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Brand mapping
Brand mapping is a questionnaire that encompasses a list of attributes, a list of brands, and questions for customers. It helps companies evaluate how good they are in terms of innovations, trustworthiness, and pricing compared to competitors and figure out how clients and prospects perceive their businesses and products.
In this article, we’ll explore the importance of brand mapping and the steps necessary to map your brand.
Why is brand mapping important?
Brand mapping is a source of valuable information for marketers. By creating a visual display of data, you can gain customer insights that will help you with the further marketing strategy. First of all, you can reveal how potential and current customers perceive your brand. Secondly, you can unveil what consumers think or feel about your competitors. With brand mapping, you can identify your main rivals and understand their competitive advantage. Besides, you can visually outline your strengths and weaknesses. Once you map your brand, you can improve your position in those fields in which you are superior to your competitors and improve those in which there are shortcomings.
If you have average results, you can revise your marketing strategy and message. Do research to find out what makes consumers satisfied or unsatisfied with your business. After you do it, you’ll understand which areas to improve and how to make your company stand out. For example, if prospective customers assume that your company is less reliable than competitors, find out the reason. Analyze these rivals to figure out what they do to earn people’s trust. Once you eliminate the problem, consumers will have a different perception.
With a brand map, you’ll have a clear picture of your company, know your competitors, and how customers perceive them. As a result, you’ll have an opportunity to change a strategy to reach customers and hook their attention, earn trust, or become an industry leader. You’ll also get some valuable data about your brand positioning.
Now that you know the importance, it’s time to unveil how to map your brand.
How to map your brand?
There are several mandatory steps you should perform to do the brand mapping. You can develop a brand map as a part of bigger research or create it separately. We’ve prepared a list of to-dos to achieve the necessary results.
Write a list of rivals. You should identify the number and names of competitors you want to analyze in line with your brand. Choose around 5-8 competitors to have a comprehensive analysis and customer insights into your brand and rivals.
Prepare a list of attributes for companies. Choose for which areas of your business you need customer insights. After, select attributes that will help consumers answer your questions. 8-10 attributes would be perfect.
Get ready with the right questions. To get essential insights into consumer behavior, you should relate your questions to attributes. For instance, if you have a “reliable” attribute, you can ask respondents to assess the reliability level of each brand, including yours. Your customers should evaluate companies on the list by using a 100 point scale.
Make sure you have at least 200 responses. To have a clear picture of your company compared to competitors, you need to have a minimum of 200 answers from clients. Ideally, you need to collect 1,000 responses. This way, you’ll have a list of associations related to your business.
Process information. Once you gather all answers, you need to analyze the data you have. You can find out how positively customers perceive your brand, whether they think it’s reliable, trustworthy, quality, affordable, etc. Use information about your competitors to make some innovations and improvements to make people feel happier with your company.
Brand mapping will come in handy when you don’t know what you are doing right and wrong. It’ll serve you as a source of valuable information about your customers.
Brand marketing
Brand marketing is a particular approach to creating a brand name and design, establishing clear creative communications, and performing marketing activities that will differentiate your productfrom others.
Brand marketingcollaborates with many branches of advertisement. Brand marketing aims to create a product that will hook the audience and lead the current market.
Brand marketing and direct response marketing are two different approaches to marketing. Watch the video to find out the differences and ways to combine them.
Why is brand marketing is essential?
This type of marketing is all about developing brand awareness and recognition, trustworthiness, product visibility, market reach, and the overall reputation of your brand. It is a way to promote your product uniquely and recognizably to highlight your brand, it's a particular value for customers and show what sets you apart from others. As a result, products or services that you offer your customers will have a higher value.
Brand marketing pursues a long-term goal of building a continually growing base of loyal customers through communicating your brand's identity and values. Therefore, an effective brand marketing strategy can help you stand out from the crowd and take your business to the next level, skyrocket sales, and attract new customers.
Brand Marketing Objectives
Brand awareness
Brand loyalty
Brand advocate
Brand equity
Brand engagement
Brand identity and image
Building a brand is a challenging and crucial step in your business's success. Brand marketing objectives are the main goals of any brand, such as creating a particular image in the market or increasing revenue. Let’s cover the most common brand marketing objectives that companies usually pursue while designing their brand strategy.
Brand awareness. Raising awareness is the main task to make customers recognize and recall your product or service through diverse advertising activities.
Brand loyalty. It’s essential to make customers not just recognize and choose your brand but to stick withit. The primary task is to convince customers they have to opt for your brand by displaying product value and uniqueness.
Brand advocate. Increase the number of customers who will recommend your product or service to other people.
Brand equity. Authoritative and firmly established brands are believed to be more successful since people prefer a well-known company to a less recognizable brand.
Brand engagement. It’s better to work towards increased engagement from your active users. The more users that interact with your brand (visit your website, review products, or make orders), the higher are your chances are to build a recognizable brand.
Brand identity and image. People need torecognize your brand through visual elements such as symbols, logos, colors, packaging, etc.
As you can see, these objectives are crucial for the success of your product.
Brand Marketing Strategies
Brand-namerecognition
Individual branding
Attitude branding
“No brand” strategy
Brand extension
Private label
Crowdsourcing
A brand marketing strategy is the general approach you choose to promote your brand and make it visible and well-known. If a brand strategy is well-defined and executed, you will be able to achieve tangible results. There are plenty of brand marketing strategies based on the target audience, budget, marketing campaigns, but we will cover the most common ones below.
Brand-namerecognition. People recognize a company by its brand name, logo, slogan as well as colors. Great examples are Apple, Coca Cola, or Starbucks that use the weight of their brand name to drive sales and attract customers.
Individual branding. This strategy is used when a large company has subsidiary products, which function independently under their name. For example, Mars, Inc. produces Snickers, Twix, Bounty, MMs.
Attitude branding. This is a great strategy to consider. Companies like Nike implement attitude branding by bringing a personality andshow their particular style.
“No brand” strategy. This minimalist approach can bringexcellent results for your brand. The design of a logo and product itself is generic but straightforward and creative at the same time. A good example is the Japanese company, “Muji,” which translates to “No label” in English.
Brand extension. This particular strategy is used when a well-established company decides tocreate new products or services. The latest products or services will still carry the primary brand identity. For example, Fender had produced guitars and then extended its brand with the production of earbuds.
Private label. This strategy is widely used among supermarkets. For example, Walmart sells products at a more reasonable price to beat competition from larger, well-known brands.
Crowdsourcing. In this case, it’s up to the public to support your brand's creation. For example, supporters are actively involved increating the name of yourbrand. This approach allows you to carefully follow your customer’s preferences and drive their interest in a product.
Each of these marketing strategies can promote your brand and makeyour products successful.
How to Develop an Effective Brand Marketing Strategy
Establish your company vision
Identify the target audience
Stay consistent
Draw real emotions
Brand strategy is a crucial part ofyour overall marketing plan as it helps to establish sustainable relationships with customers and make them choose your brand.
If you want to establish a well-running business and create an effective brand strategy, there are a few things to consider.
Before you define your brand, you have to answer several questions that will help you make the right decision:
What is the primary mission of your product?
What are the main features that set you apart?
Who are your customers?
What do they already think of your product?
What are the main things you want customers to associate with your brand?
Now that you have answered these questions,you should have a better idea of how to design your brand strategy.
Here are the main tips that will make your brand strategy highly effective.
Establish your company vision.Create a list of features or characteristics that you want your brand to be known for. Come up with a strategy that will communicate these characteristics to your customers through various marketing channels.
Identify the target audience. Brand marketing will be successful only if you determine your target audience correctly. Identify your audience, not just by their underlying demographics. Dig deeper, consider details, and try to define their psychographics as well.
Stay consistent.You must come up with a recognizable name, logo, colors, and communication style with your customers. Consistency is the key to creating and maintaining reliable brand recognition.
Draw real emotions. It’s obligatory to establish an emotional connection with your customers. Provide the best service possible, care about your customers' satisfaction, and create marketing campaigns that will evoke emotions. Creating an emotional response is vital for your success and to establish brand loyalty.
How to Improve Your Brand Marketing with LIKE.TG
Nowadays, there are a lot of tools and services that facilitate all marketing activities, including brand marketing. The main reason to do this is to advance all the processes, make them more productive and cost-efficient. Here LIKE.TG proves useful.
With this service, you will be able to establish effective communication with customers, let them stay up to date with the latest news, and promote loyalty through compelling email campaigns and messages in social media.
Creating adaptive email campaigns has never been more comfortable with LIKE.TG. Tell your customers about the forthcoming seasonal sale or announce a new feature launch. Drag and drop editor allows creating an email easily and fast. Make customized eye-catching email designs, send it to your target audience, and track your performance through analytics.
Moreover, LIKE.TG allows marketers to create a chatbot forFacebook Messengerand Telegram app that you should try out. With this outstanding feature, you will be able to provide automated customer support that will imitate live communication with company representatives. Your customers will be satisfied with instant responses to their queries.
Brand Marketing Example
We have mentioned some brands and their general brand marketing strategies. The most prominent example, Nike, was established 55 years ago. Now Nike is known all over the world, and the company brings more than $35 billion in yearly revenue. Customers continue to choose Nike, despite having many other options, because of their superior brand marketing.
Nike's logo is known everywhere and is instantly recognizable. Nike creates high-quality sportswear and shoes and knows how to make customers want to buy their products through effective brand marketing.
Nike’s brand strategy was defined long ago. Their website, customer support, marketing activities are top-notch. In their brand marketing campaigns, they often involve a particular personality to speak to customers’ emotions. Nike's personality is open about failures, struggles, and the ways they overcome all the hurdles related to sports. Through various kinds of visual marketing such as promo videos, banners, ads, Nike drives sales.
This approach is hugely motivating for people, evokes sheer emotion, and spurs customers to cope with challenges while choosing their brand. This what you need to strive for. Consistent, motivational, and emotional content that makes people believe and trust a manufacturer and stay with their brand for years.
The importance of brand marketing for your business's success is undeniable. It’s recommended to take care of it in the early stages of product development to build a brand that will be recognized by customers forever. By implementing these tips, you will be one step closer to creating an effective, sustainable, and memorable brand image. Raise brand awareness, boost loyalty, and be ready to harvest success.
Brand recognition
Brand recognition is a concept that defines a customer’s ability to identify a particular company based on its visual assets like logo, slogan, packaging, style, or colors. With brand recognition, a brand can obtain higher customer loyalty, advertising effectiveness, lower price sensitivity, and more word-of-mouth.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance and benefits of brand recognition and explore howit differs from brand awareness. We’ll also uncover seven strategies to increase your brand recognition and ways to measure it.
Why is brand recognition important?
If you aim to keep your brand in consumers’ minds, improving your brand recognition is crucial. Marketers of different companies often come up with various visual and audio clues to make customers recall their brands. They create the world’s most recognizable packaging like Tiffany and Co., famous symbols like McDonald’s Golden Arches, and memorable slogans like Nike’s “Just Do It.”
If a brand’s value has a direct connection with consumers, it shows that a company is moving in the right direction. For example, when consumers think of soda, the first brand that emerges in their minds is Coca-Cola. When customers remember a brand, it means that they are more likely to buy its product. As a result, a company obtains a significant sales volume and a bigger market share.
Both startupsand big corporations are ready to do all it takes to develop a brand recall since it brings the following benefits:
increased customer trust;
reduced price sensitivity;
improved brand equity;
better user experience;
higher sales volume;
increased revenue;
bigger market share;
more conversions;
expanded customer base;
active word-of-mouth promotion.
Now that you know the pros, let’s jump into the next section to discuss how brand recognition differs from brand awareness.
Brand Recognition vs. Brand Awareness
Brand recognition refers to a brand’s visual and audio clues, such as logos, slogans, styles, colors, etc. These visual assets help people identify a certain company. For example, when people think of foam clogs to wear to a picnic, they instantly recall Crocs because of its logo, name font, unique design, quality, and bright shoe colors.
Brand awareness refers to the person’s knowledge that a certain company exists. If people are aware of the brand, it means they know that a company offers some products or services. For example, if people didn’t know about the existence of Samsung, they wouldn’t recognize its visual assets and wouldn’t buy its smartphones, laptops, TVs, tablets, etc. Check out our article to find out more about brand awareness.
The difference is that a person learns about the existence of a company first. After it happens, brand recognition appears. It shows that a customer can already identify a brand from its logo, colors, slogan, etc. Hence, the two terms are interconnected and represent two different stages of one process.
Now when you are acquainted with the basics, let’s walk you through some strategies to improve your brand recognition.
7Strategies to Increase Brand Recognition
Consider guest blogging
Improve your ranking
Think of running paid ads on social media
Implement influencer marketing
Conduct giveaways
Create podcasts
Leverage native advertising
There are many great ways to improve brand recognition, but we’ll unpack the most effective ones. They can help you connect with yourtarget audience, win customer trust, enhancebrand recognition, and make your company prosper.
Consider guest blogging
Creating a blog is a must-have for a company if you want to show your knowledge and expertise and prove that your brand is an industry leader. Providing users with informative and interesting blog posts allows you to improve your rankings. Ultimately, more and more people will be not only aware of your brand but also identify your visual elements.
If you want to reach a wider audience, try to foster guest blogging. Writing for other websites related to your industry enables you to boost traffic, increase domain authority, build customer trust, and attain new readers. By visiting your website, new users can get to know your company and recognize it in the future.
Improve your ranking
SEO is the best way to show the quality and usefulness of your website to users. Consequently, you can rank higher and be available to a wider audience of Internet users. By reviewing your SEO strategy and improving it, you have an excellent opportunity to advance user experience, win new customers, and establish your credibility and brand awareness.
Remember to produce evergreen contentso that both visitors and Google can appreciate your articles. You should also make sure that you post only unique and quality content. Try to publish and update relevant posts frequently, share infographics and informative videos, create quality links, and use alt tags.
Let’s search for an evergreen article.Below you can seea post that was published in 2011, but it is still relevant and has a high ranking on Google.
Think of running paid ads on social media
Now when the number of social media users amounts to 4.33 billion, using paid ads on social media channels is a wonderful idea. Especially when advertising through social media proves to enhance brand recognition. Besides, running paid advertising allows you to obtain more loyal customers, make more conversions, reduce marketing costs, and also obtain a higher ranking on Google. You can run your ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other popular platforms.
Let’s take Isla Ida, a company that sells sustainable bracelets, for example. The brand’s sponsored ad on Instagram introduces its bracelets made from shells, black tourmaline, pink quartz, etc. It makes viewers recognize the brand and order its products to support our environment. Conscious buyers will definitely appreciate the idea and remember Isla Ida.
Implement influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is extremely popular because of the positive results it brings to businesses. Brand awareness and recognition, trust, authority, credibility, andlead generation are only a few benefits it brings. With opinion leaders, big corporations and startups manage to connect with a wider audience, boost conversions, increase their following, and build long-term partnerships.
For example, Dua Lipa, a famous singer and opinion leader, promotes Puma, a world-known footwear manufacturer. For sure, the influencer’s audience will identify Puma’s renowned logo and unique design of sneakers. The photo and mentions encourage people to buy its products because of Dua Lipa’s recommendation.
Conduct giveaways
To increase the digital footprint of your brand, consider creating giveaways. By promoting such contests on your social media channels, you’ll be able to attract prospectsand increase your brand recognition. Digital platforms are a perfect choice if you strive to promote your product through giveaways, create buzz around your company, and attain new followers. Select an appropriate prize, think of your rules and conditions, and set the time frames to conduct effective contests.
For example, let’s take a giveaway on Mother’s Day from Olukai, a brand that creates sandals, shoes, and slippers. By becoming word-of-mouth promoters, new followers will be able to remember and recall Olukai’s visual elements and footwear.
Create podcasts
There’s no need to talk merely about your product. Say, you have a marketing company, so you can start with a podcast about product promotion. Find the areas you know best to share your knowledge and experience in your podcasts. By doing this, you’ll reach your audience, build trusting relationships, communicate your expertise, share some stories, give valuable advice, unveil some life hacks, or teach something. Remember, the more value you bring to your audience, the more they will appreciate, recognize, and recommend your brand.
Let’s take ACCA, for example. The company has a series of podcasts that contain helpful information for people who are interested in accounting.
Leverage native advertising
If you aim to effectively enhance your brand recognition, consider leveragingnative advertising. It implies ads that suit the form and function of a website where they are placed. By employing this type of advertising, you can improve awareness, increase click-through rate, and encourage more people to purchase.
Take a look at Fast Company’s website. You can see one of their native advertisements below. The ad is from CareerFoundry, a German company that teaches people how to become UI designers.
It’s time to find out the ways to measure how well customers can recognize your company.
How to Measure Brand Recognition
If you want to measure how well customers can identify your brand, there are two easy ways to do it, and we’ll show you how. By analyzing your audience and conducting surveys, you’ll know how well your brand is performing.
Unprompted brand recall. In this situation, you have to measure the number of people who think about your company without initial prompting. The main goal is to determine the proportion of customers who recall your brand when they think about a certain product category. Firstly, ask your consumers what brand comes to their mind when they hear about a certain product category. Secondly, calculate the number of people who can think of your company, and divide it by the total number of survey participants. Thirdly, multiply the number by 100, and obtain your metric.
Prompted brand recall. This approach implies showing your respondents some materials about your company to see ifthey can recall your brand. You need to create a list of brands (including yours) that offer products in the same category and ask customers to choose companies they are familiar with. The metric will show you how many people have heard of your and your competitors’ products.
In a nutshell, the concept is an essential part of each company’s growth. It sets the direction for the number of sales and profit and defines the market share a business can win. Hence, if you want to improve your company’s performance, follow our tips and strategies above.
Brand preference
Brand preference is a marketing metric that reflects the strength of a brand in the market. This indicator shows whether consumers prefer a particular brand over other brands from the same category.
Watch this video to find out about the three main components that drive brand preference, learn how to measure the success of your strategy, and how to become a preferred brand.
Why is it important to build brand preference?
Simply put, brand preference measures the level of consumer dedication to your company. If your clients don't consider any other brands to save money or break new ground, you've managed to build brand preference.
There are some other ways to measure this metric. For example, your store has run out of the top-selling product that your clients adore. Check whether they will look for the similar one among your competitors or wait until it's back in stock. Another option is to monitor your customers' reaction to a price increase. If it doesn't influence your sales volume, it means that clients believe your product is worth its price.
The formula is simple: the higher your brand preference, the higher your total sales. You know that your clients appreciate you if they don't leave you because of higher prices or temporarily unavailable items. You can achieve this with well-thought-out marketing campaigns, high-quality products, and excellent customer service. Brand preferenceis also crucial since it reveals your loyal clients and brand advocates.
