All successful businesses have one thing in common — A memorable brand.
If you think about all of your favourite companies, what comes to mind? A logo? An eye catching advert? Enticing storytelling? Strong values and ethics? Leveraging your company’s brand could transform your sales, placing you in contact with your ideal customers.
Now what exactly is a brand?
A brand represents the sum of people’s perception of a company’s customer service, reputation, advertising, and logo. When all of these components of the business are running smoothly, the overall brand tends to be healthy. Whereas when the different pieces fail to fit it can have detrimental consequences. We all probably know a company that offers excellent products or services, but has a tarnished brand due to poor customer service.
Here are four key features of brands that you should consider to generate trust and excitement around your business.
Humanise
Perhaps the most significant part of branding is connecting with consumers in a natural and genuine way. Zimmerman Communications found that 65% of people feel an emotional connection with a brand because they feel they care for individuals like them. In this digital age, consumers are no longer seeking monoliths of organisations with the biggest budgets. Instead focus on understanding your target audience and reaching out to them authentically.
Your branding should indicate that you understand your customers’ problems, and care about solving them.
Finding your ‘why’
Essential to every great brand is understanding your company’s mission statement and core values. By pinning down your business’s goals, the impact you would like to create on your customers and how you want to raise the standards of your industry. Engaging with consumers that have shared values and are excited by your brand’s story, is a strong way to gain customer loyalty and advocacy because they develop trust for your business. 64% of consumers say that shared values are the main reason that they have a trusted relationship with a brand.
Your brand message and image should convey the values of your organisation, not just the products of services. Whether it’s community, quality, or sustainability, ensure your values are clear to your target audience.
Tone of voice
Once you understand how your brand represents your business, it’s important consider how you want to communicate with your target audience. By understanding your ideal customers and their values, you can learn the tone that fits best.
For example if you are a high end luxury jewellery brand it would be beneficial to apply a professional and emotive tone which uses strong imagery. Whereas if you are a health food brand selling everyday value smoothies, it would make more sense to implement a more informal and creative tone which injects more humour to the communication.
The tone of voice that you use can have a huge impact on your content marketing strategy and how your brand is perceived. Using congruent language with your target audience is an effective way to develop a strong connection.
Long-term loyalty
Now that you have your brands personality and you understand your target audience inside out, it’s critical that you aim to initiate a long term relationship. By gradually earning the trust of your customers and engaging with them in an exciting and fitting way, you’ll begin to develop brand loyalty and advocacy. Consistent presentation of a brand increases revenue by 23% on average. Repetition and consistency are two cornerstones of any successful branding efforts.
By presenting your brand consistently, over time, consumers will internalise your brand values and be more likely to purchase.
Conclusion
Branding should be a key part of your strategy to expand and thrive. Research has shown that 77% of marketers say that branding is critical to future growth. It’s fairly simple, the more people that actually know who you are, what you offer, and the values you stand for, the more in demand you’ll be. By establishing your business’s key story and how you will communicate your values to your target audience, it becomes easier for your company to stand out and separate from your competitors.
