While you’ll most often hear the importance of brand loyalty and influence touted in the context of B2C marketing, it’s important that B2B marketers recognize that brand loyalty is essential in B2B marketing as well. After all, humans are at the other end of all marketing funnels, whether they’re making the purchase for themselves or for their business.
Building an influential brand is directly tied to marketing efforts. To that end, here are five simple techniques that B2B marketers can employ to build brand loyalty and influence.
1. Extend Your Reach Through Partner Marketing
If you’ve never tried partner marketing before, now’s the time to give it a chance. Co-marketing partnerships serve to extend the reach of your brand, build key networking relationships, and even increase your funnel size.
A few quick strategies you can try:
- Identify strategic partners whose audiences align with yours, but aren’t competitors.
- Contribute guest content to blogs or appear on a podcast episode.
- Co-host an event (in-person or digital) to grow and engage both audiences.
We’re so passionate about this topic, we wrote a whole blog on it. Read more about effective partner marketing on our blog here.
2. Create Criteria to Find the Best Influencers
When trying to build your brand and influence, it’s key to have agreed-upon criteria to determine your best clients and influencers.
It’s important to note here that an influencer may or may not refer to an actual “influencer” as we know it (AKA, social media influencer). Instead, think of an influencer as someone who can be the best “influence” for building brand awareness — maybe a key client with extended reach or, yes, a traditional influencer on social platforms with an audience.
When deciding criteria for how to choose an influencer to represent your brand, it’s helpful to start with the following questions:
- What are your campaign goals and requirements?
- Who are the influencers that align with your goals?
- What are the ideal engagement rates and outcomes you want to measure?
- What is the influencer’s relevance to your brand?
- What common values do you and the influencer have in common?
3. Invest in Your Influencers & Partnerships
One of the best ways to ensure brand reach and loyalty is by investing in your investments. In other words, make your marketing partners, influencers, and customers feel like royalty whenever they interact with your brand.
This can mean offering exclusive deals, hosting private events for them, or finding speaking opportunities. While these may not benefit your brand directly in the short term, building trusted relationships with key partners can pay dividends down the road. Never forget the human behind the partnership!
4. Create a Referral Rewards Program
Don’t underestimate the power of referral marketing. After all, 84% of B2B decision makers say that the B2B buying process starts with a referral. Not only that, but 78% of B2B marketers believe that customer referral programs create high-quality leads.
In short? If you want more high-quality leads, look no further than referral marketing. Not sure where to start? Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling:
- Offer direct cash incentives (if you refer someone, you get $$).
- Send swag to key B2B customers to incentivize them to give a referral.
- If you sell SaaS, offer upgraded features or product discounts for a referral.
- Offer free passes to content, events, or courses in exchange for a referral.
5. Focus on Customer Success
Finally, it should come as no surprise that sharing customer success stories is a huge driver of brand loyalty and influence. Creating, distributing, and re-using customer success stories can be a win for all those involved. After all, customers love talking about their own success!
Here are just a few benefits of focusing on customer success:
- Customer retention: Interviewing existing customers about their wins can increase customer retention by reminding them how much they love your product.
- Upsell opportunities: Get the conversation going again after making a case study.
- Customer support: Learn your customers’ challenges and prove to them why you deserve their loyalty.
At Inverta, we’re experts at building brands that last. Our marketing expertise helps brands make small changes with big results. If you could benefit from an expert partner, learn more here.