Factors Influencing Brand Preference
Building brand preference is one of the goals each business tries to achieve because it goes hand in hand with brand marketing concepts. Brand marketing is a holistic approach that entails reaching several objectives to build long-lasting relationships and emotional connections with clients, resulting in high revenue.
Essential aspects that contribute significantly to building your brand preferences include brand awareness, advocacy, loyalty, equity, engagement, identity, and image. It may seem like a lot, but, again, this is a long-term game. As soon as you consider these factors while developing your brand marketing strategy, customers will have more reasons to choose your company.
High-level personalization, deep segmentation, and predicting customers' intentions based on their activities and engagement will eliminate the possibility of your clients' turning to your competitors. A thorough analysis of your clients' needs and preferences will provide you with the data necessary to create highly relevant and killer offers.
Now, let's take a look at practical tips that will help you build brand preference.
6 Tips to Build Brand Preference
Highlight your benefits
Create customer profiles
Analyze your customer behavior
Increase customer engagement
Support your client at each stage of their buyer journey
Build customer loyalty
In the previous section, we've mentioned the factors that influence the process of building your brand preference. Here we'll share the tips to master some skills to increase the number of repeat buyers.
Highlight your benefits. You should understand what makes your company stand out among competitors. Remember that clients don't usually look for brands or products — they look for solutions to their problems. Therefore, you need to define your unique value propositionand talk about the benefits you offer. To make this scheme work, you should research your clients' needs and preferences to grab some insights and seethe whole picture.If you genuinely believe in the uniqueness and value of your product, so will your customers.
Create customer profiles.They should include personal data about your customers that will help you understand them better. A customer profile usually consists of user gender, age, location, job, income level, and other important information. You can collect this data via subscription forms, CRM systems, surveys and polls, analytics tools, andemail campaigns. You can tell the users that this data will help you craft the most relevant offers and improve customer service.
Analyze your customer behavior. User behavior on your site and social media accounts can tell much about their preferences and shopping habits. If users add items to their shopping cart without buying, reconsider the design of your checkout because it may take too long to order. If customers contact your support team with the same questions every day, they probably fail to find the answers on your site. Consider paying particular attention to your site navigation, resources available, and FAQ section. If clients never return to you to purchase again, they may question your product quality. Contact them and ask for their feedback for you to improve your services.
Increase customer engagement.People love brands that engage with their audience on socials which is the key to building a powerful emotional connection. Consider creating polls and surveys to discover your followers' opinions about your products or services and sharing some behind-the-scenes via Instagram Stories. You can also tell your brand story via a Facebook post or encourage customers to share their feedback with your hashtag to collect UGC. At least, you can just ask your audience which kind of content they prefer. They will appreciate this move.
Support your clients at each stage of their buyer journey. Your leads won't buy your products immediately if they have difficulties with your service. Don't panic; it happens. Your task is to be one step ahead and predict these issues. Determine at which stage you lose leads, analyze the obstacles, and be proactive. A well-thought content marketing strategy will help your leads eliminate possible problems. Offer them how-tos, checklists, reminders, video guides, and demos to realize how things work. Let your sales manager or customer retention team consult clients individually to understand them better.
Build customer loyalty. Loyal customers shop regularly, spend more on purchases than first-time buyers, and are a great source of word-of-mouth for your brand. They will definitely share their positive experience with friends and colleagues and, as a result, bring in new customers. To attract more devoted clients, you can hire more customer care agents, create a loyalty program, offer VIP tiers, collect customer feedback, optimize your efforts accordingly, send triggered emails, and segment your audience. Your efforts will pay off with high revenue and a strong brand reputation.
Now you know why building your brand preference is a must for each brand. Keep in mind the tips and make use of LIKE.TG marketing services to communicate with your audience effectively across almost every channel.
Brand strategy
A brand strategy is a company’s strategic plan that includes specific goals and helps marketers shape a certain image in customers’ minds. It allows a brand to generate more conversions, increase its value, and dominate the market.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of a brand strategy, its key components, and examples. We’ll also make the difference between a brand and marketing strategy clear and figure out how to build a brand strategy.
Why is a brand strategy important?
Every business owner who strives to grow a successful company needs to develop a strong brand strategy. With its help, businesses identify long-term goals and the type of company they manage. After setting key targets, entrepreneurs move towards their achievement and track their progress. A comprehensive brand strategy keeps them updated on whether they move in the right direction.
A brand is about intangible assets of a company that make it competitive in the market and worthy for customers. If you create an excellent strategy, you’ll generate customer loyalty, increase sales, and establish a good reputation and position within the market. People have positive emotions and thoughts associated with a specific company, generating purchasing decisions. As a result, brand equity increases.
You can reap many benefits after implementing a thoroughly developed brand strategy. It enables you to convey the core values of your company to the target audience. Establishing customer loyalty, trust, and credibility requires you to provide seamless experiences. So when you see some drawbacks, you’ll eliminate them.
A well-developed plan is a must for any company seeking to reach its goals efficiently. With its help, you’ll get away from ideas that can hurt your brand and its reputation. You’ll focus only on successful initiatives that bring profit to your business.
Now that you clearly understand brand strategy’s importance, let’s compare brand and marketing strategy to prevent any confusion.
Brand Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
Although these two terms are related, they are still different. We’ll review the description of each in detail to avoid confusion about brand and marketing strategy.
A brand strategy is a term that embraces a company’s reputation, products, and services it offers. The strategic plan includes the brand’s value, market position, purpose, vision, and ideal customer. These points are necessary for the company’s teams to work in one direction and make the right decisions. Besides vision and purpose, a brand strategy entails a brand’s long-term goals. To achieve success, the company’s team gets a good market position, provides customers with value, creates a consistent message, and develops initiatives.
A marketing strategy is a roadmap that outlines a company’s methods to convey the key message to the target audience. The essential components of a marketing strategy include digital marketing, content strategy, advertising, PR, and more. The strategy can change based on the information a company’s team receives. Customer data, budget, and trends can influence the plan and change its tactics.
Now that you know the difference, let’s walk you through the main components of a brand strategy so that you can clearly understand its fundamentals.
6 Key Components of a Brand Strategy
A comprehensive brand strategy consists of 6 key components. It’s time to review them to guide you through the strategy development for your business. Let’s dive in.
Consistency. Companies stick to consistency to align every step with their brand message and strategy. If a business is consistent with its message across different platforms, it gains brand recognition and drives customer loyalty. Every action a company takes must be harmonious and well-planned. Be consistent in your brand voice, tone, colors, and content you communicate.
Purpose. The most fundamental thing behind your business is your brand purpose. You should know the reasons why you’re in this business. Once you find it, you should convey it to your team and customers. Earning money isn’t the only target of your company. There should be a greater cause. After identifying a clear purpose, you’ll receive higher ROI, have a bigger sales volume, and attract more customers.
Flexibility. To keep customers interested and remain relevant, companies should be flexible. Brands develop unique and creative marketing campaigns to draw consumers’ attention and stay competitive in the market. However, they still need to remember about consistency which sets standards. Flexibility allows adjusting to the needs of the target audience. So if a brand’s old methods don’t work with the audience anymore, it’s time to change, try new methods to approach customers and make them happy.
Emotion. Many customers rely on emotions rather than use rational thinking. That’s why many companies choose to appeal to sensations. Being a part of like-minded people means a lot for connoisseurs of a certain product. Since people often strive to build relationships and be closely connected to others, companies need to establish emotional connections with customers. As an option, they can create communities to achieve them. If brands succeed in making consumers feel at home, they will drive loyalty.
Loyalty. If customers demonstrate dedication, brands should reward them. Customer loyalty is worth the reward since it helps generate positive feedback, comments, and recommendations. Loyal clients can act as brand ambassadors and promote a company. Brands thank these customers by writing personalized emails and providing them with special offers, gifts, and discounts.
Competitive awareness. Nowadays, the competition within industries is high. Knowing rivals and their methods will be very useful for a business. Brands explore the approaches that succeed and fail. It’s necessary to outline future tactics. This way, a company can improve its strategy and bring more value to customers.
So now that you know the key elements, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create a brand strategy for your company.
How to build a brand strategy?
A strong strategy is everything for the success of a brand. You need to have a unique identity, quality content, and consistency to reach customers and foster customer loyalty. Since a brand strategy means a lot for a company’s success, we’ve prepared several steps you should take to reach your long-term goals.
Identify mission, vision, purpose, and values. Every brand has a set of principles and beliefs it carries through its existence in the market. Mission, vision, purpose, and values can help you obtain customers and encourage them to stay with your company. You need to create statements that clarify your purpose and values. Answer questions that will enable customers to understand your mission and vision.
Define your brand essence. You need three key elements for your brand strategy: personality, voice, and tone. To identify your brand personality, you need to find human characteristics for your company. Your brand can be exciting, cool, sophisticated, luxurious, active, etc. Besides, personality should reflect your values, mission, and purpose. The next step is to identify your brand voice, the way you’ll speak to your target audience. It should be unique and recognizable. With the tone, you convey your attitude towards customers. It can be respectful and friendly. It encompasses words, phrases, writing style, and the emotional tone you choose to communicate with your customers. Lastly, tailor your messaging to convey your value and who you are.
Work on your visual assets. Most customers rely on visual associations when they think of a brand. That’s why your company needs a visual identity. It includes a logo, colors, visuals, and font. These unique assets represent your brand and differentiate it from competitors. A strong visual identity will help you create an emotional impression and connection with your customers and update them about the product you provide.
Develop guidelines. This step is necessary to write rules for those who create content. A brand guideline is especially useful if you work with freelancers. With its help, they will understand your goals, ways to create content and communicate with the target audience. You’ll control consistency across teams and ensure the quality of content they make.
The steps are clear, so let’s review some excellent examples to unveil how the strategy works in real life.
Examples of a Brand Strategy
There are many excellent examples of brand strategies with unique approaches. Some focus on creating a brand vision that talks to consumers, while others focus on developing personalities that resonate with the audience. Let’s now consider several most outstanding companies and their brand strategies.
Amazon
Amazon takes things seriously and gathers all efforts to establish a strong brand positioning. The famous e-commerce company took care of the features that differentiated it from dozens of others and allowed it to stand out from the huge competition. Now customers choose Amazon for its fast delivery and seamless customer service.
Tesla
Tesla is a super modern company that carries a higher purpose. It produces electric cars and promotes sustainability. You can find out about the company’s mission in its purpose statement. It mentions efforts aimed at bringing the world towards sustainable energy.
In a nutshell, a brand strategy helps you keep all your steps organized. With its help, you’ll reach your main targets faster and more efficiently.
Brand management
Brand management is the process of using a brand's logo, product design, pricing policy, and adcampaigns to boostits perceived value. It helps establish strong brand awareness, obtain loyal customers, build a positivebrand image, gain brand recognition, anddrive revenue.
In this article, we’ll explorewhy you need brand management and howyou canbenefit from it. We’ll alsoexplain the difference between brand management and marketing anddiscover 7 effective brand managementtips.
Why is brand management important?
Companies like Adidas, Burger King, and Apple have managed to reach lasting success through effective brand management. These brands were able todevelopsuccessful design and marketing strategiesand create outstanding brand personalities.
Brandingenables owners and customers to differentiatebetween variouscompanies' products, increasing customer engagement and influencing the competitive environment. If your brand is well-positioned in the market and is in demand among customers, it means that it brings real value, withstands the competition, and actually stands out.
Startinga company isn’t enough— you should constantly maintain your brand image.This is exactly where brand management comes into play. Business owners implement this techniqueto achieve strong brand awareness, consistent brand messaging, a good market position, high sales volume, and great profits. Besides, brand management helps evaluate and supervise brand equity.
To reach your audience and drive revenue growth, you need to stand out among competitors and provide customers with superb and consistent experiences. You’ll be able to do it if you implement strategies aimed at effective brand management. Managing a brand requires you to understandyourtarget audience andyourcompany’soverall vision. Brand managers use tangible assets to establish positive associations with a company andquality customer interactions. However, intangible properties like customer experience and emotional connections are to be reckoned with as well, as they can boost customer retention.
Now that you knowwhy you should carry out brand management strategies, let’s dive into the advantages this process can bring to your business.
Brand Management Benefits
Brand management consists of a huge number of processes that are vital for every company. No matter your brand's size, age, and industry, it’s a must for lasting success. Let’s now review the benefits you can reap once you work on your brand management:
customer loyalty;
brand recognition;
brand awareness;
revenue growth;
enhancedproduct and brandvalue;
higher product prices;
largersales volume;
trust, credibility, and authority;
strong market position.
Now that thepros of this tactic are clear, it’s time to compare brand management and marketing— the two terms are often confused.
Brand Management vs. Marketing
Brand management and marketingoftenimplementsimilar strategies and techniques to achieve their goals, so let's talk about the main dissimilarity between the two.
Brand management aims to create a perfect brand image that customers will perceive well. Brand managers do everythingin their power to align their company’s product with consumers’ needs and desires. They implement brand awareness strategies, assess whether customers perceive their brand’s image positively, track sales progress, and create sales and marketing strategies todrive revenue.
Brand management means building an excellent reputation, positive brand image, high brand equity, and healthy customer relationships. It’s about your brandvalue, how youcommunicate it to your target audience, and the emotions it evokes in consumers.
Marketing aims to present a brand toits target audience. Marketers don’t focus on brand voice, image, and personality. They develop strategies to reach prospects, present a product, and encourage purchases. Marketing teams search for the most appropriate marketing channels to communicate their message to potential customers and sell more products. Marketers work hand in hand to convey information abouta product and its value correctly. Their responsibilities also include tracking and analyzing demand fora product or service.
Now that youhave a clear understanding of these two widespread terms, let’s take a closer look at 7 tips that will help you manage your brand effectively.
7 Tips for Effective Brand Management
Brand management is a multifaceted process— numerous tacticsare at play to ensure that it runs smoothly. We’ll unveil how to implementyour brand managementstrategy effectively with these simple tips.
Establish groundrulesfor your team. Come up withguidelines to ensure your team runs at full capacity. You should structure your brand data andmaterialsand explain howthey should be presented to your target audience.Take the time to develop and round upyour brand assets, including alogo, design, fonts, images, symbols, names, etc. Once you establish your rules and guidelines, make sure that every person in your company has access to them. You should also assignparticular roles to your team membersandexplainwhat departments can useyourbrand assets and for what purposes.
Create a unique brand strategy. You need a long-term plan to develop your business and establish a positive image and reputation among consumers.Your strategy shouldbe clear abouthow your company should communicate your brand message. You should know how, where, what, when, and towhom to convey it.Analyze youraudiencebeforehand to figure outyour brandmessage.
Pay attention to customer experience. Think of the perfect customer experience you can provide to meetyour strictest clients' needs. Strive to understand customer behavior and make improvements to eliminate both existing and potential issues. To establish an outstanding brand with a strong presence, you should focus on your customers and their buyer journeys. Building good relationships with consumers isn’t as easy as creating a logo— this process takes time and effort, but the result will justify the means.
Make customers your top priority. A huge number of companies in the world reduce your chances of success. You have to stand out to achieve your goals. Customer centricity and excellent service help brands attract more attentionand become customers’ favorites. You need to find an approach and solution for every customer. There’s nosingle solution for all anymore. Remember, the best way to stand out is to provide a personalized experience tailored to each customer's individual needs.
Keep your brand assets together. Accessibility and transparency are also crucial for a company’s efficiency. Be ready to centralize all your assets and allow employees to access them. Once your assets are centralized, you’ll identify the gaps and figure out what you need to add or update.
Use one brand style for your content. There are so many brands, and people feel overwhelmed with advertising clutter every day. You need consistency across all channels to make people recognize your company. Using one brand style enables you to communicate your unique brand voice. Clear and concise messaging, quality content, and consistency across communication channels will enable you to gain trust. With a style guide, all departments canwork in the same direction and create consistent content.
Encourage collaborationamongdepartments. Encourage teamworkamong different company departments. This will ensure seamless workflows and faster goal achievement. While collaborating, different teams can discuss new strategies in real time and agree to implement the best of them.
Keep up with the latest trends to stay relevant. Consumers’ demands and requirements change fast, so you need to be ready to adapt. As the trends evolve, your product should evolve too and become more innovative and up-to-date. As a result, your company will stay relevant and one step ahead of competitors.
A visible and recognizable brand is one of the keys to success. However, it’s often a challenge for business owners to maintain a leadership position in today’s increasingly competitive market. Customers expect brands to be transparent, credible, and customer-oriented. Companies should sustain consistent brand voices across different communication channels and carry value.
Brand platform
A brand platform is a marketing document created to describe the distinctive features of a brand both ideologically and visually. It is essential to form the holistic image of the business and provide a unique offer for the target audience.
In the article, we will explain why a brand platform is important, highlight its components and describe ways to create an effective marketing platform.
Why is a brand platform important?
According to Smallbiggenius, 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their values. Discover how the brand platform helps to develop trusting relations with the customers, increase brand loyalty, and sell more.
This document aims to provide effective business management, find a certain niche in the market, and raise income by attracting customers. Let's look closer at all the advantages of a brand platform.
It helps your business create a clear message. A brand platform makes all the components of a brand identity and marketing actions coherent. It creates strong associations with a brand and provides a clear position in the market.
It helps stand you out from competitors. Companies with effective brand platforms attract more customers because they have something unique and provide an amazing customer experience. A well-defined platform helps you send strong messages and evoke certain emotions that resonate with the audience to boost your brand in a competitive environment.
It helps expand the market share and find new ways to develop. A brand platform gives a clear understanding of the brand’s values, and you can use it to create a marketing plan that will make the product less prone to temporary changes. Moreover, a well-defined brand platform can show you unexpected ways to expand the product line and find directions for development on the market.
It provides efficient communication among the company's staff. Business owners with a strong brand platform can always give detailed guidelines for employees. This document provides a clear corporate vision and explains the purpose of the company's work. It helps motivate employees and unite them around common values. Using a brand platform, you can also attract collaborators with the same values as yours.
Now you understand why a brand platform is so important. Continue reading to discover its main components.
Brand Platform Components
Creating a brand platform can become the first step in building a successful brand or boosting your company in the market. Below there are the main components of a strong brand platform.
Purpose. What is the reason for your brand’s existence? What impact do you want to have on the world? Highlight the brand's main aim and the smaller goals.
Target audience. There can be a few groups of customers. You should define their needs, pains, interests, and values.
Values of the brand. They should be similar to the target audience’s values. What is important for your brand, what topics concern it?
Personality. Imagine that your brand is a person and think about its main human traits. It might be a good idea to give your brand qualities that your target audience value.
The tone of voice. It should include characteristics that shape your brand’s messages. Think about phrases and the way of presenting information that will differentiate your brand.
Unique proposition. Highlight the advantages based on the functional characteristics of the product and the amazing customer experience that distinguish your brand on the market.
