Contrary to what you might think, your brand is not your logo, website, name, even your product. Your brand is whatever comes to the minds of your audience when the name of your business is mentioned. The good thing is, you can shape what comes to their minds by creating a winning brand strategy.
A brand strategy is either a long term or short term plan set to achieve specific goals for developing a brand. When developing a brand strategy however, there are somethings that must be at the back of your minds. Let’s talk about four of those things.
Know Your Target Audience
A one size fits all brand strategy approach is ineffective these days. There is a need for a granular breakdown of the businesses or individuals who will be interested in associating or interacting with your brand. It is important to identify these businesses/individuals that make or influence the buying decisions, their needs/problems, their lifestyle on and offline. This will help you create brand strategies suited for the audience identified, this way, you avoid a shooting-in-the-dark scenario, hope you’ll hit the target.
When getting to know your target audience, you get insights on how your brand stories can capture their attention.
Take Home: Know your audience before creating your brand strategy. Know what I like and then be what I like.
Be Consistent
Creating content for your brand can be very exciting and you can not wait to put them out on your blogs, create white papers, and even social media posts. But it is important that the content created to go out on different channels in this digital age is vetted properly to make sure the brand messaging is consistent across the board. Every touchpoint where the brand interacts with the customers should clearly communicate the brand promises and value, this is what builds brand trust and loyalty, something that a brand with an inconsistent identity can never achieve.
Take Home: Don’t give your customers different vibes, stay true on and offline.
Humanize the brand
When creating your brand strategy, avoid sounding sterile and distant as much as possible. It is no longer enough to sell your product, your consumers need to be told stories that they can relate to. Ones that might depict your product as secondary to the narrative, but still highlights the importance, and the connection in the story. The goal is no longer to sell your product, but to tell stories that will drive your audience to take brand actions such as interacting with the brand, sharing stories in relation to the brand story etc.
Put emotions in your brand stories, the human brain places importance on stories that connect with them emotionally. Today’s customers want to support a brand not just for their product, but for the values they stand for and depict in their communication.
Take Home: Stop selling just your product, sell your story. Make the audience fall in love with your brand, not just your product.
Share Your Customers’ Stories
Customers will look out for what people are saying about your product, not just you. It is therefore important that you control that process, by sharing testimonials of customers yourself. Using testimonials will build credibility for the brand as you will be using real people to show the positive impacts of your product or service.
However, you should note that not all testimonials are effective. The key is in selecting the ones that talk about how your product or service satisfies a particular need, or solves a particular problem. Testimonials you should use must highlight specific benefits of your product or service. Customers when looking for testimonials are looking for stories that they can relate too, so make sure all the various testimonials to be used address all the pain points of your target audience.
Take Home: Customers want to hear what fellow customers are saying about your brand, make sure they are getting this information on your assets. Get real testimonials, and share them everywhere.
Bubbles’