A brand is not just an eye-catching logo.
This very concept is somewhat elusive, or as David Ogilvy put it, “It’s the intangible sum of a product’s attributes, its name, packaging, and price, its history, reputation, and the way it is advertised.”
But a brand is also something that involves your customers’ impressions of and experience with your company.
Its purpose is to differentiate yourself from others offering the same or similar products or services and give customers a reason to choose you over all of them.
To achieve this ambitious goal, your brand has to resonate with your audience.
Easier said than done, so let’s discuss some tactics to help you cut through the noise and connect with your customers on a more meaningful level.
Know Your Audience
If you want to build a relatable brand, you have to understand your audience’s needs, pain points, and preferences. Otherwise, you risk creating brand messaging that’s too generic and misses the mark, or coming across as tone-deaf.
Remember that it’s your customers who also, in a way, define how your brand will be perceived, which means they should be active participants in the brand-building process.
There are different ways to find out what makes your audience tick, and some of them include:
- Create an ideal customer profile and buyer personas to flesh out specific segments of your audience.
- Conduct market research — customer surveys, focus groups, questionnaires, and interviews to gather information about your customers.
- Analyze your existing customer data.
- Research your competitors to analyze their marketing strategies and the way they interact with their audience (which they share with you).
- Use social listening tools to find out what people are saying about your brand and competitors.
- Engage with your audience on social media and other digital channels to get their feedback.
This is one of the most important steps as it will point you in the right direction, so take it very seriously.
Mattel embraced the diversity of its audience by expanding the Barbie lineup with dolls representing people of different cultural backgrounds and body types. This once exclusively white, slender, and able-bodied doll underwent an evolution to include not only a POC Barbie but also one with vitiligo, a hearing aid, a prosthetic leg, or in a wheelchair, in an effort to help make kids of all colors, sizes, and abilities feel accepted for who they are.
Build Trust and Credibility
A relatable brand is trustworthy and credible.
It’s easier for people to connect emotionally with a company they trust. You can’t expect customers to follow a brand they perceive as shady on social media or subscribe to their newsletter, let alone purchase from them. On the other hand, 90% of customers say they’re willing to pay more for a product from a brand they trust.
So, it’s essential to carefully curate your reputation.
You can do this by delivering on your promises, ensuring exceptional customer experience, and being genuine in your interactions with your audience.
Most of these factors come into play further down the customer journey, but how do you build trust with someone who’s not decided to purchase from you?
Through educational, valuable content that will address a pressing pain point of a prospect who just landed on your site and is still weighing their options, and offer them a solution.
We’re not talking about sales pitches disguised as blog posts or videos, but long-form, detailed articles or explainer videos that won’t push your agenda but genuinely try to help your audience find answers to their questions.
Eachnight covers all the bases with their buyer’s guide for best mattresses without fiberglass . This in-depth blog post scrutinizes nine products, groups them into categories so that readers can compare them more easily, and lists the pros and cons of each one. But, what makes this example stand out is the fact that the brand walked the extra mile to ensure the quality of the content by having it fact-checked and medically reviewed by an orthopedic surgeon whose credentials readers can see. How’s that for building trust with their target audience?
Humanize Your Brand Voice
Yes, being professional in your brand messaging is important, but you can easily end up sounding too cold and robotic. Customers are not particularly fond of the corporate attitude and lingo, especially in the B2C industry.
So, if you want to establish a meaningful relationship with your audience, you need to humanize your brand voice and make it more approachable.
Let’s talk about how you can do that.
Speak your audience’s language
Using industry-specific jargon and technical terms will undoubtedly make your brand sound more authoritative in the marketplace, but if you overdo it, you risk alienating your audience.
Even if you’re in the B2B industry , don’t try to impress your potential customers with unnecessarily high-flown language — speak clearly instead. B2C audiences mostly expect a friendly tone of voice, but you have to be careful not to come across as rude or unprofessional.
Include humor
When it comes to humor, again, it’s essential to know your audience’s preferences and threshold. Some jokes can easily fall flat or, even worse, offend someone, so tread carefully.
Engage with your followers on social media
Finally, social media is an excellent outlet to get up close and personal with your customers. Make sure to start relevant conversations, respond to every question, and be polite even if you get negative comments.
Wendy’s is famous for their cheeky, outspoken social media personality. They don’t shy away from using savage humor that is sometimes bordering on rude and roasting their competitors, or even customers, on Twitter . While some other brands would be immediately canceled, Wendy’s can pull all this off simply because they know their target demographic — Millennials — to the tee, and they are proficient in internet slang.
Produce Relevant, Engaging Content
Content still reigns supreme.
According to surveys, 80% of marketers say they managed to build brand awareness with the help of content marketing.
But, if you want your content to perform well and resonate with your audience, it has to be engaging and relevant. In other words, you won’t get very far by generating content just for the sake of it. This way, you will only waste your resources without providing value to your readers.
It’s much better to have fewer compelling pieces of content than trying to hit a certain unrealistic quota at the expense of quality.
Videos, images, and infographics are highly engaging, and all these formats should be a standard part of your content marketing strategy. However, if you want to take audience engagement to the next level, interactive content is what you need.
As its name suggests, this type of content encourages your audience to participate actively in it instead of being passive recipients of your message. This participation allows for a unique, personalized experience, meaning that the content won’t be the same for everyone.
Examples of interactive content include:
- Quizzes
- Various tools (calculators, for example)
- Questionnaires
- Surveys and polls
- Games
- Interactive infographics
Besides adding value to your audience in an entertaining way, this immersive content can also help you collect relevant information about them and fine-tune your messaging to match their preferences and needs.
Transparent Labs’ Protein Calculator assists their customers in finding out how much protein they should take every day based on their individual needs. It’s fun and easy to use, plus it takes only a couple of moments for users to fill out and get results they can use to adjust their protein intake.
It’s obvious that both parties benefit from this simple yet powerful tool. Customers will get a valuable bit of information about their nutritional needs, while the brand gets to learn more about its audience, capture their contact details, and position itself as a go-to nutrition resource.
In Closing
Building a brand is a challenging process, especially if you want it to be relatable. The tips we discussed go a long way, but whatever you do, don’t skip the first and most important step of the process — learning as much as possible about your target market. This will allow you to make informed decisions about every subsequent step and ensure your messaging strikes the right chord with your audience.
The post How to Create a Brand That Resonates with Your Audience? appeared first on Productivity Land .