The modern business world is a busy place, highly competitive but full of growth opportunities. More people engaged in business today than ever before have university educations.
In the context of this highly motivated, confident, and skilled workforce, new start-ups pop up every day and innovative software tools emerge to support their development. No matter how imaginative your brand or CV maybe, there is stiff competition out there. Keeping on your toes is more important than ever. This is the age of the knowledge economy and those with the right mix of resources including knowledge, intelligence and innovative thinking will stand out from the crowd. Branding attributes a signature aesthetic to products and services. If a business is planned and executed well, its market and associated profits will rise consistently with the brand's popularity.
Authenticity conveyed within branding will promote trust and inspire loyalty. A product or service must foster a unique selling point, backed by reliability and legitimacy to achieve growth. Standing out does not mean relying on gimmicks or outlandish but superficial marketing tactics.
It's about keeping it real and understanding your customer's needs and pain points.
Create a narrative
Loyal customers buy into more than simply a product or service. They want to foster a long term relationship with a brand that understands their requirements and which is flexible enough to evolve and grow with them. Focus on communicating your brand's story, the people behind your business and how your company works. This insight can build a sense of familiarity in your customer base, in itself helping to fostering more potential leads, improving word of mouth recommendations and ultimately increasing sales. As the business world becomes increasingly automated, the personality and voice projected by a brand make it increasingly accessible to its customer base, helping it to evolve and become more successful.
Relate, relate, relate
Investing in business relationships will allow new and existing customers to see the value in your brand, which in turn offers a more personalised and compelling customer experience. This means businesses are not only required to provide the products or services their customers need, but they must also deliver an excellent end-to-end experience across every touchpoint. If approached and viewed from a relationship perspective, a new and more relevant term can be used, Return on Relationship (ROR). The more in-depth the insight customers have into a business's personality, the greater its accessibility and ability to connect with them. This will help shrink the trust gap and enable businesses to evolve, offering more meaningful engagement and relationships.
Brand presence in the digital world should match the personalities of the people operating the brand and match offline conversations. Consistency is critical and staying true to your word on all deliverables is critical if you are to maintain traction with your online audience and customers.
Social Listening
Defined as the process for monitoring social media channels for mentions of a brand, competitors and product or service, effective social listening is an important factor in helping you stand out from the crowd. All the issues you need to address in order to improve and enhance your customer's experience can be heard, actioned and then appreciated by simply paying attention to the feedback and public opinion about a product or service. Brand mentions, relevant hashtags, competitor mentions and industry trends are all methods for helping you to understand what is popular and unpopular about what you do. Social listening helps you to evaluate the mood behind the social media chatter; This 'online mood' is also called social media sentiment.
Paying attention to social media sentiment is another integral aspect of social media listening. It taps into the depth of how audiences perceive your brand. Keeping on top of negative perceptions and taking appropriate corrective action is important in maintaining and improving a brands popularity. Watch over who comments and shares posts, re-post celebratory mentions and hashtags, be active online and respond constructively when you become aware of negative experiences published on socials, offering refunds and apologies when appropriate.
Be Direct
We've all seen it, a brand communicating via their socials, posting off-brand, irrelevant and misdirected messages which feel painful and misinformed. These types of marketing misfires can turn followers off and even damage brands. It's about quality, not quantity when it comes to effective social media posting. Address pain points, use words such as ‘us’ and ‘we’ to foster a sense of community, ask questions, run polls, publish guides to products or services and use brand ambassadors to positively represent and promote your company's core values.
Keep track of the latest trends and be creative!
Tik-Tok, Socialbee and Trello, the digital world, move at a lightning pace. Keeping track of the most relevant apps and social media platforms launching and picking up traction keeps your brand current. Video marketing via Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook has quickly become the most successful strategy for promoting increased interactions. Videos get 1,200% more shares than text and images combined. Peoples attention when reading lasts a fraction of the time invested in watching a video. Well produced videos can have a lasting and positive impact compared to the written word.
So breakthrough all that background noise and get noticed. Be genuine and innovate and never imitate. Connect with your audience on their level, always communicating the collateral value and character of your product or service from a place of authenticity.
