You can have an excellent product or offer the best customer service in the business, but you need to communicate your brand's value to your target market to reach your true sales potential.
Brand communication is a relatively simple concept, but it significantly impacts your growth strategy. It's anything your company or brand does to get your name, products, or services in front of people who might want to buy them. Common brand communication strategies include marketing, advertising, and public relations campaigns.
When it comes to brand communication, quality is more important than quantity. If your advertisements reach 50,000 people, but only 1% of that audience is your target market, you'll make about 500 new sales. However, if you reach 10,000 people, but 50% of them are your target market, that's 5,000 new customers for your business.
If you are still looking for the results you would like from your brand's communication activities, it's time to reassess and improve your strategy. Before implementing a new business growth strategy, it's essential to understand your audience, get clear on your brand voice, develop a content marketing strategy, establish consistency, develop visual assets, and put metrics in place to measure your success.
1. Understand Your Target Audience: Who Are You Selling To?
No matter how good your products are or how impressive your marketing campaign is, some people are not a fit for your product or service and will never buy it. For example someone who does not have a baby and doesn't know anyone who does will not buy a stroller, no matter how good the ads are. Similarly, a lifelong dedicated vegan will not be persuaded to eat at a burger restaurant with no meat-free options. Your target audience is those with an unmet need that your product or service fills. It is also important that their goals and values align with your brand's.
Determining your target audience is crucial before launching any strategic communication initiative so you don't waste money. It is better to reach a smaller group of people deeply interested in your brand or product than to reach as many people as possible if only a small percentage of them become customers.
Start by looking at your customers and dividing them into subgroups based on factors like age, location, income, interests, and more. You can also look at who your competitors are selling to. Consider gathering data via customer interviews or web analytics to learn more about them. It may also be helpful to define who is not included in your target audience. Once you've researched, create ideal buyer personas to guide you. These profiles of your hypothetical "perfect" customers outline their demographics, personalities, likes, dislikes, goals, values, wants, and needs. Having about 3-5 ideal buyer personas for your brand is good.
This research will tell you what kind of content to create and give you insights into where to pot that content so your target audience is most likely to see it. Take Slack, for example. Slack is a messaging service designed to help facilitate work communication. Their target audience includes people who own and operate a business and rely on forward-thinking technology to help them improve efficiency. Their content marketing strategy incorporates live and on-demand events, a podcast focused on teamwork, office culture, and blogs. These are resources that their target audience is likely to seek out independently and thus discover Slack as a product.
2. Define Your Brand Voice: Who Are You?
In identifying your target audience, you've understood why your audience needs your product. Now you just have to tell them why they need you. If your brand were a person, its voice would be its personality. We determine a person's personality by what they say and how they say them. And just like with humans, we are attracted more to some personalities than others.
Your target audience should be able to relate to your brand through its voice. It shows that you care about the same things they do — like luxury, sustainability, or productivity — and want to see them succeed in their goals. Start defining your brand voice by looking at your buyer personas. What do they want or need to hear? What are their pain points? What kind of tone will they be most responsive to? What traits do they look for in someone they affiliate with?
Once you have determined what your brand should sound like, go and audit what it does sound like. Pay attention to your vocabulary, tone, and branded phrases. If they don't convey the personality you want to embody in your brand, create new guidelines. Once you have settled on a voice for your brand, document it in your branding guidelines.
HubSpot is a platform businesses use to manage their marketing automation and CRM. HubSpot markets itself as easy to use and ideal for businesses and organizations of any size. They use casual, direct, conversational language in their blogs, social media posts, and newsletters to put users at ease and help them feel confident about their marketing efforts.
3. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy: Why Do You Matter?
Do you ever feel like everyone is trying to sell you something? Sometimes your customers feel that way too. Customers can turn a blind eye to flashy ads sometimes missing them all together. Content marketing is more subtle. Its primary purpose is to inform an audience. Successful content marketing identifies the customers' pain points and offers advice to help them overcome these challenges. Of course, the advice usually includes suggesting they buy the marketer's product or service to help them. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and e-books are content marketing examples.