The name of the brand, its logo, slogan, packaging of the product, and all other elements that you develop based on the brand positioning.
The brand platform can also include key functions, corporate values, brand history, and its marketing strategy. Continue reading to discover how to build a strong brand platform and make all the components clear to your employees.
How to build a brand platform?
Creating a brand platform can take weeks and even months of work. However, you can make this process faster and easier by following all the steps below. Discover how to develop a well-defined brand platform in this section.
Research the market. Conduct market research to discover your target audience, direct and indirect competitors. Firstly, think about people who buy your product. Create an image of your ideal clients and think about how you can persuade them to choose your brand. Secondly, identify your niche and take a look at the companies which already sell something within it. Gather all the information about the competitors, check their websites and social media, and then highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Do a SWOT analysis to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to develop a company's competitive strategy.
Create a brand's philosophy. Think of your brand’s purpose, values, unique proposition, and personality. All these components should resonate with the values and needs of your target audience, and reflect their way of life. Write down a list of adjectives to describe a brand as a real person. Think about the benefits you can provide to your audience.
Define a visual language and tone of voice. Visual language and tone of voice should correspond to the philosophy to create a holistic image of your brand. Choose the main types of content you use in marketing campaigns, define main colors and develop the brand's style. Then think about how you will communicate with the audience. This step will help you create strong associations with your product in the customers’ minds.
Choose the right business name, create a catchy slogan and an attractive logo. These are the first three elements that new customers pay attention to when meeting your brand. Your name and slogan should be memorable and easy to pronounce. Try to capture the values of your brand in these few words. Your professionally designed logo should reflect a brand personality.
Make a brand platform work. Now you are ready to apply a platform to your company. It is important to review it regularly, make changes, and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Make your employees read the brand platform in order to inspire them to work further.
Congrats, now you know all the main information to build your successful brand platform. Use this document to boost your company on the market.
Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty is a customer’s attachment to a certain brand or product and their tendency to make repeat purchases. It also includes consumers’ positive emotions and feelings associated with a company and its word-of-mouth promotion.
In this article, you’ll get to know the importance of brand loyalty, explore its benefits, and compare brand and customer loyalty. We’ll also reviewseveralstrategies, metrics, and examples to help you improve your brand loyalty.
Why is brand loyalty important?
Business owners allocate their marketing and customer service resources to ensure the best customer experience. This way, they try to build brand loyalty with a certain product or service and maintain good relationships with consumers. Clients loyal to a particular brand will buy from it without considering purchasing from competitors. They can buy products they need even at a higher price.
Since there are hundreds of options available for customers both online and offline, your company needs to be the best option for them. If everything goes well, brand loyalty enables a company to grow its customer base and encourage consumers to refer friends. Brand loyalty allows companies to establish emotional connections with customers and make customized offers. Everything is built on trust, which means that companies shapetheir reputation for years to make people choose them for credibility, quality, and innovation.
Brand loyalty is critical for the long-term efficiency and success of a company. By boosting brand loyalty, business owners can obtain the opportunity to increase their constant profits, reduce expenditures, and improve sales volumeand the number of repeat purchases.
Now let’s consider the main benefits of brand loyalty.
Benefits of Brand Loyalty
It’s pivotal for companies to make the best offers since loyal customers contribute to their business development. The pros of brand loyalty are as follows:
reduced expenditures on customer retention;
word-of-mouth promotion;
advantages over competitors;
new leadsand customers;
increasedbrand value;
customers who stay with a company for a long time;
brand recognition;
positive associations and emotions.
Now that you know all the pros, it’s time to find out the difference between brand and customer loyalty.
Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty
Brand loyalty and customer loyalty start to form when people have a good experience with a brand, positive emotions, and associations. However, there’s a slight difference between the two concepts, so let’s take a closer look at them.
Brand loyalty refers to the way consumers perceive a company. It also entails a customer’s attachment to a certain brand, emotional connection, and positive associations with a specific company. Companies implement different strategies to establish a positive image in customers’ minds and improve their brand loyalty.
Customer loyalty is about providing consumers with products and services that meet their demands and budget. To reach high customer loyalty, companies come up with discounts, special offers, and affordable pricing plans.
In a nutshell, if you provide consumers with a product or service that meets their expectations and has reasonable pricing plans, you’ll be able to increase customer loyalty. At the same time, it’s critical to develop trust to build brand loyalty. Customers who are loyal to your company will buy your product regardless of the price you offer.
Let’s explore our five effective strategies that will help you establish brand loyalty.
5Strategies to Build Brand Loyalty
Design a testimonial page
Provide the best customer service
Respond to customers’ comments on your social media profiles
Develop loyalty programs
Meet customers’ expectations
Building brand loyalty can often be challenging since it requires a lot of effort from a company’s team. However, it will bring positive word-of-mouth promotion, new customers, and significant revenues in the long run. Follow our five brand loyalty strategies to get started.
Design a testimonial page
If you want to become a leader in your industry and build authority and credibility, you need customers’ trust. Still, it takes a lot of time for customers to explore different products and choose one brand with the best quality. Consider creating a testimonial page and showcasing customers’ product reviews to help them decide.
Position yourself as an expert in the industry, maintain a positive reputation, and establish a unique tone of voice to communicate with your customers to earn their trust. Prove that your product is high-quality and your brand is reputable.
The example below demonstrates mHelpDesk’s customer testimonial page.
Provide the best customer service
To deliver an excellent customer service experience, you need to be friendly, polite, and respectful. Besides, your customer support reps should respond promptly. Good customer service needs a team of specialists who know a product well and are ready to listen to consumers’ problems and solve them. Build relationships with your clients: ask questions, explore social media profiles, or conduct a survey. These steps will allow you to provide customers with the support they need.
Respond to customers’ comments on your social media profiles
In order to simply ask a question about a product or service, customers often prefer to write a short message on social networks and receive a prompt reply. That’s why it’s crucial for you to track these messages and provide informative and clear answers as soon as possible. Apart from that, remember to monitor your company’s mentions on social media.
For example, Burger King answers customers’ questions on Twitter.
Develop loyalty programs
Many customers research available offers before purchasing. People look for flash sales, best deals, and reduced prices to save costs. That’s why you need to offer something more attractive, a loyalty program, for example. Give customers a special status when they comply with your conditions to encourage them to stay with your brand. You can provide themextra incentives, such as discounts, gifts, bonuses, and special offers.
For example, The North Face’s XPLR Pass loyalty program provides customers with exclusive access to limited-edition collections, rewards, gifts for birthdays, and a lot more.
Meet customers’ expectations
If you strive to become a favorite brand of hundreds or thousands of customers, you need to create quality products and keep your promises. Make sure to maintain a high standard of your products, customer service, and sales process and focus on your customers to make them stay with your brand for a long time.
It’s time to explore several metrics that will help you determine whether your brand loyalty strategy is effective.
4Metrics to Measure Brand Loyalty
To have a clear picture of your brand loyalty, you need to pay attention tothese metrics:
net promoter score (in a survey, ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to their friends);
repurchase ratio (the metric gives you an understanding of the number of customers who come back to repeat their purchase);
upsell ratio (the metric gives you a clear picture of customers who buy your new products and demonstrate trust in your company);
customer lifetime value(the metric helpsdetermine how much money a company can earn during the entire relationship with a customer).
Let’s grab some inspiration from the examples below.
Brand Loyalty Examples
There are dozens of great brands with high brand loyalty that implement successful marketing strategies. Next, we’ll explore some of them.
GoPro
The technology company famous for its high-quality video cameras is widely perceived as one of the best in this industry. The brand strives to be closer to customers through its website that contains user-generated content. It provides visitors with a sense of ownership. GoPro also entices customers to join its huge following of fans by growing its social media presence. The company rewards its social media contest winners with great prizes.
The MINI Cooper
The brand presents its vehicles as different from others. In a world full of cars that become bigger, the company decided to make its products smaller in size.
Congrats, now you know why brand loyalty is crucial for the success of any business. Make use of the strategies mentioned in this article to establish brand loyalty and assess it.
Brand image
Brand image is a set of associations that form consumers’ perceptions of a certain company. It is based on the people’s interactions with the brand and their beliefs about its personality.
In the article, we explain what brand image is and why it is important, compare it with brand identity, and provide some tips on building a strong brand image. We also give examples of brands with strong brand images.
Why is brand image important?
Brand image is the customers’ impression of your company that conveys emotional value. It consists of the brand’s personality, tone of voice, visual language, company’s values, products, pricing, quality of the service, etc., and the way people perceive all these elements. Smallbizgenius states that 89% of consumers are loyal to brands with the same values. These inspiring statistics show the importance of building a positive brand image. Discover more about its benefits below.
It helps increase brand recognition. A strong brand image evokes specific associations and makes people recognize the company better. It helps consumers remember a brand faster and, in such a way, saves costs on increasing people’s brand awareness.
It creates a strong competitive advantage. Most consumers choose goods based not only on their features but on the values that brands stand for. A positive reputation means that people are ready to pay more for the products to feel brand affiliation. It helps increase the company’s profits and market share.
It influences customer loyalty and retention. Trusting the company stimulates people to buy goods more often and recommend them to their friends and family. Also, consumers tend to feel positive toward new products. Moreover, a strong image of the company helps retain customers and reduce brand switching.
Understanding all these factors motivates many business owners to work hard on the image of their brands. However, building a strong brand image is impossible without developing a brand identity. Read more about the peculiarities of these two terms in the next section.
Brand Image vs Brand Identity
Both brand image and brand identity form the reputation of the company. They are similar, so sometimes it is difficult to understand the difference between them. Continue reading to discover how these two terms vary.
Brand identity describes the associations that marketers create to transmit the company’s values to the customers. You can control these characteristics and change them because brand identity is developed inside the company. This term is about how the business wants people to think of it. Usually, establishing the brand identity is a constant process.
Brand image describes the way consumers perceive your company in their minds. It is almost out of your control. However, you can influence this perception by transmitting certain values within your brand identity. Brand image is based on the existing experience of interactions. Sometimes, it can coincide with what marketers want us to think about the company, but sometimes it can be completely different.
Building a positive brand image may be challenging if you do not understand how to work with it. In the next section, we provide some tips on how to develop a strong brand image and make it coincide with the existing brand identity in the minds of your customers.
How to build a strong brand image?
Building a brand image can boost your company on the market, help attract more customers and increase revenue. Below we provide the steps you should go through to develop a strong brand image.
Create your buyer persona. Firstly, you should think about the people who will purchase your products. Discover their pains and needs, study worldview and buying habits. You can conduct interviews with potential clients or use questionnaires to collect more information. Segment these people into several groups according to their specific preferences and think about the brand’s qualities that will attract them.
Study your competitors. Understanding the pros and cons of each company on the market will allow you to develop a strong competitive advantage and avoid mistakes made by other business owners. Think about the ways to distinguish your brand from the others. Competitive analysis can also help you discover the trends in the sphere that you can focus on to develop cutting-edge products and stand out in the market.
Identify brand values. Oberlo states that 64% of people will buy from a brand because of its position on social problems. These statistics show how companies’ values influence consumers’ preferences. It is essential to transmit a clear position and be transparent to make customers trust you. A consistent realization of a well-defined brand mission helps companies build a strong brand image.
Develop a brand identity. Once you pick out your values, it is time to focus on the company’s tone of voice, visual language, and unique position. Describe all these elements into the brand platform to have a holistic image of the business’s ideology. Their combination will let you transmit the brand identity more effectively.
Focus on providing a positive customer experience. Now you should make your plans coincide with your actions. Your company will have a strong brand image if it broadcasts its position through every interaction. Moreover, a positive image of the business motivates your employees to work better for your company’s success. It is crucial because 73% of people continue buying from a brand when they receive helpful service.
Now you understand how to build a strong brand image and what you should focus on to make this process faster. Continue reading to discover companies with a positive image and get inspired to make your brand even better.
Brands with a Strong Brand Image
In this section, we describe three companies that most of us know and like. However, only a small number of people understand that they are so popular because of their strong brand images. Find out how they were able to achieve such success below.
Coca-Cola
According to Smallbizgenius, 94% of consumers worldwide recognize the Coca-Cola logo. These statistics are rather impressive, but they are not surprising. The company increased brand awareness through regular advertising campaigns and building strong associations. Its drinks are always perceived as joyful, positive, and cheerful. Coca-Cola has a consistent image of a friendly brand that always accompanies you in happy moments.
Look at the example of the Coca-Cola New Year’s ad in 2010. This one and their other videos always bring the holiday spirit and make people watch them again and again. People sing songs from their commercials every year before Christmas. Moreover, no one will miss the opportunity to take a photo with a legendary Coca-Cola truck and share it on their social media.
Nike
According to Wallstreetzen, Nike has a 51% market share in the segment of athletic footwear. This brand is known due to its successful collaborations and special projects. Nike's central values are sustainable innovations, dynamic development, and inspiration to reach its goals. The company has a clear mission and a strong identity that makes it the cult brand in the market.
Look at the advertisement for Nike’s Space Hippie sneakers. The brand is socially responsible, so it decided to reduce its carbon footprint while producing its models. Nike started to use garbage as a material for the sneakers. The result was awesome: Space Hippie became rather popular on the market. Also, this special project improved the reputation of the brand significantly.
Congrats, now you know what brand image is, why it is important, and understand its difference from the brand identity. You know how to build a strong brand image and use it to boost your company on the market.
Brand extension
Brand extension is a strategy where a company creates a new product category under its well-known brand name. It helps launch new products easily, obtain higher profit, reduce costs necessary to launch a new business, and meet customers’ needs and wants.
In this video, you’ll learn what brand extension is and how to leverage it.
Why is brand extension important?
Increasingly competitive markets make it impossible for a company to stay ahead if it doesn’t present something new to its target audience. Entrepreneurs consider brand extension strategies to increase their market share, become more innovative, and create a new product category. It’s a critical step that helps boost their business and engage new leads.
To successfully implement this technique, brands must study and analyze new trends. With the help of research, companies try to figure out the wants and needs of their prospective customers to create a product that will satisfy these requirements. Afterward, they strive to create a product that will be sold under an established company’s name and remain in high demand.
The process brings several benefits to businesses. Corporations obtain an increased brand image, save funds on the development of a new brand, use their costs on promotion efficiently, and gain more revenue.
With the help of brand extension strategies, companies can present products that their customers accept. Nowadays, the tactic is popular because businesses can assess their opportunities in new product categories, determine how relevant and appealing their brands are and define the resource requirements.
Now that you know the reasons why many firms use a brand extension, let’s review the advantages of this technique.
Advantages of Drand Extension
It’s worth noting that brand extension helps upscale your business in various ways. Since the number of competitors in the market is constantly increasing, brands should prepare multiple strategies to stay ahead.
Companies can create new products, provide better customer experiences, and present some innovations or new services to gain revenue. When you decide to extend your company and create a product or service, it can be related or unrelated to your business. Brands often leverage brand extension because it can:
help launch products in new categories seamlessly;
enable brands to meet their customers’ needs and wants;
allow companies to receive higher revenue;
reduce expenditures when launching and developing a new company;
encourage customers to try a new product from a trusted brand;
reduce the risks for customers because they can purchase different products from reliable brands;
help spend costs on promotion efficiently;
improve the overall brand image;
provide consumers with a greater variety of products;
enable brands to attract more leads;
help revive a company.
As you’ve noticed, there is a list of reasons why a company should consider implementing brand extension. Now let’s review the types of this tactic.
Types of Brand Extension
Product form
Companion product
Company expertise
Brand distinction
Brand prestige
Transfer of components
Leveraging a lifestyle
There are different ways in which companies use this strategy, so it’s time to walk you through the types of brand extensions.
Product form. It is when a company decides to change the form of an existing product. This allows a product to compete in a different category. For example, Snickers used to launch ice cream bars.
Companion product. Companion products are those that complement the main products. They belong to the same niche and relate to the original products. For instance, Colgate, famous for its toothpaste, also decided to release toothbrushes under its brand name.
Company expertise. This is when a company expands its production and designs a new product under an established name. Let’s take Fender, a brand known for its high-quality guitars. It extended its expertise to making earbuds.
Brand distinction.Companies are often considered unique because of the exceptional benefits or experiences they provide. These advantages are usually associated with a certain brand name. Therefore, marketers use such companies’ names to compete in new markets and extend their brand equity. Let’s consider Parachute, a brand name for a variety of coconut oil-based hair products. These goods are manufactured by Marico, a consumer goods company famous in India that produces other hair products.
Brand prestige. This strategy involves a brand that creates a product unrelated to the main company’s expertise. BMW is a great example. The brand, widely recognized as a corporation that produces luxury vehicles and motorcycles, started to operate in the apparel industry and produce watches.
Transfer of components. Sometimes brands try to use the successful elements of their old products in new ones. They strive to leverage this element and gain the same success. These components are flavor, ingredients, scent, and color. For example, Fanta, a brand that produces fruit-flavored carbonated soft drinks, has around 100 flavors worldwide.
Leveraging a lifestyle. Some companies present a particular type of lifestyle that can be conveyed through a particular way of living, culture, values, or interests. They possess certain traits customers find relatable. Companies can have different types ofbrand personalitieslike “sincerity,” “competence,” “sophistication,” and more. Let’s take Jeep, for example. The company presents an outdoorsy lifestyle and uses this particular image for other products, such as knives, tents, bicycles, etc.
It’s time to proceed to the differences between brand and line extension.
Brand Extension vs. Line Extension
Bybrand extension, we mean an established brand that creates a new product category that is assumed to meet the needs of consumers. In this scenario, a company heavilyrelies on its loyal customers,who will be glad to see more products from a trusted brand. With a successful implementation of brand extension, a firm can reach new demographics, acquire new customers, boost sales, and increase revenue.
A line extension is when a firm extends an existing product line. A manufacturer brings a new product to the product category that a company already manufactures. For example, a brand adds “Vanilla” or “Lemon” flavor to its cola line and creates a variety of available products.
Usually, line extension is associated with a product’s new scent, flavor, formula, color, and style in a current product line. The strategy is less risky than a brand extension as consumers are familiar with the product and will be eager to try it with a new twist.
Now let’s move to the next section to grab inspiration from our examples.
9 Examples of Brand Extension
Colgate
Apple
LifeBuoy
Sunkist
Dyson
Callaway
LIKE.TG
Fender
Google
If you consider extending your product category, check out our list of brand extensions that will inspire your own.
Colgate
A company famous for its toothpaste made a new useful product, a toothbrush that is complementary to the main product. It turned out to be a great combination. This move allowed Colgate to enter the toothbrush market.
Apple
Apple, a technology company that is known for its computers and phones, also used brand extension. You can find Smart Watches and MP3 Players designed by Apple.
