his followers and influence them.

5. Communication
   If necessary, get to know your brand lovers better, if you need to have a direct conversation with them, have one, so you can keep the conversation flowing, see what they think about the brand and find out what they want.
   Once you know who your brand lovers are, you can start negotiating with them, on the one hand, work together on advertising your brand, you can also work with them on loyalty programmes, you have to look for emotion, a brand lover is not the same as an influencer who has already won over their audience, a brand lover is not a well-known person or a celebrity, it is a person unknown to the rest of the users, so to connect with them, you need to resort to emotion.

how to turn your fans into brand lovers?

1. Treat your customers well
   

   This seems like a very simple and obvious step, but it is essential, not only is it not enough not to treat them badly, which is more than obvious, but you have to make an effort to give your customers the treatment they deserve. If you identify the needs of your customers and you make an effort to satisfy them, they will see you as a trusted brand, and you will end up earning their loyalty. Make their requests part of your strategy, as they feel listened to, the feeling towards your brand will grow and you will be able to strengthen a customer-company relationship.

2. Adapt to them
   Depending on where your target audience is, you should adapt your strategy to them, i.e. if your customers have a preference for a particular channel, a good strategy is to be on those channels. If, for example, your target audience is on TikTok, you should appear on Tiktok. If your business is related to audiovisuals, the format in which you should present yourself should be audiovisual, as this is exactly the same. You have to communicate through these channels with your customers quickly and accurately. And for this, the channels must be optimised to meet customer needs at any time and in an optimal way.
   
   
3. Social media
   Social networks are becoming more and more and faster the means of communication par excellence. This is where the strategy of brand lovers makes the most sense because it is where they will be best appreciated. All comments that are positive towards your brand will reach much further because between some accounts and others the reach is much greater than in other media, apart from the possibility of interaction. Negative comments also appear, these can even help you because you get feedback on what is going wrong with your image and your products, and if you can fix it and communicate with dissatisfied customers, it will change the image of your brand to see your commitment, you must use anything to your advantage.
   
   
4. Nurture and excite
   Offering a good service is something that you must do in any occasion, the customer treatment and the attention you give them are those things that will make you stand out from other brands, but that is not enough, you must also excite them, they should not see you as a cold company that just wants to make money, earn their trust and humanize yourself!

Now you know all about brand lovers, if you are a company, you will have realised that it is very important for your brand to keep your customers happy, as it can benefit you enormously, so don't wait any longer and turn your customers into brand lovers.