Successful content marketing is good storytelling. It focuses on building a relationship with customers and establishing trust. It also relies on knowing your target audience and what content they usually consume. The Storybrand framework (by Donald Miller) is an effective method for using content marketing to connect with potential buyers. This framework positions the buyer as the hero of their own story. Your company serves as a guide or mentor who points them in the right direction, but ultimately they discover and implement the solution (i.e., your product) themselves. The best content marketing empowers the buyer.
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows entrepreneurs to take their business online. Their podcast, Shopify Masters, interviews a different e-commerce founder weekly about their journey of starting a business. Aspiring entrepreneurs can tune in to learn tips about starting their businesses and gain exposure to the Shopify brand in the process.
4. Maintain Consistency in Brand Communication: Don't Let Your Audience Forget You
Consistency in brand communication means your brand looks and sounds uniform across every channel. In a world where buyers are constantly bombarded by companies who want their attention and money, getting lost in the crowd is easy. You want customers and prospective customers to have an instant point of connection and recognition with your brand.
Imagine driving down the highway in a new part of the country. You're hungry, and you keep seeing signs for restaurants, but you don't recognize them. Not only do all the signs start to blur together, but you would need to take the time to stop and research the menu, hours, and price of each one to decide where you want to eat.
Then imagine you see a set of Golden Arches. You've definitely seen these before, and you instantly know what they mean. Even if you've never eaten there, you know what to expect. Consistent branding lets customers know they can trust you to deliver the same quality and service each time. To help achieve consistency, it's crucial to outline your brand identity in a branding guideline that any team member can refer to. This should outline your color scheme, typeface, logo, tone, slogan, and voice and give usage examples.
Branding Example
Source: John Deere
An excellent example of a company that is consistent with its branding is John Deere. They stick to a design aesthetic across every channel. You'll find their classic green and yellow from their app to their website to their social media pages.
5. Embrace Visual Communication: Make People Pay Attention
Humans are highly visual, and digital technology takes advantage of that. Reading takes time. If you want a customer to listen to a video or podcast, they need to be in a place where it is appropriate. However, we can quickly look at an image and take in a lot of information.
If you use visual marketing assets, remember that they should also follow your brand style guides. This can mean including your logo somewhere on the image or simply that it matches the same aesthetic as the rest of your branded communications.
For example, a luxury clothing brand whose color palette heavily features earth tones should not create visual assets that feature children on a playground. If you want to create videos, ensure they are captioned so people can follow along without listening. All visuals should be crisp, well-produced, and attractive.
Ford Motors is an excellent example of how to do visual content well. All of their videos feature their logo on the screen. They use real people in their content and talk about how they use their Ford cars and trucks.
6. Measure Your Success: How Will You Know You've Succeeded?
Even with all of the careful research and consideration in the world, there's no way to know for sure if your brand communication strategy will be successful until you put it out into the world. Collecting feedback from your audience and adjusting and refining your strategy as necessary to optimize your results is important.
One way to measure your success is to look at your website traffic. Has it significantly increased, especially in the desired areas? Have some pages gained more traction than others? Where do your visitors come from, and how long do they stay? Of the people who come to your site, how many leave with a purchase? You should conduct a similar analysis on your social media profiles. Don't just look at your follower count but how often users engage with your content and visit your website.
You can also conduct brand surveys to gather qualitative information from your customers and quantitative data.
What Do You Get Out of a Successful Brand Communication Strategy?
Get More Loyal Customers
A successful brand communication strategy starts with knowing your audience and defining who you are and why they should affiliate with you. Apply these findings consistently on all channels and focus on adding value to their lives with narrative-based content marketing and engaging visuals. Be responsive to customer feedback and flexible enough to adjust your strategy accordingly. No matter what products or services you sell, your most valuable asset is your brand identity. Where the wrong communication strategies can turn away buyers in your target audience, the right strategy can turn strangers into loyal customers.
Is your communication strategy keeping your business growth objectives on target? Take our growth potential assessment to find out!
