Top 10 Tips To Get or Keep Your Brand On Track
1. Understand and know everything you can about your ideal customer. What makes them tick. What they love and what they hate. Have a bulls eye focus to meet their needs. Then tailor your brand to be irresistibly desirable to them. To be their number one product or service of choice.
2. Is your brand distinctive, different and memorable ? Does it really stand out from the crowd or is it just another “me too” blending into the morass of mediocrity ? Does your brand have meaningful individuality with the same values that stand for something important to your target customer ? Stand out within your market and align your brand values to your customer values if you want to get their attention and sustain it.
3. Have you reviewed your brand strategy, or action plan to put your brand to work ? This is your brand communications system that provides structure and guidance for all points of contact within your business, both internally and externally with your customers. It needs to be monitored, measured for effectiveness and regularly updated to meet the changing needs of your market.
4. Do you have a brand social media strategy to directly communicate with and exchange opinions and ideas with your customers. Develop your online marketing strategy to communicate with your customers in the channels in which they predominantly use. Deploy your tactics consistently. Your brand’s customers are talking about you even you aren’t participating. Be actively part of the conversation. Influence discussions, give your customers reasons to return to you.
5. Learn from your customers feedback, opinions and preferences and then innovate your brand and develop your new product offerings to meet their changing needs. Drive your NPD creatively to meet their preferences, pleasantly surprise them, keep your offering fresh and relevant if you want loyal customers and raving brand advocates.
6. Be prepared to engaged your brand with your customers in multiple channels both on and offline. Mass marketing is largely a thing of the past. Your brand needs to fluidly and congruently communicate with its market at a much more focussed and personal level, almost one-to-one at times, using parallel tactics on and offline (through traditional and new media) where appropriate.
7. Is your brand identity design fresh and “up-to-date” pertinent to your brands market ? Does it have longevity and reflect your current brand story ? Make sure it looks current and contemporary wherever it sits on the scale of appropriateness and relevance to its industry category and target customer.
8. Keep your brand designs looking fresh and relevant be they product or service. Is your brand collateral moving with the times or, better still, a leading innovator in your brand category. Reappraise all your brand design materials critically and objectively e.g. web site, Facebook page, LinkedIn presence, ezines and newsletters, packaging design, brochures, leaflets, vehicle livery, exhibition stands, branded power point presentations, movies, video and showreels. Do they reflect your brand story and deliver both on the aesthetics of your brand design and in their functional effectiveness ? Are they delivering perceived value ?
9. Are your customer facing staff enhancing the impression of your brand ? Are they behaving and communicating in a way that consistently supports and amplifies your customer brand experience and brand personality ? They are your brand ambassadors and how they dress, talk and present themselves in person or on the phone has a significant impact (positively or negatively) on your brand. Choose the right people carefully and support them with regular training and incentivize them to enrich your brand promise.
10. Never overlook, under resource or under estimate the importance of your brand customer service. Your customer service experience can make or break your brand. Todays customers are highly mobile and sophisticated.They can and do very quickly talk publicly about your brand and their personal experience with it. Ensure you have an outstanding brand customer service strategy for meeting your customers needs at all times.
These brand tips are by no means exhaustive so if you have anything you’d like to add or feel deserves inclusion please don’t hesitate to come back to us. We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
All the very best in growing your brands into even more profitable and thriving power houses in the year ahead.
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