LifeBuoy
LifeBuoy is a brand of soap marketed by Unilever. Over time, the company managed to enter other markets, such as the supply of sanitary towels and sanitizers that are always on hand. Now you can see LifeBuoy’s sanitizersthat are ready to ensure your daily hygiene on store shelves.
Sunkist
The brand is usually associated with oranges, health, and energy. The company decided to make the most out of it. Sunkist’s production of vitamin C tablets spawned the business of vitamins and supplements.
Dyson
The company started with manufacturing vacuum cleaners and household appliances but further extended its products to desk lamps. Now the brand is popular among young people because of the hairdryers, bladeless fans, and stylers it produces.
Callaway
Callaway is known for its golf clubs, yet not only for them. This company also manufactures and sells equipment for golf and accessories like bags, gloves, and caps.
LIKE.TG
Another excellent example of brand extension is LIKE.TG, an email marketing service. The company has also introduced two new products: CRMand landing page builder. Now you can automate your communication with customers and create a landing page or an online store.
Fender
The company, recognized as a manufacturer of guitars and amplifiers, now also produces earbuds. Their products bring dynamic and high-quality sound to their owners.
Google
We all know and use Google as a web search engine. Nevertheless, it’s not the only product from Google. The brand extended to hosted email services. Google Workspace empowers brands to access great digital products (Google Drive, Cloud Search, Google Meets, and more) anytime and anywhere and provides security of your information.
Simply put, when you have an established brand admired by customers and want to release a new product category, go ahead. It can bring many benefits to your business, such as increased profit and an opportunity to meet your client’s needs and improve your brand image. If you have an excellent idea for your new product that your audience will accept, give it a try.
Brand development index
A brand development index (BDI) is a ratio that shows the level of a brand's performance in a defined segment of customers. It indicates the relation between the total sales of a company and the population of a particular market, helping brands improve their marketing and advertising techniques.
Why is a brand development index important?
Companies use various marketing approaches to come up with the most appropriate budget allocation. By doing this, they try to achieve the main marketing aim — to reach the largest possible number of people with the help of advertising without making any unnecessary spendings. Brand development index is one of such approaches. It helps identify the relation between the total sales of a specific company and the population of a certain market.
Depending on the company's strategy, BDI influences the number of funds allocated to a particular region. This data enables businesses to tailor their marketing, advertising, and sales efforts because it gives them insights into where most consumers live. The index is usually associated with aggressive and defensive marketing approaches.
For instance, a brand with a defensive marketing strategy will invest more in the regions where the company is more popular (the brand development index is higher) to strengthen its hold in those areas. If the company uses an aggressive strategy, it'll allocate more money for advertising in the regions where the brand's products aren't trendy, and the BDI is low.
When a brand development index in a specific region is low, a company needs to improve it, for example, byallocating more funds for advertising to that region.
One thing is clear: BDI is essential for a brand's marketing initiatives. Let's make sure that you know how to calculate this index.
How to Calculate a Brand Development Index
BDI can be vital in developing audience segmentation, targeting strategy, and a company's positioning. It gives the measure of the brand with respect to its market and number of consumers. Below you can see a formula to calculate BDI for your business.
Note that the result obtained after using this formula should be a whole number.
Now that you know the formula to calculate BDI for your firm, let's explore the distinctive features of the brand development index and category development index.
Brand Development Index and Category Development Index
Companies calculate brand development index to qualify the relative performance of their business in a particular group of customers. You need to own such information as demographics or psychographics. As a result, you'll obtain data on strong and weak segments for specific companies. Besides, you can use this index to evaluate the presence of a company within a particular target audience.
Category development index defines the sales of goods' category within a market related to the average performance among customers. It helps companies receive information on the performance of a particular product category among certain customers and determine strong and weak groups for product categories.
When used with BDI, CDI is beneficial in any marketing strategy. It enables companies to access data necessary to allocate advertising budget to specific areas properly to maximize product category awareness and revenue.
Example of a Brand Development Index
Imagine that you need to obtain the BDI of Samsung laptops in one of the country's cities (further called city A). First, to get this indicator, you need to calculate their sales in city A as a percentage of their total sales in the country. Next, you compare it with the population of city A as a percentage of the country's total population. Then, use the obtained percentages to calculate the BDI for city A.
Let's say if the country's population is 50000, the population of city A is 10000, sales of the Samsung laptops in the country is 1000 units, sales of these laptops in city A is 100 units.
Let's proceed to the calculations to obtain the BDI of Samsung laptops.
BDI in city A = (100/1000) x 100 / (10000/50000) = 50.
Therefore, the brand development index of Samsung laptops in city A is 50.
Brand development index is an essential measure that can demonstrate your company's performance in different segments of customers. You can easily calculate BDI for your company by using the formula above.Understanding the index allows you to efficiently segment your audience, allocate resources to suitable regions, and so much more.
Brand consistency
Brand consistency is a vital component of any business. It implies perfect comprehension of your brand message by the clients.
Brand consistency is achieved if:
clients recognize your brand
clients are aware of your brand benefits
clients know what to expect from you
clients trust your brand
This is hard work for every marketer as it requires much work to be carried out. If your brand lacks consistency, customers won't manage to get the full image of it.
How to maintain brand consistency?
Work out the strategy
Define what makes your brand unique
Keep your brand identity
Keep your staff engaged
Monitor your brand image on the market
1. Work out the strategy
Brand strategy will help you both start off on the right foot and plan your growth for 3-7 years ahead. Without a well-thought strategy, you will fail to analyze the effectiveness of your work as you won't have a plan to stick to. It's the same thing with your customers — they will certainly feel these gaps in your business.
2. Define what makes your brand unique
When working out a strategy, define the significant benefits of your business that make it unique. Entering the market, you deal with competitors that already have something unique to offer. It's pretty difficult to lure customers away from them, so be ready to provide clients with exclusive benefits.
3. Keep your brand identity
Make sure that you deliver the same message via all communication channels. Stick to your brand design: use the same colors, fonts, and style throughout the website — for your logo, emails, and call-to-action buttons. It makes customers identify and recognize your brand.
4. Keep your staff engaged
First and foremost, make sure that your team understands your brand. If it is fully aware of what it does — there are more chances to deliver the right message to your audience. An engaged and interested staff works more effectively, hence, makes much effort to satisfy the clients.
5. Monitor your brand image on the market
Brand image refers to the perfect comprehension of your brand message by your customers. Regularly monitor what the target audience thinks about your brand, whether they understand it the same way as you do. Hold opinion polls, compare your clients' perception of the brand with yours, correct the strategy to improve your work.
Keep to these tips to maintain your brand consistency. Provide the best user experience!
Brand engagement
Brand engagement is the process of building and sustaining a commitment to a brand from its customers. This is one of the most important marketing goals for every business. It allows companies to constantly interact with customers and increase their brand loyalty.
Why is brand engagement important?
Building a strong emotional connection with customers provides several important advantages. Let's look at them in more detail.
It means high client engagement. This is the first and most obvious benefit of building brand engagement. A well-thought strategy along with a set of effective techniques will help you interact with users on social networks, messengers, and via email campaigns. As a result, you'll build a great community around your brand.
It allows companies to increase both customer retention and loyalty. If you take care of your clients' needs and preferences, ask their opinion about your brand, and do your best to ensure a positive user experience, you will certainly be rewarded. Customers will pay you back with their loyalty. As you know, it's a lot easier to sell to an existing client than to a recently acquired lead.
It helps boost sales. This benefit comes as a result of the previous point. The level of customer engagement directly affects the number of sales. Users buy not brands' products, but solutions to their problems, so the goal is to persuade a client that cooperation with this particular brand will bring them the benefits they want.
It facilitates the improvement of products and services. If a brand manages to build trusting relationships with its customers, it will result not only in high sales but in collecting valuable feedback. Clients are happy to help their favorite brands grow and improve. Your task, as a marketer, is to use various channels and techniques to interview clients. They include surveys, polls, quizzes, feedback forms, etc. You may reward customers for feedback shared with a discount or any other offer.
Now you know why brands invest a lot in building relationships with their community. Very often brand engagement and brand awareness go hand in hand. Let’s find out the differences between these terms.
Brand Awareness vs Brand Engagement
Both terms belong to the key concepts of brand marketing. This approach implies reaching several objectives each brand needs to pursue to be successful. They include brand awareness, brand engagement, brand loyalty, brand advocacy, brand equity, brand identity, and brand image.
Brand awareness comes first when designing your brand strategy. It requires marketing activities aimed at raising awareness of your brand. Potential clients should be able to recognize your brand among competitors and recall your products. In other words, if they find a need for a product they haven’t used before, your company's name should be the first to come to people’s minds. Brands invest a lot in advertising on various channels to achieve this goal.
After you build brand awareness, you should work on increasing brand engagement. Users need to be interested in your company to make a purchase. So, let them interact with you on several channels — let them know that their opinion matters. The higher your brand engagement, the better the relationship with your audience, resulting in more sales.
Now you know a lot about the advantages of building brand engagement, so it’s time to find out some effective techniques. We’ve shared a few tips below.
5 Tips and Examples to Increase Brand Engagement
Hold giveaways, contests, and polls
Organize events
Personalize communications with clients on different channels
Encourage user-generated content
Ask clients for feedback
Internet marketing opportunities are only limited by your creativity. A great variety of channels, content formats, and tools that are available today let every brand find the best fit for their audience. In this section, we’ll share proven practices that will help you boost your brand engagement.
Hold giveaways, contests, and polls
These content formats allow companies to skyrocket their engagement rates, bring in new clients, and increase sales. People enjoy interactive content as well as getting freebies. That is a win-win for both parties.
Giveaways are especially popular among young companies since they help build brand awareness and bring in potential customers. Motivate users to join your mailing list or share your brand with friends in exchange for an incentive. It can be a special offer, a discount, a free trial, or anything valuable.
Below you see a giveaway held on Facebook. The company encourages users to interact with the post to win a divan set.
Contests work almost the same way. Polls are popular on Instagram because they help brands increase customer engagement in posts and stories. Since users check stories first, they’re very likely to interact this way. Besides, it makes customers feel meaningful and lets brands discover their most active clients.
Check out the Instagram poll below. A wedding dress retailer asks its followers to choose their favorite shape for the back of a wedding dress. Then, the brand can use this information to promote the dresses users like or give a discount to increase sales.
2. Organize events
Event marketing is a sure way to promote a brand. Events help brands acquire new leads, build brand recognition and awareness, educate leads, and increase engagement. This is all possible with the help of both online and offline events: webinars, seminars, conferences, thought-leadership events, workshops, etc.
You can use a bunch of marketing tools to promote your future event. Send an event invitation email, create a landing page, promote events on social media.
With LIKE.TG, you can create a professional event invitation email for free without any technical skills. Our drag and drop editor allows users to use text, images, buttons, add videos, and design each element to their liking. Look at the process of creating a campaign below.
3. Personalize communications with clients on different channels
Personalizationis the key to building long-lasting relationships with customers. Clients won’t be committed to your brand if you know nothing about them and interact with your entire audience the same way.
To approach every user individually, make use of personalization and segmentation. The first tool allows marketers to use clients’ personal information to send targeted messages. This data can include name, gender, country, birth date, address, etc. Segmentation enables brands to divide their audience into segments and address each segment with highly targeted offers. You can create segments based on demographics, interests, preferences, buyers’ journey stage, purchasing behavior, etc.
With segmentation, you can provide a client with a highly relevant offer at the right time. For example, if a user adds an item to their shopping cart without buying, they will be added to a corresponding mailing list and receive an abandoned cart email. Incentivize them with a discount or free shipping to boost sales.
You can send triggered emails automatically according to predefined events. Automation 360 is exactly the tool you need for this purpose. It allows marketers to create events and an email will be sent automatically after a user performs the necessary action — books a hotel room, places an order, adds a product to the shopping cart, registers for a webinar, etc.
You can see an abandoned cart email below. The brand saves their customers’ picks andinvites them to go back to their shopping cart. To provide an additional incentive, the company offers a 15% discount.
Follow this step-by-step guide to creating an abandoned cart email flow with LIKE.TG.
4. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
User-generated contentmeans content created by the audience of your brand. It’s extremely effective since it helps promote your company, increase brand awareness and engagement, reach new potential clients, and works better than any type of content created by the company itself. People trust other people.
UGC can be anything — photo and video reviews, comments, participation in contests, and giveaways. Very often brands let their audience generate fresh ideas and win a prize for the most creative one. To make this strategy work, analyze both your audience and the most promising channels. Hashtags on Instagram and Facebook will help your content go viral.
Below you can see how Starbucks collects UGC. The brand encouraged clients to create a new design for their cups and share it on Instagram with the corresponding hashtag. 4,000 peoplw took part in the contest which definitely helped increase brand engagement on socials.
5. Ask clients for feedback
It’s hard to find any popular big brand that doesn’t collect their clients’ feedback. It helps companies not only better understand their customers, but find ways of improvement. You can reveal the weak points of your products and some issues with the customer support team.
Customers are pleased to share their opinion with the brands they adore. This way you’ll show that you care and appreciate the opinion of every user. Besides, you can reward those who really help your brand grow and improve.
Ask clients to leave comments on socials or product pages. You can also send a feedback request email in a week or two after the purchase. Check out below how Biscuiteers asks clients to share their thoughts on products in a review.
Now you have at least five effective tips to increase your brand engagement. It’s time to find out how to measure the achievement of this goal.
How to measure brand engagement
Everything depends on the channels you use and your short-time goals. If you put all your effort into social media, monitor the number of shares, reposts, hashtags, and mentions. Choose the necessary periods to have a clear picture of the performance of your strategy. Find out more about SMM KPIs in this article.
If you want to track user engagement on your site and particular pages, make use of analytics tools. Google Analytics provides businesses with reliable and accurate data on user activities on their site. In particular, you can discover the way users navigate your site, their interests, devices they use, traffic channels, and even real-time users. This information will provide you the insights on the most interesting pages and how users interact with your site.
If you communicate with clients via email campaigns, you should monitor email analytics. These metrics include email open rate, click-through rate, and conversions. Of course, there are many more indicators worth your attention, but these three influence your brand engagement mostly.
Your email open rate shows the level of engagement in general and how well your subject line reveals the topic of your email. The click-through rate indicates whether you managed to create a relevant offer interesting for subscribers. The conversion rate shows the number of users who performed the necessary action. It tells whether your email marketing efforts bring results.
You can also monitor high-quality backlinks and branded search terms. Use Ahrefs to track links and Google Trends to see how often your brand is mentioned.
Measure these important metrics to have a clear picture of the performance of your brand engagement strategy and be ready to improve it.
Congrats, you know pretty much about building brand engagement, so it’s time to outline your strategy. Make use of LIKE.TG tools to communicate with your customers effectively.
Brand differentiation
Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors.
Why is brand differentiation important?
Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit.
Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue.
In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy.
Let’s find out how to create one for your business.
5Brand Differentiation Strategies
Become an innovator
Choose a winning pricing strategy
Solve clients’ unique problems
Appeal to emotions
Deliver unique customer support
In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors.
Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted.
Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does.
Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product.
Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem.
Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid.
Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.
Brand identity
Brand identity is a set of visual components that represents a company’s ideas and allows customers to remember a brand and distinguish it from dozens of others. It helps shape consumers’ perceptions about a company, build loyalty and trust, and make a brand memorable.
In this video Anya explores the key strategies for building a strong brand identity, essential for businesses seeking to stand out in today's competitive market.
In this article, we’ll review the importance of brand identity, compare brand identity and brand image, unveil its elements, get to know how to develop a powerful brand identity, and see examples.
Why is brand identity important?
You don’t need to have a large market share and a huge customer base like other well-established brands. However, having a strong brand identity is critical if you want to receive such benefitsas customer loyalty, brand recognition, customer trust, and constant growth. It helps represent your brand’s values and personality and convey consistent messages across all marketing channels.
An increasingly competitive market makes brands come up with something new to stand out. By creating a powerful identity for your company, you’ll be able to find an appropriate position for your brand and create a unique design that people will recognize. As a result, you’ll improve yourbrand awareness.
Now that you know why brand identity is important, let’s dig deeper and compare the two terms that often evoke confusion.
Brand Identity vs. Brand Image
Brand identity is a set of visible elements like logo, design, and color that helps a brand stand out among its competitors in consumers’ minds. A business owner’s team selects a name, develops a logo, crafts messages and a certain way of communication, creates shapes and visuals, and uses colors to shape a specific image in the minds of consumers.
Brand image is the perception a consumer has about a particular brand after interacting with it. Simply put, it’s a result of a company’s team’s efforts to create a brand identity. If it is successful, they shape a positive image.
Now it’s time to walk you through the main components of brand identity.
Elements of Brand Identity
Brand identity isn’t merely a logo, it includes more components that you should consider.
Logo. Logos can be presented in the form of images, texts, and shapes that depict a brand’s name and purpose. Of course, a logo is the key element of a company’s identity since customers usually pay attention to it. You can also use a text logo (a distinct text-only typographic treatment of a brand’s name). More and more companies now choose text-only logos since they are easier to remember.
Font. Once you decide on your logo, you should think of the corporate font you will use on your website and in different marketing campaigns. Find an attention-grabbing and easy-to-understand font. The best fonts include Proxima Nova, TT Norms Pro, and Helvetica Now. They are used by famous brands like Spotify, Jeep, Bosh, Panasonic, and many more.
Style consistency. By mentioning style, we mean visual elements of your brand. You should be consistent when it comes to images and other visual elements on your website or in promotional campaigns.
Shape and form. One more essential component is a shape or form that represents your company and makes people recognize your product. Ensure that you have memorable packaging and an interesting form. For example, McDonald’s effectively utilized a unique element for promotion. Now the iconic “M” form is known all over the world.
Now when you are acquainted with the key elements, let’s jump into the next section.
How to Create a Powerful Brand Identity
Analyze your ideal customer, unique value proposition, and competitors
Come up with unique visual elements for your brand that reflect your ideas
Think of the language you use to communicate with customers
Avoid several negative practices
Monitor your progress
To establish a strong brand presence, you need to have a powerful set of visual assets. However, that’s not all. Check out the steps below to find out more.
1. Analyze your ideal customer, unique value proposition, and competitors
You need to conduct market researchto understand your audience, unique value proposition, and rivals. Firstly, make sure that you know your ideal customers and their needs. By understanding your audience, you will be closer to developing a product that people will admire.
Secondly, analyze your product and identify what makes you unique among others and allows you to stand out. To develop a successful brand, you should know the difference between your company and your rivals. Thirdly, create a clear mission statement that includes your vision and objectives.
For example, Mercedes-Benz is an exclusive brand that demonstrates the success of someone who has its products. The company communicates superiority and exclusivity. This strong brand reflects German precision, quality, and discipline. The company targets customers that are 25-45 years old and havehigh incomes. The brands’ clients value luxury and comfort.
