Luxury Experience: How to Build Brand Loyalty for Your Small Business in 3 Steps
Nov 5
Wondering how to build a flourishing business based on gushing referrals? By the end of this video you’ll know how to create a luxury experience that gets your clients talking—and gets you booked based on their referrals alone!
Create a Luxury Experience to Help BUILD BRAND LOYALTY IN 3 STEPS!
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Assess Your Brand’s Client Touch Points to Create a Luxury Experience
If you’ve got a business, you’ve got a “brand experience” for that business.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good brand experience. And if you’re still wondering what the heck a “brand experience” even is… I’m guessing yours isn’t great.
But don’t worry, because I’m going to walk you through the basics so you can start improving your brand experience right away.
The first step is to assess each one of your client touch points. To do this, sit down, grab a pen and paper, and think about a typical client’s interaction with your brand from start to finish.
This will usually look like…
- Brand awareness and marketing
- Contact
- Initial consultation
- Booking process
- Client onboarding
- Project planning and preparation
- Project
- Delivery
- Client off-boarding
- Follow up
So, let’s get more specific and use the example of a hypothetical wedding photographer so you can see what these touch points might look like in practice.
Brand Awareness and Marketing
A newly-engaged bride (aka potential client), finds out about our hypothetical wedding photographer by picking up a business card in a dress shop, or searching a specific hashtag on instagram, or maybe by word of mouth if she’s referred by a friend.
The bride will probably do more research by reading online reviews and visiting the photographers website, where eventually she’ll move to the next step…
Contact
At this point, the bride has decided she wants more information, so she fills out the contact form on our photographer’s website, which leads to…
Initial consultation
The photographer responds via email and sets up a time to meet with the potential client.
Booking process
When the bride decides to book, the photographer begins the booking process, taking a down payment and getting a signed contract.
Client onboarding
Once the bride is “officially” booked, the photographer starts onboarding their new client by sending a client welcome packet and scheduling their engagement session.
Project planning and preparation
The wedding photographer has the couple fill out a client survey form to learn more about their wedding day.
Project
The photographer shoots the wedding.
Delivery
The photographer gives the clients their images and album.
Client off-boarding
The photographer sends a handwritten thank you card to the client, and requests an online review.
Follow up
On the couple’s one year anniversary, the photographer sends them a card and a gift.
So, there’s just one example of what a hypothetical brand experience might look like. Like I said earlier, take some time to write down your own brand experience by assessing each individual client touch point.
Now I’m going to show you how to take those touch points and turn them into a luxury brand experience that builds brand loyalty and has your clients referring all of their friends and family.
Look for “Holes” in your Luxury Brand Experience
The next step is to look for any areas of your brand experience that need help. And I’ve got four different methods to help you discover them:
Analyze Your Brand Experience Yourself
The first way to do this is by analyzing your client touch points and asking yourself where you could make improvements. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Do your logo, branding, and website evoke “luxury?”
Do you have a systematized client onboarding process that welcomes your new clients, helps set realistic expectations, and helps prevent buyer’s remorse? [If not, check out this video on client onboarding: 4 things to do immediately after booking a new client!]
Are your products [like an album, etc.] high quality and luxurious? And are they delivered in high-end on-brand packaging?
While I think it’s important to always be asking yourself these types of questions, I think having an outside perspective can be far more effective.
Analyze Your Clients’ Behavior
The next way to find areas of your brand experience that need help, is to actually study your audience and client interactions.
Ask yourself, is there a particular part of your brand experience where potential clients drop off (i.e. you stop hear from them and they don’t book)? While it’s easy to assume that they just didn’t like your pricing, in most cases it’s much more complicated than that.
Maybe, instead, you’re not actually building sufficient trust with your audience ahead of time. If you’re not hearing from them after the initial inquiry, maybe you need to respond faster, or change the content of your response email. Or if you’re not getting inquiries to begin with, maybe you need to invest in a more sophisticated website and include plenty of testimonials throughout.
You can use this strategy to analyze the behavior of potential customers, current clients, and former clients.
Where in your brand experience do you experience difficulties or frustrations? Those are the places your clients are getting frustrated as well—and it’s YOUR job to fix that.
Ask For Your Clients’ Input
One of the most direct ways to find areas of your brand experience that need to be tightened up, is to just ASK.
Now, it might sound simple—but I’ll warn you that getting that kind of direct feedback about your business isn’t always so easy. It can be hard to hear that clients’ expectations have not been met, or worse they’ve been disappointed by parts of your brand experience.
However, I really urge you to take this kind of feedback gracefully and with gratitude. This can actually help you grow incredibly as a business owner, and ensure that your brand experience only gets better and better.
One of the easiest ways to collect feedback is to incorporate a “Client Survey” into your client off-boarding process. I’ve made an online survey through my client management software, Dubsado, that I send to all of my design clients once we’ve completed their projects.
Get Professional Advice
The final, and most effective way to work on improving your brand experience is to hire a brand strategist, like me, to provide a valuable outside perspective.
It’s so easy for us to be so “in our heads” about our own businesses, that we’ll often miss something that is blatantly obvious to an outsider—especially an outsider who knows exactly what a successful luxury brand experience should look like.
If you want more information on working with me one-on-one on your brand experience, be sure to get in touch with me.
Turn Your Brand into a Luxury Experience
Once you figure out where your brand experience is falling short, it’s time to get to work!
You need to start fixing these “holes” in your brand experience as quickly as possible. It’s easy to convince yourself that tasks like creating a client survey or updating your website can be taken care of later. In fact these types of business chores are the ones that consistently fall to the bottom of our to-do lists.
But in reality, it’s these “small” tasks that can have the biggest impact on our businesses.
Do you want more clients?
Do you want higher paying clients?
Then you need to make sure that your brand experience is flawless.
Comment below—what’s one area of your brand experience that you’re going to work on this week?
Now you know the basics to building brand loyalty with your current clients (and get them to refer their friends!), but if you’re ready to dive deeper, I’ve written a 20-page guide—The Brand Blueprint—on how to create a remarkable brand from start to finish.
