After tuning into Huy Tran’s interview and getting to learn about his experience as the Director of Marketing at ABURI Restaurants Canada, one of the key takeaways I picked up was that brand affinity matters and it’s important to keep a close eye on the affinity rates throughout the execution of your strategies to ensure that your customers retain their interest and support to the company.
But before we focus on that, lets first talk about what brand affinity is, and ways we can increase it through out content creation and marketing strategies.
Brand affinity is the emotional connection built between the customers and companies. Often times brands share a specific set of values and missions that resonate with their audience which tends to influence their buying journey and the overall relationship with the company through the emotional bond. As Huy was saying in his interview, in order to increase brand affinity, the company has to make an effort to understand what people care about, translate metrics, and research trends in order to start building a long-lasting bond and loyalty with their customers.
Let’s look at how we can do that. Although there are many ways to build brand affinity, the one I wanted to focus on for today’s blog post is how companies can improve their affinity rate through effective content creation and conducting frequent content audits.
As we read in one of our week 5 readings, we should always be aware of what we are putting out to our audience members and be open to shifting the vision as we go. Just as our reading compared content creation work to cleaning a messy room, as content strategists, we should be organizing and optimizing our content in order to avoid clutter and to move towards growth rather than experience a plateau or decline in our engagement efforts.
Photo Credit: Sprout Social
Many successful companies have utilized this practice, reviewed its outcomes, and maintained the growth in order to improve customer retention. One personal example of mine is working at Victim Services Toronto as the Digital Content and Communications Lead. Although we are a non-for-profit agency with very different goals for our organization compared to traditional corporate companies, we have also performed content audits with our team members to see what strategies have been working and what has not been successful. Usually, we conduct yearly reviews of our social media accounts and compare it to our engagement rates. From the previous audits we conducted, we discovered that we gained more audience members and clientele by humanizing our brand and posting more informative posts with our team members faces and publishing short videos highlighting our services. This gained a better reach for our organization’s objectives because our target audience wanted to see more of a human element to our social media pages as opposed to written wordy content with a lack of visuals. As a result, not only did our followers gain interest in our programs and build an emotional connection to our values, but we also were able to increase our brand infinity and retain loyalty from our clients.
This is one example among many out there and many successful brands have made it a common practice to conduct content audits to stay on top of the trends and improve their strategies. Although it can be very tedious work, all it takes is a bit of patience and a desire to seek growth and revamp the strategies as time goes by!
Written By: Brintha Manoharan
Date: October 17th, 2023