2. Come up with unique visual elements for your brand that reflect your ideas
Once you do your market research, create a logo that combines your values and represents your product well. Remember, it helps customers recognize your brand and come back.
A logo is always included in online and offline forms of promotion:email campaigns, web push notifications, chatbots, posters, billboards, infomercials, commercials, etc.Trybrainstorming with your team to create something unique and easy to recollect. Besides, it’s also imperative to develop appropriate packaging and an interesting form.
Lots of women worldwide would recognize the product package from Tiffany Co. — a small but valuable blue box with jewelry. Now it has become the world’s most popular package.
3. Think of the language you use to communicate with customers
At this step, you need to connect with your customers. For this purpose, use the language that suits your brand personality. For example, if your company is laid-back, use conversational language. It’s essential to use the same tone across all marketing channels. Since people like storytelling, consider creating a story for your brand. It helps build connections with your target audience and evoke certain emotions.
4. Avoid several negative practices
It’s critically important to avoid several things when developing a strong identity. First of all, don’t communicate mixed messages to your audience so as not to confuse them. You should always know what to say and use the language and visuals that fit your company.
Secondly, be unique and innovative. Find ways to improve a product you want to offer or add something special. For example, provide customers with a new feature or better quality.
Thirdly and most importantly, remember to be consistent in your values, ideas, and messages. You need to stick to your plan and use the same colors, font, elements, and shapes when interacting with leadsand customers.
5. Monitor your progress
Finally, track your performance metrics to know if everything goes right. Consider leveraging Google Analytics, surveys, reviewing customer feedback on your product, and checking social media to get an understanding of how well customers perceive your brand. Moreover, surveys, reviews, and comments will help you figure out the areas that require some changes. This, in turn, will enable you to improve theuser experience.
Now let’s look at several examples.
Strong Brand IdentityExamples
Visual elements stay in the minds of customers long after purchase. Let’s discoverwhat famous brands do to achieve such success among consumers.
Coca-Cola
This brand is an excellentexample of a well-established company with a strong brand identity. When customers hear the company’s name, they probably have several associations with Coca-Cola. It can be its red logo, a polar bear, or its popular “Share a Coke” campaign. The drink evokes feelings like happiness and joy.
Fashion To Figure
The brand that focuses on selling women’s plus-size apparel has a powerful brand identity. The company has clear values and always tries to convey its central idea that fashion is for everyone. The brand’s motto is “Fashion is a state of mind, not a size range.” Hence, the company strives to provide its customers with the latest looks.
With a strong brand identity, you have a chance to reach the hearts of buyers and make them recognize your company. Make sure that it includes your values, ideas, a memorable logo, and colors that fit your product perfectly.
Brand experience
Brand experience is a combination of feelings and impressions consumers have after interacting with a company at different touchpoints. Positive experience helps establish an emotional connection and build long-term relations with the audience.
In the article, we explain why brand experience is vital and describe its difference from the customer one. Also, we provide ways to measure it using different metrics and improve it to boost your company on the market.
Why is brand experience important?
According to PWC, 65% of buyers think that a positive experience influences them more than a great promotion. These statistics prove that the emotions you evoke can be a powerful tool to improve your company’s performance. Study why brand experience is so vital below.
Consistent positive impressions let you create a strong connection between your company and potential clients. When target consumers get positive brand experiences at every touchpoint, they feel empathetic and loyal to your brand. It helps encourage them to purchase your products for the first time and reduces brand switching later.
Such people are more likely to trust your company and provide qualitative feedback. You can find out more about the audience's needs and preferences and align your efforts to meet their expectations. Also, consumers’ reviews will help you discover problems as fast as possible, fix them immediately and grow faster.
One more important point is that positive experiences lead to higher consumer engagement. Loyal buyers deliver 300% more value to the business over a year. Moreover, satisfied clients are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family. According to Semrush Blog, 78% of people talk about their recent positive experiences at least once a week, and 90% of consumers tend to trust a recommended brand. Consequently, you can attract new clients for free using word-of-mouth marketing by providing great impressions.
Understanding all these advantages motivates many companies to improve the impressions they make. However, it is vital to differentiate the brand experience from the customer experience. Continue reading to study the peculiarities of each term.
Brand Experience vs Customer Experience
Both brand and customer experiences concentrate on consumers’ emotions from interacting with the company. They influence each other and look similar, but brand experience is more complex and includes a customer experience.
Brand experience refers to the impressions of all consumers who have already interacted with your brand. They can be your existing clients, potential ones, or people who are just aware of your company. Sources of brand experience can vary from communication with your sales team to interacting with your promotions. Usually, marketers develop long-term strategies to engage consumers, build strong relations and create a consistent image of the company.
Customer experience is a narrower concept. It appeals only to existing clients of the brand and their emotions and feelings after the purchase. Improving the customer experience means delivering more value to consumers through the company's products and services. However, this concept doesn’t include impressions of potential clients after interacting with your website, social media, marketing activities, and other aspects before the purchase.
Now you understand the difference between these two terms. Tracking and optimizing impressions your company provides is essential to improving your performance. Go further to find out the ways to measure the brand experiences of your clients.
How to measure brand experience?
There isn’t one metric to identify the consumers’ impressions of your brand. Measuring brand experience requires collecting and analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. In this section, we give some tips on how to get a holistic image of the feelings and emotions you evoke in the audience.
Track Net Promotional Score (NPS)
Marketers use this metric to study buyers’ loyalty to the brand and the chance of word-of-mouth marketing. To identify NPS, you need to ask your clients to rate how likely they are to recommend your products to their friends and family. Usually, companies use a scale from 0 to 10.
NPS = (Consumers who rated as 9-10 — consumers who rated as 0-6) / total respondents * 100%
Conduct Customer Satisfaction Score Surveys (CSAT)
This metric lets you measure how satisfied your clients are with a company's products and services. CSAT helps measure consumers' attitudes to specific aspects of the brand’s work. Usually, respondents rate their satisfaction from 1 to 5.
CSAT = Satisfied clients / total respondents * 100%.
Analyze social media engagement
The two previous metrics help collect qualitative data and measure impressions of existing clients. However, studying the experiences of potential buyers may be more difficult. It is where social platforms play an important role. They allow you to collect qualitative and quantitative information, which can help you get a holistic image of the situation.
Firstly, you can use an insights overview to monitor trends in the number of followers, and the reached and engaged consumers and compare this data with the content you post. Secondly, social platforms let you track mentions and consumer reactions to the messages you communicate. Analyzing them will help you find out more about users’ experiences and interact with people to collect their reviews about your company.
Interview focus groups and collect customer feedback
This method helps you collect qualitative data about consumers. You can question different segments of your audience based on their stages in the sales funnel or peculiarities of buyer behavior. Such interviews will let you discover the impressions of both potential and existing clients.
Also, you should be attentive to consumers’ reviews. It is the easiest way to find out more about existing clients’ experiences, as they willingly tell you about the pros and cons of your company. To motivate customers to provide more feedback, you can offer a discount on the next purchase. In such a way, you will discover more about people’s impressions and how to make them better.
While measuring the experience your company provides, you will possibly find roadblocks and weaknesses in your strategy. In the next section, we give some tips on fixing them and building strong emotional connections with consumers.
How to improve brand experience?
According to Forbes, only 39% of business leaders state that their company resonates with potential clients. Such a small percentage highlights problems with giving positive impressions on the market. Find out how to improve the experiences of your buyers below.
Identify the values of your company and transmit them. To make your business resonate with consumers, it is necessary to understand their priorities. Some people consider their family the most important thing in their life, others are sure that a career is vital. Once you identify them, transmit your position through your branding, marketing activities, service, etc. Also, you can show that your company is socially responsible, as it will make buyers feel more loyal to your brand.
Develop the visual language and tone of voice. Identify your brand’s colors to help you evoke certain emotions. For example, yellow means optimism and happiness, while blue is about calmness or serenity. Once you choose the colors, develop visual elements, such as logos, packaging, signboards, cards, etc. Then think about the tone of voice that should align with the company's image. Use storytelling to engage people better.
Evoke emotions and affect certain senses. Emotional connection is the most important aspect of solid relations with consumers. Your brand should provide consistent experiences and create strong associations. It will let you become more memorable and raise people’s awareness and loyalty. One more important point is to influence consumers’ perceptions. This is what determines the rhythm of the music in stores. Think about how affecting senses will help you provide positive brand experiences.
Make consuming processes effortless and pleasant. Analyze your sales pipeline and find the touchpoints where too many consumers leak out. Then fix the problems and optimize the strategy so that people will be highly-engaged during the whole customer journey. Pay attention to the quality of your service. Create a chatbot for Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp for free using our chatbot builder to answer customers’ messages faster and better.
Personalize the brand’s messages. 70% of people state that a brand's understanding of their individual needs improves their loyalty. Segment consumers to deliver relevant messages to each group, make a good impression on potential clients and raise the satisfaction of the existing ones. LIKE.TG free CRM can help you collect consumer data to personalize content. You can manage all the information in one place and get in touch with buyers through the most convenient channels.
Provide helpful content. You can write articles with tips on how to use your products that will be appealing to existing clients and guides related to your industry that may be interesting to potential ones. Post accurate and interesting information in your blog or on social media. Such content will help you highlight your brand’s expertise. Moreover, such articles will let you grow organically by attracting already interested clients through the search engine.
Congrats, now you understand what brand experience is and why it is critical, can measure it, and distinguish it from customer experience. Use LIKE.TG services to improve the experience your brand provides and boost it on the market.
Brand building
Brand building is the process that implies using direct advertising campaigns to boost brand awareness, promote a specific product, establish connections and provide value to the target audience. It increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and brand recognition.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of brand building and the 7 steps to building a successful brand.
Why is brand building important?
A brand is a crucial asset since it helps shape a positive perception of your business in consumers’ minds. With its help, people become aware of your company’s values, brand personality, and mission. If you succeed to create a strong brand, you can reap the following benefits:
increased recognition;
high level of customer loyalty;
word-of-mouth promotion;
trust;
credibility.
Moreover, you can attract new leads and convert them into customers. People who share your values and mission will be interested in your product and ideas. Besides, it will also help you gather an excellent team of like-minded people. Employees who support your company’s values and principles will shape a dream team for future business development.
The most crucial aspect is that a strong brand can generate brand awareness, establish connections with the audience, and gain trust. Brand identity enables you to stand out, encourage customer loyalty, and increase your value among consumers.
Now that you know why it’s important to consider brand building, it’s time to delve into our guide to explore steps to build a successful brand.
7 Steps to Build a Successful Brand
Brand building can be broken down into seven key steps. Let’s review each of them in more detail to find out how to develop a successful brand.
Define your target audience and research competitors. Conducting a comprehensive analysis of ideal customers and competitors is a must for every successful brand. Direct your efforts to explore the market. You need to identify and describe your ideal customer and define the level of competition. To understand your target market and its needs, conduct a short survey to ask potential customers about the brands they prefer to buy. Besides, you can look through social media accounts of companies that offer similar products. Analyze their strategies to figure out the preferences of your potential audience.
Work on your brand personality. One company can’t be a perfect choice for everybody, that’s why it’s essential to create a brand that will be suitable for a specific audience segment. You need a clear brand personality to communicate your message and drive customers’ attention to your product. For this purpose, you should think of your positioning statement that covers your claim in the market. Besides, you need to determine your unique value proposition. It should be something significant your company can offer, and others don’t have. To become closer to your customers and establish strong connections, you should identify individual qualities that suit your company. This way, you’ll be able to communicate the feelings and emotions you associate with your business.
Decide on the business name. A brand is a vast concept that covers many different things. The brand name is essential too. Since the name of your future company influences your marketing strategies, logo, domain, and trademark registration, you need to choose a relevant and memorable name. It should be unique, easy to remember, and short. If you plan to expand, keep in mind that your company name should be broad, for example, if you want to create new product lines.
Choose a catchy slogan. You can use a slogan on your social media networks, business cards, and website. It helps describe your product and deliver the necessary message to the audience. A catchy slogan can hook customers’ attention and keep a specific brand in mind. It’s also critical for your brand identity and reputation.
Think of your brand design. Color scheme and font play an important role when you create a company. Using the same brand design across different marketing channels allows you to be more recognizable among customers. The design should visually represent your company. With the help of the right colors, you can communicate the necessary message and feelings.
Create a unique brand logo. The logo also belongs to the most important elements of a brand. A unique and recognizable logo enables you to make a strong first impression, serve as a foundation for brand identity, grab attention, and increase customer loyalty. Remember, a brand logo is the face of your company, and it should be outstanding for people to pay attention and memorize it. Once you develop a great logo, make sure to include it on your website, social media accounts, product, banners, all possible ads, etc.
Share your brand story. Apply your branding across different marketing channels to educate people about your company’s values. You need to tell people a brand story with facts and feelings to evoke emotions in customers and encourage interaction. Ensure that your mission and purpose are clear so that people can find out about your brand and values more and decide whether to become your customer. For example, TOMS, the famous footwear company, is widely known for its aim to improve lives. The brand contributes to people in need and donates shoes to children through charitable programs.
If you strive to connect with the audience and hook their attention, you need to have a strong brand and values. Once you succeed in building an outstanding brand, you’ll be able to increase awareness and drive conversions.
Brand attributes
Brand attributes are the brand’s traits that resonate with consumers’ personal characteristics and feelings. Examples include credibility, uniqueness, relevance, consistency, proper positioning, etc. They help a brand stand out among competitors and be recognized by customers.
In this article, we’ll make the difference between brand attributes and personality clear. We’ll also review the brand attributes list and examples and get to know how to define characteristics for your company.
Why are brand attributes important for your branding?
A strong brand with a set of essential brand attributes provides a unique value proposition and stands out from the competition. Customers appreciate competitive businesses and recommend them to friends. A business that offers excellent customer service, high-quality products, and a seamless user experience can attain brand recognition. Customers promote brands with positive characteristics to their friends and family. Brand reputation and credibility help business owners close more deals and win new customers.
Businesses with well-defined brand attributes empower marketers to choose suitable brand positioning strategies and develop a clear brand identity. Having brand attributes in place allows you to select the right marketing approaches and tools to market your products. As a result, marketing and sales efforts are aligned with your business goals.
Now that you know about the importance, it’s time to compare brand attributes and brand personality. Although the two concepts might seem similar, they still have distinctive features.
Brand Attributes vs Brand Personality
Since the difference between the two terms might evoke confusion, we’ll see each of them in detail. It will help find this difference.
Brand attributes are the traits that describe your brand. Credibility, relevance, consistency, and proper positioning are examples of attributes. Consumers see these characteristics when they look at your business as a whole without paying attention to the product you sell. Every company has hard and soft attributes. Examples of hard attributes include name, logo, slogan, website, product, vision, and mission. Uniqueness, credibility, and consistency are the soft attributes.
Brand personality is a framework that enables business owners to shape a specific perception among customers regarding their product, service, and mission. Brand personality evokes certain emotions and feelings and encourages emotional response that leads to purchasing decisions. Entrepreneurs believe that consumers are more willing to buy from a brand that has a similar personality to their own. There are different types of personalities: competence, sophistication, ruggedness, sincerity, and excitement.
Now when the difference is clear, let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to define attributes for your brand.
How to define brand attributes for your business?
If you hire a marketing agency to determine your brand attributes, you’ll see what to do. Let’s explore the process in detail.
Determine your brand culture. The brand culture of your brand combines psychology, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. These aspects impact brand behavior and brand experience and shape brand reputation. Brand culture influences the story of your company and the way team members work. Your company will bring significant returns if you successfully shape a strong brand culture. Your business can be knowledgable, smart, unique, or reliable. Conduct research to find out how customers perceive your company.
Identify attributes that describe your prospects. When creating a buyer persona, explore the characteristics of your potential clients. Identify their traits and individual preferences to provide them with a targeted offer. Your leads’ attributes should be positive like smart, organized, detail-orientated, ambitious, etc.
List the desired emotions of your clients. Focus on the emotions your consumers will have after purchasing your product. Make sure that your brand attributes and product will deliver value and positive feelings to your target audience. For example, people can be satisfied, happy, understood, etc.
Identify your brand voice. Brand voice is the unique way you represent your company and product to the target market. It can be elegant, inspiring, ambitious, exclusive, powerful, or strong. After you identify your brand voice, make sure to be consistent with your brand voice over various communication channels.
After going through these essential steps, you’ll have a long list of attributes. Choose the most appropriate words that will resonate with your customers’ traits, needs, and problems. To reduce the list and make the right decision, take one best word from each step. This way, you’ll be able to determine relevant brand attributes for your business.
Now that you know how to find attributes for your company, let’s review the traits that might suit your brand.
Brand Attributes List
A company should have several brand attributes which are necessary for success. In this section, we’ll uncover the characteristics so that you can consider them when developing a brand.
Proper positioning strategy. Your branding and marketing team should collaborate to determine the relevant positioning strategy for your company. It will provide your product with a unique position, competitive advantage, and the possibility to stand out from the competition. After setting proper positioning tactics, you’ll be able to stay on top of consumers’ minds. Your company should be able to showcase the product’s advantage. It can have superior quality, low price, or advanced features. Make sure to align your brand positioning strategy with your offering, mission, vision, value, and business goals.
Relevance. To establish an emotional connection with prospects and loyal customers, you should meet the needs of your target audience. Strive to comply with consumers’ expectations and exceed them. Make sure that your customer support agents understand prospects’ problems and offer relevant solutions. If your company succeeds in meeting the demand, your sales and revenues will rise.
Consistency. If you want to gain customer trust, be consistent across different communication channels, deliver logical messages, and solve customers’ problems regularly. Coherency should be present everywhere starting from website design, logo, slogan, vision, and mission, and ending with your after-sales service.
Credibility. To look credible in consumers’ eyes, your brand’s team should meet expectations, ensure excellent customer service, promptly respond to clients’ inquiries, and create authoritative content. Remember that trustworthiness and expertise of your company influence customer decisions. To boost credibility, your marketing team should create informative quality content, ask influencers for promotion, establish a strong brand identity, protect customer data, and build a community.
Uniqueness. Although now you might find businesses that offer similar products, you should gather all your creativity to present a unique and inspiring product. Having such an offer allows you to stand out from the competition. Better yet, you’ll build a strong identity widely recognized within the market and among consumers.
Inspiration. Innovative marketing approaches and technologies should serve as inspiration for your customers and employees. Organize meetings, prepare presentations, and demonstrate opportunities for growth to inspire employees to do their job well. As a result, consumers will be satisfied and feel inspired to make something extraordinary using your product. For instance, offering a landing page builder can encourage customers to start a small business.
Now that you know the most popular brand attributes for businesses, it’s time to explore the examples. After reviewing them, you’ll be able to do the same thing for your company.
