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What do you think about when starting a blog? Probably about how to attract a large number of followers, make money and get whatever you want bringing the half of social media world together. This is all great, but are you sure that you can turn reach into profits? We’ll tell you what audience loyalty is, how and why to build it, and most importantly, what results you can achieve.
What’s audience loyalty?
A loyal audience is the part of your followers that remains firm in their support, people who are ready to recommend your services and buy your product regularly.
A loyal audience follows updates, comments on posts, shares your content to their stories, and supports you no matter what. Also, according to Inc., loyal customers are likely to spend 67% more than newcomers.
Why develop a loyal audience?
You can achieve good results if you pay attention not only to the number of followers but also to such a key element as a loyal audience.
If you put your heart and soul into the process of attracting a loyal audience, you’ll succeed:
1. Create a strong brand image. Listening to your audience’s opinions is taking care of them. Such customers are more likely to leave positive feedback and recommend your products and services.
2. Know your product shortcomings and fix the problems. The audience will appreciate your honesty about shortcomings and desire to work better on your products. Solve these problems, and then you can attract users who have had a negative customer experience.
3. Increase brand awareness. Post engaging content so that followers share it to their feed or stories and recommend you to people who might be interested in your product.
What are the tools?
Users have to go through a certain path to become loyal customers.
Here is the path:
1. Stranger. This person is potentially interested in your product but doesn’t know anything about you yet. Grab the attention of strangers by such tools as targeted advertising, mutual PR, etc. It’s also important to use word-of-mouth advertising.
2. Visitor. When strangers find you or your brand in the digital space, they go to your profile. Now you have to retain them. All you need is strong brand positioning, engaging content and an appealing offer.
3. Follower. When visitors have decided to follow you, it’s time to tell them about your offer, talk about discounts, and use calls to action.
4. Client. If followers clicked on active links and bought a product, they have become your customers. It’s important to meet their needs and provide effective customer service communication. Be polite and respond promptly to all requests.
5. Loyal client. If customer demand is satisfied, clients will recommend you to their friends and probably come back to you again. In difficult situations, they may even defend you by telling people about their positive experiences.
Customer engagement and loyalty: are they the same?
These two concepts might sound similar but they’re different. A loyal customer is interested in your blog, goes to your profile, buys products, and comes back. An engaged user goes through a similar path, except the last step. It’s important to track both metrics to adjust your development plan and understand your audience.
How to measure a loyal and engaged audience?
You have to both attract users and track basic metrics. There are several of them:
1. Reach
Reach is the total number of unique users who have seen both posts and promotion content. Reach allows you to understand how successful a particular publication is, analyze your audience, and find out whether there are newcomers.
2. Engagement
Engagement rate is a metric used to assess the average number of interactions your social media content receives: likes, comments, shares, etc.
3. The number of followers
This tool helps you track your existing audience. Pay attention to its locations, interests, age range, gender, and most active times. You can monitor the dynamics of audience growth and change the promotion strategy depending on this metric.
4. The number of users who clicked the link
This important metric shows how many people are interested in the product.
However, you can’t monitor the dynamics simply using these metrics. You have to dive deeper and find out who your loyal audience is.
After detailed research, IO Technologies tracks a loyal audience as follows. They have only three types of users:
1. New users. Visited a page 30 days ago or more.
2. Returning users. Visited a page within the last 7-10 days.
3. Loyal users. Visit a page every 7 days and more often.
If you divide your audience into these three groups it’ll become easier to define loyal users – they return to your profile, read posts, and interact with content.
Once you decide who your loyal audience is, you can start building a promotion strategy, writing posts that find the most response, and communicating with users more effectively. All this helps you promote your blog, make your page recognizable, and improve products. So, don’t worry if the number of your followers is less than a million. Analyze your loyal audience and adapt your blog to its needs!
