A successful brand strategy is a long-term plan that a business focuses on to improve and sustain its brand image. Your brand strategy can absolutely make or break your business. So what could be the secret ingredients for a successful brand strategy that would really work long-term?
Some of the most successful brands (think: Apple, Disney, and McDonald’s) are successful because they know how to appeal to customers through excitement and emotion. To these brands, it’s more than just business. They have brand strategies that transform their brands into something that makes sense to customers and entices them to remain loyal.
These six tips are the secret ingredients that will take your brand to the next level for better customer engagement and loyalty and an all-around, more defined brand.
- Know Your Customers
As a business owner, possibly the most important thing you can do is know your customers. Really know them. Study their likes, their dislikes, their behaviors, and their lives. Your customers are the people who provide your business, so if you don’t make them happy, you have nothing.
You’ll want to understand how to keep customers coming back. Therefore, you must appeal to them. Take advantage of today’s technology. Social media is one of the best tools to help you get insight into your audience.
Google Analytics, for example, tells you the demographic information of your website visitors. You’ll get basic information, like age and gender, of your visitors, and you can see what their behaviors were when they visited. What pages did they visit? What did they want to know more about?
Take that information and tailor your brand to it. Do what you can to appeal to the masses, whether that means changing your brand’s mission statement (if you remain truthful!) or tweaking commercials to intrigue your audience.
- Create a Relatable Story
Once you know what your audience likes and dislikes, you can create an engaging brand story that appeals emotionally to them. To be a successful marketer, you should understand how to tell a story. Advertisements, essentially, are stories that attempt to convert, right?
Older brands can rely on retelling their histories to create a sense of nostalgia with long-term customers. Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken are good examples of how to re-create history through a brand story.
However, newer brands must create a story that can last through generations. First, define a purpose for your brand. What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to help your audience?
Your story should be a good mix of your mission statement, the things you want your business to accomplish, and how your business can help others. The more your audience can relate to your brand’s story, the more successful and memorable it will be.
- Remain Consistent and Authentic
Do you notice that the most successful brands are those that remain consistent in their branding and mission and authentic to the message they send? That’s because their authenticity helps them gain trust and a loyal fan base.
To create a successful brand strategy, your brand must be honest and remain faithful to its customers. Your audience can’t trust a flip-flopping message and will be turned off by advertisements that contradict your mission statement.
Of course, your brand image can only be as authentic as those who are supposed to uphold it every day: Your employees. Your team is one of the most important secret weapons in keeping consistency throughout your brand.
Train your team based on the principles you want your business to grow upon. Don’t settle for anything less, and make this a priority within your company. Have the same expectations for your social media managers as you do for yourself and you’ll have a team