Examples of Brand Attributes
You can find examples of brand attributes in any industry: electronic devices, apparel, cars, and skin care. Every brand has its unique characteristics and traits the same way people do. We’ll now unveil some brands that succeeded in identifying attributes that resonate with their target market.
Levi’s
Customers can describe good old Levi’s with words like originality, quality, and courage. Customers pay money for durability and can rely on the brand. Levi’s jeans have high quality and are in use for years after the initial purchase. You can wear a pair of jeans to go to work, do some housework in the garden, or even repair a house. The brand stands for durable clothing and condemns one-season items. Levi Strauss managed to turn blue denim pants for minors into clothes people wear every day.
Volkswagen
Established in 1946, the brand is famous for quality stylish cars. The Iconic Beetle, VW Bus, and Volkswagen Touareg are among the best Volkswagen vehicles ever made. All cars have the same characteristics in common: quality, durability, and style. The brand often communicates its main message about its cars — their reliability. The company produces practical and safe cars. As a result, customers perceive the brand as an honest and reliable company. “Think Small” marketing campaigns communicates Volkswagen’s main principles.
Congrats, now you know what brand attributes are and why they are essential. Hope that our examples gave you a clear understanding of them.
Brand ambassador
A brand ambassador is a professional with an outgoing personality and strong social media presence who speaks for a brand and promotes its products online and offline. This person helps create content, becomes a spokesperson at various events, handles word-of-mouth marketing, and promotes a brand and its products through different digital platforms.
Watch the video below to figure out how to make your brand grow with the help of a brand ambassador.
In a world with 3.78 billion social media users, the influence of digital platforms is very strong. That’s why brands seek professionals ready to become their representatives and promote their products and services. In this article, we’ll unveil the reasons why businesses look for brand ambassadors, their responsibilities, and salary. Next, we’ll jump into our step-by-step guide on how to become a brand ambassador.
Why do businesses need brand ambassadors?
Every company needs a “face,” a real person who has all the required traits and shares the brand’s values and tone of voice. Brands search for the perfect candidates to speak for them because they can:
improve brand awareness;
create a higher level of customer trust;
reach a new audience and bring in new customers with the help of referral sales (links and coupons) and word-of-mouth;
enhance customer lifetime value;
blow up conversionsthrough user-generated content;
reduce extra expenditures on the creation of in-house content;
increase a company’s effectiveness across different channels;
establish credibility;
build a good reputation;
boost sales;
drive traffic to a brand’s website.
An employee, a huge fan of your brand, or just a customer can easily become your brand representative. The person should know the details of your brand’s product, vision, and mission, manage brand accounts on social media, have experience in marketing, and be a great spokesperson. Real people are more likely to engage a wider audience by trying a product or service and recommending it to a company’starget audience. Moreover, they help obtain new customers and retain the current ones.
Ideally, brands want to see a public figure who has a great influence on the masses. You’ve probably heard about Dua Lipa representing Puma and Selena Gomez being an ambassador of Pantene. Influencersinspire people all around the world through their campaigns and initiatives.
Now that you know the key reasons, let’s proceed to the responsibilities of brands’ faces.
What do brand ambassadors do?
As a face and voice of a company, a brand ambassador creates buzz around a certain brand and promotes products both offline and online. To make people talk about a company and recommend it to others, opinion leaders leverage word-of-mouth marketing, distribute merchandise and information to prospects, and communicate a product’s value and benefits. Moreover, the position involves becoming a company’s spokesperson at various events, product launches, and conferences.
Since more and more people become familiar with social media platforms, a candidate should navigate Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and various messengers perfectly. Areal professional should create quality content for a brand’s site and social media to bring leads.
These employees regularly communicate with their audience in different ways to generate brand awareness: participate in events and represent a brand online through videos, and educational materials and offline through various live events, meetings, and conferences.
Large companies seek professionals who are ready to make every effort to shape their marketing strategy, communicate a brand’s message, and promote it through the most effective channels. A great communicator with excellent networking skills also collaborates with the sales and marketing departments to achieve a company’s objectives.
Now that you know about the responsibilities of brand reps, let’s talk about the compensation you can receive when having a job like this.
Do brand ambassadors get paid?
Becoming an ambassador of a brand is an excellent idea for friendly, outgoing, and enthusiastic people. According to Indeed, an average salary is $17 per hour and $39,834 per year in the United States. 49% of Americans who work as brand ambassadors are satisfied with their incomes and say that they earn enough money for living.
It’s worth mentioning that there are a lot of great companies that offer higher salaries and let brand reps earn $55,000-65,000 annually. Hence, salaries vary and depend on the brand you endorse.
Sometimes brands employ a different strategy and prefer to pay their professionals based on the number of promotional materials they can distribute or leads they generate. As a result, brand ambassadors who work on commission can earn a lot in case they bring many prospects or nothing if they don’t succeed in expanding a customer base.
To become a perfect candidate for this position, you need to consider the following guide.
How to Become a Brand Ambassador
Look for the brands you would like to represent
Create a unique personality
Engage a wider audience
Communicate with your followers
Increase the number of subscribers
Contact the companies you would like to work with
Today, you don’t need to be a celebrity, an influencer, or a public figure to become a corporate ambassador. Since companies strive to build brand recognition and drive theirsales volume, they look for young enthusiasts good at multitasking. If you feel that you have great networking and communication skills, stick to the following steps to get started.
Look for the brands you would like to represent. To start, search for the companies you would like to endorse. Bear in mind that brands would like to see opinion leaders who share their values and suit their primary purpose. For instance, a beauty blogger is a perfect fit for a cosmetics company. Therefore, it’s useful to research the brands that relate to the content on your social media. Follow them to comprehend their fundamental principles and the people they need.
Create a unique personality. Get ready to demonstrate a clear personality online. For this purpose, find your niche: traveling, lifestyle, beauty, fashion, or business. Brands need ambassadors with certain vibes and intereststhat suit their products perfectly. Many well-known brands of sportswear choose athletes as ambassadors. For example, Tony Hawk, known for his achievements in skateboarding, took a worthy position as a brand ambassador of Vans, a famous brand of skateboarding shoes and apparel.
Engage a wider audience.You need to create quality content to build a good reputation and trust. Do your best to create engaging posts, share quality pictures, create stories to gain more followers, and collect likes and comments. Employ different strategies and approaches to reach more people. As an option, consider commenting on famous pages or blogs, conducting giveaways, turning to bloggers for promotion, or using paid advertising. The more activity your page has, the more attractive your personality is to companies in the same niche.
Communicate with your followers. Be active with your subscribers. Ask them to share their experiences and opinions. This is an excellent opportunity to build a dialogue and engage followers in a conversation. Your interactive approach won’t leave them indifferent. As a result, you’ll not only retain your existing followers but also attract new ones.
Increase the number of subscribers. One of the main aims of every blogger is to have a large following. To attain it, opinion leaders cooperate with other influencers in the niche, conduct giveaways, create blog posts regularly, use hashtags, and actively communicate with their audiences.
Contact the companies you would like to work with. Once your social media account is ready, and you have decided which brands you would love to endorse, start reaching out to them. You can send them a message offering your services through social media or email. You can also do it in person by visiting special events and meetings.
To conclude, by enlisting your best employees or customers as brand ambassadors, your brand can reach leads, bring in new clients, forge a deep bond with the audience, and improve conversion rates. If you think about representing brands and their products, becoming a spokesperson, and designing effective marketing campaigns and strategies is your cup of tea, go ahead and show your knowledge and skills as a brand ambassador.
Blogging
Blogging is the process that implies creating articles, photos, and other forms of content and publishing them on a website. Its characteristics include informal language, a laid-back atmosphere, regular updates, lifehacks, tips, and a high level of customer engagement.
Watch the video below to learn 5 tips to run a successful blog!
In this article, we’ll explain the advantages and disadvantages of blogging, find out how it works, and uncover some steps to start your blog. We’ll also talk about how to make money on that, promote your blog, and review some free platforms to create it.
Pros and Cons of Blogging
Nowadays, when the number of blogs reaches 600 million, there’s evidence that this type of business brings good profits. People start their blogs for personal use, business, brand visibility, or high ranks on Google. Let’s now discuss all the advantages of having a blog in more detail.
The pros of blogging are as follows:
Ranking optimization. Creating useful and informative blog posts allows you to get a higher ranking. With evergreen articles, your website will rank better on Google and ultimately drive organic traffic. To ensure improvements in terms of your site’s performance, don’t forget to update your content regularly.
Good relationships and communication with your audience. Customer engagement iscrucial when it comes to your brand promotion and sales. That’s why it’s imperative to connect with your audience. Starting a blog is the best way to do it since you can let your readers explore your relevant content, leave feedback, and rate your material. It also enables you to update customers on your company’s latest products, launches, and news.
Additional revenue. Successful blogs make significant profits. You can generate more income not only from selling products but also from blogging itself. If you have a reliable and popular website, your revenue can come from traffic, affiliate links, sponsored content, ebooks, webinars, courses, training, etc.
Extra exposure. If you aim to create buzz around your company and product, making content related to your industry is the best decision. Leadscan come from different sources to findinfo about certain industries. This way, your website will obtain more visitors and drive traffic.
Online visibility. As of 2021,4.72 billion peopleuse online networks. In one way or another, all these users use the internet to find answers to their questions, learn something new, or just fill in their free time. By creating interesting blog posts, you can draw users’ attention to your brand and establish brand recognition. A visible website enables you to generate new customers faster.
Higher traffic. Additional pages on your website increase your opportunity to emerge on a search engine results page and obtain more website readers andprospects. Hence, every time you write an article for your website, you increase your chances of ranking high on Google and attaining new readers and customers.
However, like any other business strategy, it has drawbacks as well:
requires a relatively long time to bring positive results;
always needs fresh and unique ideas relevant to your target audience;
brings only a little payoff in the beginning;
needs additional ways of promotion like email, social media, influencer marketing, PPC, and pre-roll ads.
Now that we’ve figured out thepros and cons of blogging, we also need to discuss the way this kind of business strategy works.
How does blogging work?
People who begin their startupsbuy a domain name and design their websites by themselves, while established businesses create new landing pages for a blog on their existing websites to fill them with good content. With simple websites, blogs enable visitors to use them easily and find the necessary information.
Different bloggers choose different blog themes. Some prefer to talk about marketing and product reviews, and others discuss fashion, healthy life, cooking, or any other topic. Bloggers create a series of posts and make them available for reading on their websites. Articles usually appear in a certain order, starting from the most recent ones. They are also divided into categories to enable people to navigate them easily. Besides, blog posts have another unique feature, such as interlinking. This way, bloggers link to other blogs and promote each other to expand their audiences.
If you are interested in starting your own blog from the very beginning, let’s explore some steps you need to take to get started.
6Steps to Start a Blog
Choose a niche
Pick a catchy and easy name for your blog
Select a unique design
Write your first blog post
Promote your blog through different platforms
Optimize and update your content
With basic computer knowledge and an understanding of what your heart desires, you can easily create a blog by sticking to our guide.
Choose a niche. Firstly, you need to select a niche in which you have a high level of expertise. Your passion and interest in the chosen industry are essential. Secondly, once you choose your key topic, make sure that it has a wide audience so that you have some space to grow your blog. If you don’t have any idea what to blog about, consider sharing your life experiences. You can start a personal blog and tell about your daily routine: makeup and cosmetics, style and clothes, traveling, or anything else. Thekey is to create quality content that will attract the public.
Pick a catchy and easy name for your blog. To make readers recognize your blog, you need to select an easy-to-remember domain name. It’s your address on the internet, so it should be unique. Your domain name will enable people to find your website or social media account easily.Your title should be descriptive so that new users can catch the main idea of your blog.
Select a unique design.You need to have some understanding of your blog and its design since it needs a face. As an option, you can consider leveraging WordPress since it has special layouts for blogs. The platform enables you to obtaina layout and its design just in a few clicks.
Write your first blog post. Once you decideon your design, it’s time to create your first piece of content. Bear in mind that to blog successfully, you need to create unique, engaging, informative, interesting, and relatively long posts. It’s not an easy task to always come up with fresh and interestingideas, but they help attract people, engage them, and make them loyal to your brand. Besides, don’t forget to add some photos to create visually appealing blog posts and simplify the way visitors perceive your content.
Promote your blog through different platforms. Now when companies and bloggers promote products with the help ofdigital and traditional marketing, you can’t remain inactive. Use various forms of ads like PPC, native advertising, pre-roll ads, create email campaigns, and leverage social media channels to popularize your blog. More and more bloggers use paid ads that appear on users’ Instagram Stories and feed. Consider collaborating with other bloggers in your niche, commenting on other famous pages, communicating with your audience, and posting regularly to build a follower base and gain your readers’ love and trust.
Optimize and update your content. Onceyourblog post is published, remember to update it frequently. If you want your blog to rank higher on Google, utilize relevant keywords, write quality content, add SEOmeta tags, optimize images, and reduce your bounce rate.
Now that you’ve already explored our guide on developing a blog, let’s jump into the next section to figure out the ways to gain revenue from yourblog.
How to Make Money Blogging
Conduct courses and workshops
Create sponsored posts
Host a paid webinar or training
Consider affiliate marketing
Write books
The popularity of your blog provides you with new opportunities to make money. You can see several effective ways to earn some extra costs below.
Conduct courses and workshops
One of the greatest ways to make money online is to create courses. Modern people look for new skills and knowledge that help their personal and career growth. However, due to their often heavy workload, theydon’t have a lot oftime. That’s why it’s always a problem to go somewhere to directly participate in different events.
Online courses and workshops come to the rescue and help both participants and bloggers. As a blogger, you can connect with your audience through different video platforms and share a topic you specialize in, and your participants can obtain the necessary knowledge.
Let’s take Gabrielle Bernstein, for example. The spiritual leader offers readers to buy her courses on relationships, business, and meditation. She earns money by sharing her experience and valuable hands-on tips.
Create sponsored posts
Bloggers often write sponsored posts on social media platforms or their websites toget paid by different brands. They help draw followers’ attention to a brand or individual promoted. Opinion leaders create blog posts, videos, or Instagram Stories to bring new customers to a company.
For example, let’s take Madelaine Petsch and Bliss. In the Instagram post below, the actress promotes the brand’s sunscreen.
Host a paid webinar or training
A lot of companies and individuals start with free webinars. However, if you are an expert in your industry,you can make money on your expertise by organizing paid training or webinars. To run webinars smoothly, pay attention to details and check your info for accuracy. Small errors and typos are unacceptable. Remember to make your training special and uniqueso that it can be useful and fresh for participants. If it shows good results, consider making a series.
For example, Jack Kornfield, an author and Buddist practitioner, conducts a seven-week online training about the power of awareness.
Consider affiliate marketing
One more secondary source of income is affiliate marketing. By recommending digital products, services, and other products of other companies on your blog, you can earn a good commission.This way, you get paid every time you promote a company.
Write books
Bloggers can get some additional income not only from recommending and promoting other companies but also from writing and selling their own books or ebooks to their audience. By reading books, people can sharpen their knowledge in various industries: marketing, psychology, design, sales, beauty, etc. As an expert, you can communicate your knowledge by creating something unique and fresh. Your readers will appreciate that.
For example, Becca Ludlum, who has a website and anInstagram page dedicated to nutrition and healthy eating habits,also wrote a new book called “Meal Prep in an Instant.”
Now that you know how to monetize your blog, let’s look at several ways to promote and popularize it.
How to Promote a Blog
Many great ideas can help you make your blog more popular, although not all of them are free. In this section, we’ll review the most effective ways to promote a blog.
Optimize your website. To make everything run smoothly and rank high on Google, you need to select a reliable web host, optimize the loading time of your blog, put security measures, and manage external and internal links. Monitor the performance of your blog with tools like Google Analytics.
Create an account on social networks. With 3.96 billion social media users, digital platforms are perfect for promotion. There are plenty of great ways to obtain new leads, boost traffic to your website, and enhance your audience. You can use giveaways, paid advertising, influencer marketing, and sponsored content to drive interest to your blog. Special campaigns, hashtags, reviews, freebies, and referral programs enable you to create word-of-mouth promotions.
Find influencers. Influencer marketing is a very powerful tool right now.Perhaps you should give thought to contacting an opinion leader in your niche to support your blog and promote it at the same time. An opinion leader can draw the attention of new readers to your blog and encourage them to participate in your events, webinars, and courses.
Send email newsletters. Email campaigns are another effective tool to educate people about your website. It has a lower cost compared to other methods, but it doesn’t compromise efficiency. By sending email newsletters, you can reach your existing audience, deliver targeted messages, and have an immediate impact. With LIKE.TG, you can craft professional emails and set up email send-outs without any technical knowledge and for free.
Answer questions on Quora. To enhance the number of your readers, you need to visit a popular platform where you can communicate with people. Quora is the best option. You can engage with people that are interested in your blog’s topic. If you succeed in intriguing them with your blog posts, there’s a great probability that they will follow your blog updates.
Reach your audience through web push. With push notifications, you can instantly deliver your information, educate readers about your blog, and obtain excellent results. They help inform your blog readers and visitors about your new content, improve engagement, and increase conversions. LIKE.TGenables you to create automatic web push notifications based on your blog’s RSSfeed.
You are acquainted with the methods of promotion, so it’s time to review the best platforms to create an up-to-date website for your blog.
The Best Free Blogging Platforms
You can encounter many platforms that help create wonderful blogs with high engagement. We’ve prepared the most effective and convenient ones that offer a free plan.
WordPress.com
WordPress makes the creation of blogs easier and enables both beginners and professionals to create engaging blogs with modern design. The platform offers responsive themes, website statistics, built-in SEO, social media integration, and sharing features. With WordPress, bloggers don’t need to worry about complying with clients’ demands. The service helps create a modern site and customize it with content, features, and branding.
The platform provides its users with hundreds of design options, color schemes, and advanced design tools, so your blog will definitely satisfy your future readers. Besides, it offers secure hosting, custom CSS, and 24/7 support.
Free plan: Available forever. Paid plan: From $4 per month for one user.
Wix
Wix offers to build a successful blog with its free plan. The platform allows users to access designer-made templates and built-in features. The website builder’s features include integrated SEO tools, blog post scheduling, embed HTML, and adding categories and hashtags. Besides, it also has an app to provide its services on different devices.
Clients can add writers and editors to a website so that they can help manage blogs, create content, and share blog posts. Bloggers can leverage Wix’s blog name generator, select a domain name, obtain reliable web hosting, and use professional templates to have a strong online presence.
Free plan: Available forever.Paid plan: From $4.50 per month for one user.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a well-known all-in-one business tool that ranges from an integrated CRM to marketing, sales, service, and obviously content management system (CMS). HubSpot’s drag-and-drop website builder offers a free platform to create and manage your website and blog to build your online presence. It features a drag-and-drop function that allows you to create a website without any prior coding knowledge on top of plenty of ready-to-use templates.
