“Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” Howard Schultz
Yes, branding is perhaps one of the most powerful weapons in today’s world. All the strongest brands in the world express a clear, effective, and relevant message that has created a strong place in the mind of the customers.
When you’re establishing a brand for your business, here are some things you need to keep in mind.
It is truly vital to be aware of your intended audience and approaching them on an appropriate level.
So, how you can define your target audience?
Well, target audiences can be defined by both demographics (such as age, household income, etc.) and psychographics (such as attitudes, behaviors, goals, motivations, purpose, interests, etc.)
There are usually two types of audiences to consider:
Performing a thorough research can help you in determining which demographics are currently engaging with your brand and through what means they are following your brand. It can be through social media accounts, visiting your website or by directly buying your products at freestanding stores. Figuring out if your brand is reaching your ultimate target audience is extremely imperative for measuring the success of your entire branded image, company image, and any paid advertising campaigns.
Identifying and gaining the loyalty of your target audience is an essential way to reach your brand objectives. Customer engagement is really crucial for connecting with your target market online. The competitive advantage of your brand can make you stand out from the crowd and helps you in shaping authentic, human relations with your customers and prospects. Some of the most effective and powerful ways to reach your customers voice online are:
Communication is crucial in any kind of business. Communication with both stakeholders and customers now matter a lot in today’s world. This is vital to understand their expectations and demands. It is often mistaken that communication is only about exchanging words. However, it is not true because, in order to be a good communicator, you need to be a good listener first.
This is also all the more important since loyal customers play a major role in ensuring and sustaining the success of any business. It takes a lot of time and effort to cultivate relationships for building such a loyal customer base. Retaining your customers require a good amount of quality communication. In fact, there are several means to build robust communication channels to convey your intended messages and to ensure customer feedback.
If you are thinking that traditional communications have now received a setback in a digital era, you are probably mistaken because emails, brochures, newsletters, and various other incentive materials are still very much in practice. You can also communicate frequently by using social media. It has emerged as an excellent option to communicate with friends, to increase your network and most importantly, to build successful brands. Of all the social media platforms available, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great platforms to expand your prospects beyond your existing customer base. However, just keep in mind that communication is always a two-way process and it is not just about speaking and listening, but initiating an engaging conversation too.
In this competitive world, businesses are required to understand that the content that they publish represents their brand and that it has the potential to affect them. Content has the ability to affect a business’ image, credibility, authority, and sales either in a positive way or negative way.
Many businesses spend a large number of dollars in creating and protecting a strong brand. They set strict branding standards and are cautious about making sure people abide by them. Still, some organizations ignore the importance of content and end up having a content written by anyone.
“Content is not only important these days, but it has become an essential requirement.” This statement can be proved with the help of following statistics mentioned below:
All these stats are enough to prove that quality content is critical in today’s competitive world. So, while creating an awesome content, just make sure to:
There are some brand specific link tactics that allow you to enhance your brand value. Some of these tactics include:
Now that you’ve established what your brand is and who your target audience is, you will need to enhance your brand and increase customer interaction and engagement.
Make sure that the design and images utilized on your profile reflect your brand image and be unswerving with your website design and with your profiles on other social networks to make you recognizable. A good profile will increase the likeliness of users clicking on your profile when it appears in search results. Furthermore, when someone finds your profile make sure to keep them updated about your products and services.
Adding social media buttons on your site are helpful in driving visitors from your site to your social profiles. In addition, you want to include social buttons to your content to allow users to share your content. This way, they can share your content and information to their connections.
When you add social media buttons to your website, you are increasing the possibility of users liking your page or sharing them with their friends. This is especially important to build your brand online and social following.
Brand signals are usually a company’s brand name, website name or the exact URL that a particular company is going to use. You can use images to create brand signals as they are very efficacious in terms of recuperating your position with the keywords that you are targeting.
Rich media ads that are usually the ads that are mostly seen on a website, which elaborates when you hover over it or an ad in the corner that you can peel back to reveal more of the message. If used properly, they can be a very powerful online advertising medium.
Rich media ads can be very effective and fruitful as compared to standard display ads in many ways such as:
Great customer service is really important when it comes to building your brand reputation. In today’s digital environment, customer service needs to be quick. Of course, sometimes it can be difficult to address issues instantaneously. However, you want to get back to customers within 24 hours and provide them with quality customer service.
By interacting, customers can make perception about your brand, which is far more influential than the perceptions they form through exposure to your marketing communications. So, it is important to ensure that you optimize customer service to build the value of your brand.
These days, social media has gained a lot of attention and popularity. These channels are the perfect platform to communicate your message and let it spread organically. When you are openly engaged on social media and encourage your audience to interact with you, it builds up a certain level of accountability. By having social media interactions, a brand can effectively hold itself answerable for rendering great products, services, and customer service.
Getting engaged with your followers, subscribers or customers is a long-term resource that you can activate at the touch of a button. Moreover, if you are offering real value in exchange for social interaction, you’ll be confident that you’re growing a responsive and engaged audience.
If the relation between you and your client is not maintained properly, it will become challenging to sustain and grow your business for a longer haul. Branding is the core of any business that can make your business attractive to investors, consumers and future employees as well.
Therefore, in order to provide a strong boost to your brand, you must:
Having a strong brand makes it easier for people to promptly identify anything associated with you. This could be anything including your logo, your company’s working environment, quality of your work and most importantly how you make others feel when they interact with you.
So, whether you have just started or are in the process of tweaking your brand, here are some important points to consider:
Thus, a strong brand enables differentiation against competition and allows people to recognize your products and services.
on
That quote by Howard Schulz is spot on, building a brand doesn’t only mean getting fans or attention on the internet, it also means building a franchise that people get to love and can impact the world in a positive way. I’ve seen brands fail miserably simply because all they cared about was money and fame, that doesn’t amount to anything and it’s only 20% of the way of being a successful company/website/brand etc.
Interaction with users is key.
on
Personally, I think that the key to building a strong following is to have quality content in an easy to deliver manner. As long as you have information worth its salt. Build it and they will come.
on
I firmly believe in the power of interaction for building brand recall. We’re flooded with so many ads these days that it’s likely that a mere image or video would get lost in the crowd (unless you come up with stellar content). I think rich media is the way to go to make sure that the customer engages with your brand and after that I guess it will have to be the power of the product itself that keeps them coming back. Great post!
on
This is a very high quality and informative post!
I personally found this very educating and intriguing (that’s an understatement!).
I’m sure this will help quite a few people getting to know the business world and marketing areas!
on
When building a brand initially, do not be afraid to let feedback from your users move you into a niche that you might not have thought of. In many ways, your earliest feedback can point you to under-represented areas of the marketplace. You may have ideas of branding yourself a certain way, and be trying to figure out how to beat your competition, but the early feedback could actually tell you to move to areas where there is less or no competition. Especially very early in the process, do not be afraid to shift your brand.