On top of using the platform to write and host your blog, HubSpot also provides tools to optimize your content for SEO and organic traffic along with integrated tools to connect with your website visitors. You can easily add email marketing, customer service tickets, and sales pipelines to provide a synchronous customer experience.
Free plan: Available forever.Paid plan: From $360 per year
Ghost
Ghost is a service that focuses on professional publishing. It allows users to access native SEO, email newsletters, modern design, and technology. Bloggers can use this editor to ensure a seamless writing experience. Besides, the platform offers to connect with target audiences through built-in registration forms, subscriptions, payments, and more.
Users don’t need any additional plugins, extensions, or codes to share their content on social media. Moreover, bloggers can leverage the automated publication setup to save time.
This platform invites users to check its rich library of new themes. Ghost also doesn’t leave its clients without a detailed report on their blogs’ performance. That’s why its team developed native engagement analytics that allows bloggers to monitor which content drives the most attention and understandtheir target audience.
Free plan: 14-day trial.Paid plan: $9 per month for one user billed annually.
Congrats, now you know the advantages of blogging, great platforms to create an engaging website, and ways to receive income. If you are well-versed in a certain industry and are considering starting a blog, just give it a try. When you succeed, you’ll reap many benefits.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a marketing term that refers to how easily potential customers recognize and recall your products or services. Brand awareness is a key marketing concept and a primary goal of brand marketing.
In the video below, Digital Resource explains what brand awareness is, why it’s crucial for the success of your business, and how to build it.
In this post, we’ll explore how brand awareness differs from brand recognition, why it’s important for your brand, and how to measure it. We’ll also unpack some tactics to increase brand awareness and learn from examples.
Brand Recognition vs Brand Awareness
When exploring brand awareness, you will likely run into the expression “brand recognition.” Marketers often use these terms interchangeably. However, there are significant differences between them.
In a nutshell, brand recognition is how your target audience recognizes your brand. This concept includes an easy-to-recall brand name, corporate colors, logos, and symbols. Put simply, brand recognition is about your brand’s visual identity.
Brand awareness is a more complicated notion. It refers to the soul of your business and encompasses your unique value proposition, company culture and reputation, your product features and benefits, and so on. In short, brand awareness makes the public recall emotions and general impressions about your brand.
As you can see, brand awareness encapsulates your brand and the emotions it provokes in the target audience. Now, let’s move on and find out why you should care about brand awareness in the first place.
Importance of Brand Awareness
The importance of brand awareness boils down to the possibility to generate more revenue. According to Global banking and finance review, customers prefer to buy from brands they know. 71% of interviewees claimed that they must recognize a brand before making a purchase. No wonder 89% of marketers say that brand awareness is their top goal.
People believe they rationally choose between similar products on the market. They do research, collect information, read reviews, compare, and so on. However, in the end, they often make a purchase decision based on the acceptability and reliability of the brand.
Brand awareness makes your target audience choose you over your competitors. Read on to get into detail and explore what benefits it brings your business.
Benefits of Brand Awareness
Increased Sales
Emotional connection building
Customer loyalty growth
Acquisition through referrals
Let’s take a once-over on the benefits that strong brand awareness provides. They might be more or less expressed in your case. The key is to combine efforts on boosting brand awareness with other marketing tactics, which address particular issues your business face.
Increased sales
We’ve already mentioned that people prefer to buy from brands they know or recognize. The more customers are aware of a brand, the bigger market share this brand wins.
Companies with bigger market shares on average generate more sales than their less fortunate competitors. It boosts their revenue. According to Forbes' contributor Gabriel Shaoolian, consistent brand presentation across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%.
Emotional connection building
Brand awareness plays a big role in retaining customers and making them purchase from you repeatedly. A familiar brand creates a sense of trust and optimism. Thus, customers are more likely to return to a brand they’ve heard about or bought from before.
Better yet, brand awareness builds a strong emotional bond between a company and a customer. Over 65% of people feel connected with specific brands. This emotional link provokes customers to buy from a brand repeatedly and pay more.
Customer loyalty growth
Strong brands can not only build more robust edges in the market, higher revenue, and create emotional connections with customers. They get another privilege – making occasional mistakes. According to PwC, customers are tolerant of the errors their favorite brands make. Only 17% of clients refuse to work with their favorite company after a single blunder. If customers don’t have an emotional connection to a brand, their tolerance drops. 39% of buyers would not return to a company after a negative first experience.
Acquisition through referrals
Strong brand awareness is likely to bring you referrals. 94% of people, who are emotionally engaged with a brand, would recommend it to their friends, colleagues, and family. This leads to an increase in sales, as referrals from acquaintances are important when making apurchasing decision.
Better yet, referrals make your brand awareness even stronger than it was initially. 84% of people believe recommendations from friends to be the most credible source of information.
These benefits make businesses constantly try to increase their brand awareness. It brings up the question of how to measure this metric correctly.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Traffic to your website
Backlinks
Social listening
Surveys
Google services
Unfortunately, brand awareness isn’t a metric you can calculate with a formula. However, you can judge it by other indicators. There are three of them you should consider.
The volume of mentions in traditional media and on social networks will help you understand how discussable your brand is.
Reach is a number of people who could potentially see the publications your brand is mentioned in.
Engagement allows you to judge how effective your brand awareness actually is.
Now let’s move on to the concrete ways you can measure your brand awareness.
Traffic to your website
There are two types of traffic you need to track to determine your brand awareness. First is direct traffic, which occurs when a user types your URL into the address bar or enters from a browser bookmark. When people go to your website directly, it means they knew about your brand beforehand.
Also, overall website traffic comes in handy, as it shows how many people from the internet interact with your content daily and monthly. Measuring these metrics over time helps you track your brand awareness growth.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your website from other resources, such as social media, blogs, websites, and so on. If the traffic from these backlinks consistently grows, so does your brand awareness.
However, make sure the referral traffic is high-quality. For instance, links from untrusted sources can harm your search visibility, which eventually negatively affects brand awareness.
Social listening
This is one of the most effective ways to measure brand awareness. With special tools, such as Agorapulse or Mention, you can track every conversation about your brand on social media.
This tactic allows you to evaluate not only the number of mentions, but the quality of them as well. It provides valuable insight on how to improve your brand or product to fit customers’ needs and increase your brand awareness.
Surveys
A classic way to measure brand awareness is to conduct research. You can survey both your current and potential customers to find out what they think about your company. Create these surveys with such services as SurveyMonkey or TypeForm and share them on social media or via email.
Take special care of the questions you include in these surveys. If you poll potential customers, try to find out if they are familiar with your brand. When communicating with your current customers, ask how exactly they heard of your brand at first.
Google services
Some Google services will come in handy to measure your brand awareness. Start with Google Adwords or Keyword Planner to get an idea about the volume of searches for your brand name.
Another tool is Google Trends – a service that analyses the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. It helps you understand how many people have googled your brand.
Measuring something is key to understanding it. By understanding your brand awareness scope, you can elaborate on a plan to increase it.
How to Increase Brand Awareness: Strategies and Tips
Give your brand a personality
Focus on values and emotions
Hold and attend events
Employ social media marketing
Collaborate with influencers
Use search engine marketing
Boosting your brand awareness is a complicated process, which can encompass a great many strategies and tricks to leverage your goal. We’ve collected six ways to increase brand awareness, both online and offline, to help you out.
Give your brand a personality
When it comes to brand awareness, you can’t downplay the importance of your brand’s personality. First of all, it helps your brand stand out from a line of look-alike competitors. Secondly, a well-formed brand personality increases customer trust and engagement. Your brand should have an easily recognizable color scheme, tone of voice, and a main trait, such as sustainability or joviality behind it.
Another way to give your brand a personality is to hire a brand ambassador – find a celebrity congenial to your brand’s values and tone of voice. For instance, if you’re advertising a sportswear brand, go for a sports champion, fitness guru, or a celebrity famous for their perseverance or staying power.
Finally, if you have a distinctive and charismatic leader or representative behind your brand, you can make them the embodiment of your brand personality. Remember Apple and Tesla, which are inseparable from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
Focus on values and emotions
Consumers may be rational, but they make final choices with their hearts, not with their minds. People unknowingly consider their favorite brands an extension of their own individuality. 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their values.
To increase your brand awareness, make sure your brand articulates its values clearly and consistently. It’s possible and easy when you have a well-formed unique value proposition. If you’re struggling to define your brand identity, start by answering the following questions:
Why was your brand created?
What future does your brand want to create?
How will it achieve this goal?
What principles underlie your behavior?
Give short answers, that will shape your brand’s mission and identity. The latter should be concise yet clear-cut.
Hold and attend events
Both big and small brands stick to promotion through holding, attending, or participating in events. Event marketing provides them with a golden opportunity to create useful business connections. 75% of business owners say that events are the best networking channel.
Better yet, events help brands build deep personal relationships with their customers. Roughly half of the marketers believe that events are effective for deepening customer engagement.
By improving relationships with potential customers and partners, you increase your brand awareness. However, if you hold an event, it needs promotion as well. Employ various channels, such as social media, landing pages, or email marketing, to gather attendees. Follow our guide on creating event invitation emails that nail it to attract more participants.
If you’re at the first setout of creating your brand awareness, you may want to participate in events as an attendee. In this case, choose niche occasions that bring together the audience most interested in your products. At the event, be proactive and prepare a short pitch about your business.
Employ social media marketing
Social media marketing is one of the greatest options to increase your brand awareness. Facebook, Instagram, and other networks provide access to an enormous audience, as 3.8 billion people use social media every day.
Better yet, 54% of people research products through social networks. No wonder, over half of online brand discoveries happen in this channel.
Finally, people expect businesses to be there for them and return this care — 71% of users recommend a company they had a positive experience with on social media. To make the most of this brand awareness bonanza, stick to the following rules:
post content consistently and frequently;
make use of entertaining posts;
experiment with different content formats;
be sociable and interact with your audience.
Staying open for customers around the clock and taking advantage of various content formats may seem time consuming. To cut the cost at the start, try employing chatbots. They can handle your customer service on social media, keep your followers engaged, collect email addresses, and more. Sign up with LIKE.TG to create a chatbot for Facebook or Telegram for free and without coding.
Collaborate with influencers
Sometimes, you need just one recommendation from an opinion leader to double or triple your brand awareness. Thus, businesses implement influencer marketing into their marketing strategy willingly. Working with bloggers helps companies reach an audience that is unavailable through other channels.
The primary advantage of influencer marketing is the unlimited trust it creates in your brand. People believe recommendations from opinion leaders almost as much as they believe their friends and family.
To benefit from influencer marketing, you need to check the opinion leader you’re going to work with thoroughly. Make sure their follower base consists of real people, who are highly engaged and fond of them. Use services such as trendHERO to find bots and examine the comment section of a blogger's profile carefully.
Another rule you should stick to is prioritizing engagement rate over the follower base size. Thus, prefer influencers with less than 100 thousand subscribers, as they have higher engagement than social media stars with over 1 million followers.
Use search engine marketing
The place business has on a search engine results page is crucial. The further your website is from the top, the less chances to be noticed you have. To get your place in the first lines, try paid promotion on search engines, or search engine marketing (SEM). This tactic can boost brand awareness by up to 80%.
SEM can be even more effective than traditional SEO, as it drives results immediately. Better yet, users perceive search engine marketing well; 75% of them said paid search ads help them find the information they need.
To do effective search engine marketing, follow trends like voice search optimization. It means you should make your paid search ads more conversational. Look at how people communicate in real life and transfer these patterns to ads. Remember to include more long-tail keywords; they will help your content appear more frequently on the results page.
The tactics listed above can be more or less effective for a particular brand. Moreover, their usefulness changes depending on the way you implement them into your marketing strategy. Read one, to learn how other brands use these tricks.
Brand Awareness Examples
Let’s look at the use cases of big companies working on their brand awareness. You’ll find examples of situational marketing, SMM combined with promotion through influencers, and amazing awareness increases due to social proof and top-notch customer service.
Coors Light
The beer brand, Coors Light, did a great job with their brand awareness campaign on social media. In April of 2020, a woman quarantined at home posted a picture where she is posing with a sign asking for more beer in one hand and a Coors Light can in the other. The image went viral, and the brand sent Olive —that is the woman’s name — 150 cans of beer.
This situation inspired Coors Light to launch a giveaway. Under the terms of the competition, contestants had to post a tweet with the #CouldUseABeer hashtag to receive a six-pack of beer. During this short campaign, the brand gave away 500 thousand cans of beer.
In return, the company got enormous outreach on social media combined with drastically increased brand awareness. Better yet, Coors Light engrained a positive association with their brand into customers’ minds.
Slack
The cloud-based messaging tool, Slack, knows a little something about increasing its brand awareness via growth hacking techniques. The brand started as a startup with 15 thousand users, now Slack is the fastest-growing business app.
To achieve its current success, Slack put everything into customer relations. The company prepared the ground before its launch and generated a ton of reviews from media outlets like VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Inc. Each publication emphasized customer satisfaction with the messenger.
To make the most from word-of-mouth marketing, Slack also created the “Slack Wall of Love,” where the company shares tweets from people who love this messaging tool. These techniques coupled with thorough work on customer satisfaction improvement provided Slack with amazing brand awareness.
Spotify
The music streaming service, Spotify, increased its brand awareness by showing users their annual results. Since 2017, the company shares year-end outcomes and compiles the most-listened artists, albums, and songs for each user individually.
This mechanic works great because people love seeing personalized statistics. Better yet, they love sharing it on social media. So, the main trick Spotify uses here is making these results easily shareable. Thus, the service gets enormous outreach on social media every year.
Apart from it, Spotify goes a mile further and creates wrapping up for artists. This intricate move allows the service to employ the power of influencer marketing as well. The best part – Spotify spends next to nothing on promoting through this channel.
Brand awareness is a crucial element of your success on the market. It influences every single part of your business, including lead generation and customer acquisition. However, you need to nurture these leads and retain customers to generate stable revenue. For this purpose, try email marketing, web push notifications, chatbots, and SMS campaigns. Sign up with LIKE.TG to make the most of these marketing channels.
Booking confirmation email
A booking confirmation email is a transactional emailthat notifies a user that their order is being processed. This email confirms the booking and provides all the necessary details. With LIKE.TG, you can send these emails automatically.
Every user expects to receive a confirmation email after booking a hotel room, a tour, a restaurant table, a flight or a haircut. If they don't find one in their inbox, they will think that something went wrong with their order. So, don't leave your customers alone when interacting with your brand and provide them with the best user experience!
Why Booking Confirmation Emails are Important
Contribute to building customer loyalty
Show high open rates and CTR
Automatically sent
Reassure users
Contribute to building customer loyalty. Certainly, customer loyalty isformed not by email alone, but it shows a client that you care even after they pay.
High open rates and CTR. People wait for your booking confirmation emails, hence, they perform better than promotional campaigns. As a result, they positively impact yoursender reputation.
Automatically sent. Rely on marketing automation services. Using automation, you can set up sending booking confirmation emailsone time and focus on your marketing strategy.
Reassure users. Inform subscribers that they have successfully completed their booking and from then on they will have no doubts.
How to Write a Booking Confirmation Email
Write a relevant subject line and a preheader
Personalize
Give thanks
Include all the booking details in the email
Allow users to manage their booking
Add links to your social media profiles
Incorporate a clear CTA
Explain the booking cancellation policy
Leave the contacts of a reservation manager
Attach a relevant image
Offer a discount
To send relevant confirmation emails, follow the tips below:
Write a relevant subject line and a preheader. A user should understand your intention directly from the inbox. Make both your subject line and a preheader informative. With LIKE.TG, you can customize the preheader easily. It may look like this “Congrats, Charles! Your order #3423 has been successfully placed.”
Personalize. A personalized email is not an option, but a must for industries sending booking confirmation emails. Apart from providing an individual approach, they deliver necessary details.
Give thanks. Suppose, your brand was not the only solution for a client. Something made them choose your services. So, be polite and say that you appreciate their decision.
Include all the booking details in the email. Your confirmation email is a chance for a client to find all the necessary information in one place. Be sure to include the date of both the booking and their stay, their address, payment receipt, check-in and check-out dates, etc. Specify the amount of money to be paid for their stay.
Allow users to manage their booking. Having checked the data, a client may need to correct something, or may just change their mind. To be on the safe side and avoid overlaps, provide a link to the booking page.
Add links to your social media profiles. This will help you increase the performance of your hotel marketing strategy, as well as build trust among subscribers, and give users more information about your brand — a win-win for both of you.
Incorporate a clear CTA.A call to action should explicitly tell users what they should do next to complete their booking. It may say “Confirm my booking”, “Complete my booking”, “Pay”, “Modify my booking”.
Explain the booking cancellation policy. Stuff happens, you know. Show that you care and state the deadline to cancel a booking for free. This will help you avoid negative reviews about your company.
Leave the contacts of a reservation manager. Should anything happen, email is not the best way to connect with a company. A phone number is the bestalternative.
Attach a relevant image. It may be a photo of the city a client is going to visit, a tempting meal from a local restaurant, hotel apartments, etc. That will inspire customers and build anticipation.
Offer a discount. You may do this to reward your clients. Give a discount for a local taxi, museum, their next tour, their next visit to a restaurant, etc.
How to Send a Booking Confirmation Email
With Automation 360, you can send a booking confirmation automatically. First of all, you should go to the “Event manager” and create an event “Booked”. Follow this step-by-step guide.
Then, create an email workflow that will start right after a user makes a booking on your website. You may add a condition to resend the email if a user doesn’t open it. Find out more about sending automated emails in this article.
Booking Confirmation Email Examples
Below is an email sent by a world-known platform Booking.com. A user receives all the necessary information regarding their stay at the hostel. It includes the city, the date, the hostel, check-in and check-out dates, details regarding prepayment, payment, and cancellation cost. A clientis provided with aphone number to connect with the hostel.
This is an email sent to confirm an appointment with a barber. It has all the necessary details as well just like the previous email. Besides, the company reminds the recipient about the appointment on the X day. If a client doesn’t confirm it once again, it will be canceled.
Booking Confirmation Email Best Practices
Automate booking confirmation email sending
Send AMP emails
Segment your contacts before sending a booking confirmation email
Send a confirmation email RIGHT after the booking
Promote your referral program
Automate booking confirmation email sending. If you deal with marketing for hotels worldwide, it would be rather a daunting task to send each email automatically. So, choose a marketing automation service that allows setting up email sending in advance based on user actions.
Send AMP emails. These are web-page-like emails with dynamic content that allow recipients to interact with the brand right from their inbox. Use this technology to let your clients modify their booking on the go.
Segment your contacts before sending a booking confirmation email. Take into account different variables to create an email relevant to each subscriber. These variables include data based on the industry. It may be the number of the booking, place a user is going to visit, date and time, language a client speaks, etc.
Send a confirmation email RIGHT after the booking. Don’t make any delays and notify the clients about their order immediately after they complete their booking. This way, they won’t beworried about their plans and your brand will gain satisfied customers.
Promote your referral program. Big brands motivate their clients to attract new users with special bonuses or cashback from the orders made by their friends. This way, you increase revenue and customer loyalty.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who abandon a site in a couple of seconds after they land on it. They don't follow any links and don't interact with the page.
In this article, you'll find out why it's important to track your bounce rate, get to know factors affecting your bounce rate, and get some tips to reduce it.
Why is it important to monitor your bounce rate?
Website bounce rate is one of Google's ranking factors. The search engine' algorithms consider a page with a high bounce rate irrelevant to users’ queries. It means that it doesn’t help people find answers to their questions. As a result, this page moves lower in the SERP, giving way to other more relevant pages.
With Google Analytics, you can check your site bounce rate report. Go to “Behavior”, then click “Site Content” and “All Pages.” Alternatively, you can have a bounce rate of any specific site page.
Now you might be interested in the acceptable bounce rate. There’s no good or bad bounce rate because it depends on the industry and your type of website. For some businesses high bounce rate is okay. For example, if your site has only one page providing the prices of your services and your phone number, users will leave it immediately after they call you since they found what they had been looking for. The same thing is with blogs and stores selling several items. Users don’t need to navigate the site more if they find the necessary answers. The bounce rate of such websites can reach 100% and it’s okay.
If your site has hundreds of pages and the bounce rate of some of them makes you worry, check out some factors affecting it below.
8 Reasons Why Your Website Has a High Bounce Rate
Slow website speed, low-quality content, and links, excessive forms, errors, misleading meta descriptions make users bounce. These are just a few reasons influencing people’s decision to leave a page. Let’s take a closer look at each factor.
Slow website speed. 70% of clients admit their loading speed influences their buying decision. 46% of users wouldn't visit a poor-performing website again. The high competition allows consumers to be selective. It’s very unlikely that a user opening your website for the first time would wait more than 5 seconds for your site to load.
Misleading title and meta description. Online users judge your site quality by assessing your title and meta description. If they promise to answer their queries, they will click through. Imagine their disappointment if the page provides no answers. Some marketers try to manipulate the search and create deceptive meta descriptions to work as clickbait. As a result, they have a high bounce rate and a big number of dissatisfied site visitors.
404 error. “Page is not found” provides users with the worst experience ever. As a result, the number of bounces increases dramatically and your page sinks very quickly to the bottom of SERP. You may not even be aware of 404 errors, so check them regularly in Search Console and eliminate them immediately.
Low-quality content. Ensure that the keywords chosen correspond to a user’s intent. Meeting your site visitors’ needs should be your top priority. Avoid stuffing a page with keywords to rank higher — this won’t do. Pay special attention to your page structure. It should be easy for site visitors to scan the page without thorough reading. Make use of headings and subheadings, lists, tables, images. They will help you create easily digestible content.
Low-quality backlinks. Your backlinks and referral links can increase your bounce rate. Pay attention to the websites placing them, anchor text, and context. Building links in isolation from these factors will only hurt your site performance. Make sure that partners add links to your site on relevant pages the target audience of which is potentially interested in your site. Otherwise, you will have a high bounce rate, and Google may consider your activities as those manipulating the search.
Poor user experience. User experience is the way people feel scrolling your page. The abundance of pop-ups, subscription forms, and CTA buttons will disrupt their experience. Assess your page to ensure that nothing prevents users from navigating it and taking the desired action.
Requesting too much personal data. People are suspicious of sites that immediately ask them to enter their card number or share much information via a subscription form. Seeing your site for the first time, users don’t even know why you need this data and requesting it will only scare them off.
Not mobile-friendly site. The lack of a mobile version of the site is a big omission today. Users don’t need to spend half an hour navigating your site and using the horizontal scroll bars to make an order since they can go to a competitor’s mobile-friendly site.
Now that you know why users can bounce from your site, check out the tips below to improve your performance.
5 Tips to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Based on the factors affecting your website bounce rate, you already know what can be improved. Check some more essential issues below.
Analyze your customer journey. Examine the way your client goes through from exploring your website to making a purchase. Analyze why they drop off and what causes difficulties at each stage. They may face deceived expectations, too many forms, CTA buttons, or inconvenient payment methods. It’s all about analyzing your customer experience as well.
Create more landing pages. Each landing page should have one goal. If you have only one page asking users to do this and that, they will feel frustrated and leave it immediately. So, if you sell several products or services, create a separate page for each one to describe its features.
Use one CTA button. Since every page has one goal, the CTA should also be the only one. Asking users for too much will make them feel confused. Ensure a single, clear, and eye-grabbing call to action. Users should understand why they should take this step, so be consistent when designing your landing page.
Format your content. Content formatting is as important as its quality since it allows readers to easily perceive and digest it. For this purpose, use proper headings and subheadings, lists, tables, paragraphing, images, charts, screenshots, bold keywords, white space, etc.
Provide smart internal linking. If you post articles regularly, internal linking will be useful for readers to understand the topic better. Internal linking means providing links to other valuable resources of the same topic to create a clear picture of it. It ensures the smooth structuring of the information. When you link to third-party websites, let them open in a new window. This way users won’t need to click “Back” to read your article, which positively influences their user experience.
Congrats, now you know when it’s important to monitor your website bounce rate and how to improve it. Track this website performance metric on a regular basis to improve your rankings!
Blind carbon copy (BCC)
A blind carbon copy (BCC) is an email feature that enables senders to add several receivers without additional recipients being visible to the primary ones. Senders use this type of email when they want to keep customer information confidential. It’s helpful when the sender aims at sending information to a large group of people faster without them knowing the email addresses and names of the recipients.
In this article, we’ll unveil what blind carbon copy means and how it differs from a carbon copy. We’ll also list all the pros of this email feature and show you how to benefit from using it. Additionally, we’ll uncover several reasons for using email services rather than BCC.
What does blind carbon copy mean?
Blind carbon copy refers to sending emails to individuals without the primary recipient being aware. This practice allows companies to send emails to large groups of people quickly without letting all receivers know about it. It differs from traditional carbon copy (CC) which allows everybody to check the email addresses on the list of receivers.
The blind carbon copy helps ensure privacy, discretion, and confidentiality. When senders don’t want others to know about additional recipients, they use this approach.
Now that you know what BCC means, it’s time to reveal the difference between a carbon copy and a blind carbon copy.
Carbon Copy vs Blind Carbon Copy
In this section, we’ll uncover the characteristics of carbon and blind carbon copy and the difference between the two.
Carbon copy is an email feature that allows you to send the same email to several recipients and enables recipients to access the list of all email addresses that receive the same email. CC is useful for companies because you can send the same email to your colleagues and add a carbon copy for a supervisor to keep an eye on the working processes. This way, your employees see who received the email and let your supervisor monitor tasks. Yet, if you want to send an email copy to the primary and additional recipients without the primary receivers knowing about this fact, you’ll need a blind carbon copy.
Blind carbon copy is an email feature that enables you to confidentially send an email copy to a group of people without them being aware of this. These receivers can’t see the email addresses obtaining the same email. This email approach helps you maintain privacy and confidentiality.
Now that you know the difference, let’s proceed to the pros of using blind carbon copy.
Benefits of Using Blind Carbon Copy
Blind carbon copy carries multiple benefits for business owners. They all relate to privacy, discretion, and seamless interaction with prospects and clients. Here are the main of them:
High level of privacy and confidentiality. When sending a blind carbon copy, you do not need to reveal the list of recipients you send your email to. This makes your emails confidential and private. This email feature ensures that the personal information of your receivers is secure, making it impossible for others to see email addresses.
Less spam and solicitations. Blink carbon copy comes in handy when you need to send emails to multiple parties quickly without letting them access each other’s email addresses. This way, you prevent them from texting and sharing information you don’t want to disclose. As a result, you can avoid unwanted spam or solicitations among receivers of your emails.
Less email clutter. Company owners using carbon copy increase the possibility of email clutter being forwarded to all email addresses on your list, yet the scenario is different when they utilize blind carbon copy. This approach aims to keep recipients’ contact data private and prevent email threads and clutter from ending up in the inboxes of all recipients on the list. When you use BCC, receivers can’t text each other and share unnecessary information.
Professional appearance. By utilizing blind carbon copy, your company can have a more professional look without any leaks of information and unnecessary emails. When you text your customers with BCC, you can show respect towards each of your recipients by keeping their contact information confidential. Besides, the information you share with receivers also remains between you and your clients.
Discretion in mass emails. Sending email newsletters with BCC enables you to protect the privacy of each of your customers. With its help, you can keep calm and be sure that no one on the list will see the information they don’t need to see, including the email addresses of all individuals. Even more, by sending emails with blind carbon copy, you can show recipients that you forward the information they need personally to them, making it look private. As a result, emails don’t look like spam.
Now that you know the pros, we’ll provide a short guide on using BCC in Gmail.
How to use BCC in Gmail?
If you want to send BCC in Gmail, you’ll only need a few steps. We’ll show you how in these short instructions.
Log in to your Gmail account.
Click “Compose” to create a new email.
Add receivers, email subject, and the body of your email.
Add BCC recipients by clicking the “BCC” button in the upper-right corner of your new message.
You’ll see an additional field where you can put all the receivers you don’t want to be visible to your primary email address. You can add as many emails as you wish by using the field below the main recipient’s email. Add commas to separate email addresses when you add multiple recipients.
Complete your email copy by adding text and attachments, finishing formatting, and sending your email. Click “Send” after completing your email and checking for typos and errors. The email will be forwarded to all recipients without primary receivers being aware of all email addresses on the list.
However, every email feature carries pros and cons, and blind carbon copy is not an exception. That’s why we’ll briefly discuss the drawbacks of this approach. Here are the main reasons for not using BCC.
Trust concerns. Blind carbon copy might cause issues with transparency and trust. Since people can see that some of the recipients are hidden, it can cause doubt, suspicion, and additional concerns. It results in receivers feeling like a part of the mass sending of an email rather than a personalized approach.
No personalization. BCC doesn’t let you apply a personalization feature, so you can’t address your receivers by name and send emails based on their preferences. It becomes an additional disadvantage and a reason for clients not to open your email.
Suspicious email or spam marking. Since you can send emails to many recipients using BCC, some email services can filter your emails. If they flag your emails as suspicious or spam, it might influence the deliverability and reputation of your business email address.
Limited analytics. When you use BCC, you can’t access tracking and analytics features to assess the success of your email campaigns. The situation is different when you use a bulk email service. LIKE.TG will help you gauge the effectiveness of your interaction with recipients and monitor their engagement, including open and click-through rates.
Every feature has disadvantages, yet you can still find solutions that will help you deal with them. You’ll need a good bulk email service. If you need to know more about such software, we invite you to explore the next section, where we’ll explain why using an email service is better than leveraging BCC.
Why is using an email service better than using BCC?
The two methods, email service and BCC can be used for various purposes, depending on the type of interactions. If you strive to improve communication with clients within your business, it’s better to consider bulk email software. Let’s find out why:
no limitations on the number of recipients per day as in Gmail;
personalization for trust;
email scheduling to avoid manual work;
integration with Google Analytics, chatbots, web push notifications, CRM, etc.;
data import and export for higher efficiency;
branding for professional business emails;
inbox management to save time;
customer support for a better understanding of the service.
These are only a few features most email services offer. Yet you can have even more for your business when utilizing a versatile solution like LIKE.TG. It’s an omnichannel marketing and sales solution for startups, enterprises, and individuals. Let’s discover its email features that will help you avoid using BCC and harming your brand reputation.
The service offers a drag-and-drop builder, so you don’t need the knowledge of the code to start creating your email campaigns. LIKE.TG enables you to build emails from scratch or use one of the available pre-built templates. Moreover, if you want to send less than 15,000 emails monthly, you can do it for free in LIKE.TG.
Log in to your LIKE.TG account to start creating your email campaigns. Go to the “Email” tab and click “New Campaign.” Select the mailing list and apply segmentation if you want to send this email campaign only to subscribers who meet your conditions. You can segment them based on email, previous campaigns, ratings, and statistics. Insert sender details like sender address and name and write your subject line. Apply smart personalization by selecting the variables.
Click “Next” to proceed to the email campaign template.
You can create your email campaign from a blank canvas or choose one of the ready-to-go templates. LIKE.TG gives you access to its library of templates for free. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can edit the template by adding or deleting specific elements within seconds.
Set campaign parameters and click “Next” to continue. Then, look through the information in your campaign and recheck it for typos and errors. Once everything is ready, choose the sending time and click “Start” to launch your new email campaign.
Check out our article for more detailed instructions on sending a good-looking email campaign in LIKE.TG.
Congrats, now you know what BCC is and why it’s useful. Hope that you’ve found a perfect solution for sending emails in bulk. Register in LIKE.TG now to enjoy the benefits of our email service for free.
Brand affinity
Brand affinity is building an emotional connection between a brand and its customers. People who share the values of a brand tend to choose its product and recommend it to their friends.
This video covers the concept of brand affinity marketing. Here you’ll find the tips to build it.
Why is brand affinity important?
Brand affinity belongs to the most essential marketing metrics such as brand preference and loyalty. Affinity lets companies build emotional connections with their clients which is the cherry on the cake.
Companies can succeed in this task by communicating their core values during every interaction with a customer. Finding a brand that shares the same values, clients feel support, harmony, and gratitude. Hence, they will associate these feelings and emotions with that particular brand. As we know, emotions drive peoples' motives and actions. So, customers will consider this brand the best choice.
This will result in higher sales volume. Besides, clients who feel an affinity to your brand, have increased lifetime value which impacts your revenue positively.
Before we move on to the techniques that will help you develop this metric, let's see the difference between brand affinity and loyalty, since these terms are often used interchangeably by mistake.
Brand Affinity vs Brand Loyalty
These terms differ, firstly, by the driving force which makes people choose this or that brand. Secondly, to develop brand affinity, companies should build brand awareness and loyalty. It means that this is a long-lasting process that includes working on both affinity and loyalty. Let’s look at this in more detail.
The first thing which makes these terms different is the driving force. Brand loyaltydoesn’t require companies to build an emotional connection with their customers. People choose a brand wisely. They research competitors, compare prices and features, consider refund and exchange policy, look for reviews and testimonials. So, this is a rational decision that makes customers buy again.
While brand affinity is all about feelings and emotions. They are the driving force that makes people choose this or that brand. Fans of Apple explain their affinity to the company the same way. They share the same values as Apple does and enjoy the feelings they have when using their products. So, they won’t switch brands just because of a price increase, for example. This emotional connection is rather strong and provides additional reasons to remain this brand’s client.
In addition, to develop your brand affinity, you need to work on building brand awareness and loyalty first. If you successfully complete all these stages, your efforts will pay off.
In the next section, we’ll share some proven tips that will help you build brand affinity. So, stay tuned.
How to build brand affinity?
Figure out your customers’ values
Provide first-class customer support
Partner with influencers
Create your brand community
Engage with customers on social media
You need to carry out complex work that will cover different business spheres. This way, you’ll take an in-depth look at your brand to improve every aspect. Below we’ll share several important tips.
Figure out your customers’ values. To build an emotional connection with clients, you need to have a clear picture of their core values, needs, wants, and preferences. This will help you be on the same page. Also, you can find out what they consider your top value. Conduct a survey and ask clients directly. This way, you’ll see whether your audience realizes your values and shares them. If they understand them differently, you can change your direction accordingly.
Provide first-class customer support. Customers are ready to pay more for 24/7 support in their language, fast response time, personalized offers, and guys who treat them as friends rather than attacking with tons of prepared links. Your support team is the face of your company which makes clients judge it relying on communicating with it. Make sure your clients feel no anger or disappointment when contacting your support team to ask for a refund or exchange of products. Be helpful and friendly.
Partner with influencers. These people can not only enhance your brand promotion but provide you with clients who share your values. Influencers are not only well-known celebrities. You can start by finding a micro-influencer who may like your product or is already your client. Offer them mutually beneficial cooperation and ask to promote your brand focusing on its core values. This way, you’ll acquire qualified and interested leads who have enough social proof to buy from you.
Create your brand community. People like to belong to something huge because it makes them feel valuable and find like-minded people. Their common interest in your brand and the values you share. So, it’s your chance to build trustful and long-lasting relationships.
Engage with customers on social media. The power of social networks is immense and it’s limited only by your creativity. People spend hours every day on Facebook and Instagram, so why should you miss this opportunity? Find out what they think about your company with the help of social media listening tools, check out your brand mentions, and act on them. Encourage people to comment on your account and be proactive to answer them to show that you care. Give them thanks for positive mentions and contact with those who left negative comments — this is your chance to change their experience for the better. Provide customer service via chatbots with the help of LIKE.TG. Share educational content, photos and videos, user-generated content, and reviews on social media. This will help you attract new leads as well.
Now that you know how to build brand affinity, it’s time to find out how to measure this metric.
How to measure brand affinity?
There’s no single and most accurate way to measure it, but there are a lot of metrics you can monitor to assess your brand affinity. They will provide you with a clear picture of your performance. These indicators include the ones below.
NPS (Net Promoter Score). It allows you to find out the percentage of customers who are fully satisfied with your company and are ready to recommend it to their friends and colleagues. This likelihood is measured with the help of points from 1 to 10. You can ask your clients to answer these questions in their profile on your site.
Customer lifetime value. This metric shows how much money your client can spend on your products during your relationships. Customer lifetime value is one of the crucial metrics for each business since it reflects your customer retention and loyalty efforts.
Referrals. These are people brought to your business by your current clients. You should track this metric constantly to understand the number of loyal clients and the reasons why they bring you or not new leads. Reward them for every new customer.
“Time spent” in Google Analytics. GA provides businesses with tons of insights into their performance. You can monitor the time spent on each page of your site. You’ll find out the number of sessions and their duration. The higher this indicator, the better. It means that you’ve managed to create engaging and valuable content and your audience likes it.
Facebook insights and Youtube analytics. These tools are similar to the previous one. They help you understand the performance of your content in terms of time spent watching it.
Brand search volume. Check this data in Google Search Console. It allows you to find out the number of people who use your brand name while searching with Google. It means that you’ve managed to build brand awareness, create interest and affinity towards your company.
Mentions on social media. Keep track of your brand mentions to see what customers think about your company. This will help you uncover your pain points as well as your strengths.
Congrats, now you know why brand affinity matters, the way it differs from brand loyalty, have some tips at hand to develop and measure it. Make use of the LIKE.TG tools to bring your communication with clients to the next level.
