12 Tips To Build Your Brand With Success
In a world of intense competition, brands are the difference between success and failure. Consumers across the world are faced with so much choice that the typical consumer prefers to buy products from brands they know and trust, rather than take risks. If you want to stand out from the crows, you need to build your brand. Here’s how.
- Have a Clear, Distinct Identity
The most important thing about having a strong brand is that it has to be based on a clear, and distinct idea. In other words, when consumers look at your brand, they have to see something unique, differentiated from your competitors. If they don’t see that, then your brand becomes interchangeable, and that means that even if you can win them over, you won’t have any kind of customer loyalty.
Customers form attachments to brands as much as they do to other people. They need to feel that there is something truly different about your brand in order to form an emotional bond with your brand. If you can succeed at turning a transactional relationship into a positive emotional one, then you will succeed at earning customer loyalty.
- Think Creatively
With so many competitors out there, you have to think creatively to be able to truly grab a customer’s attention. This isn’t just about the brand per se, it’s about your value proposition, the nature of your products and services, your business model, and so many other things. You always have to think creatively and be innovative. Never settle for ordinary. Ordinary is everywhere, creativity is rare.
- Be Consistent
You are fighting for your customer’s attention, even if it’s just offering carpet repair. That means that when you do get your customer’s attention, you don’t want them feeling confused about who you are, or the quality of what you offer. Consistently is essential. You have to employ the same brand logo, colors, name, etc, all the time, so that your customers are never confused about your business. Consistency is vital to trust.
- Speak With Potential Customers
You should view any opportunity to get feedback from potential customers, as an opportunity to build a relationship with them, and to learn and improve your brand. Use as many communication channels as you can, to encourage a dialogue with your customers, because they have all the secrets about who you can grow your brand.
- Always Deliver Quality
It’s really hard to build a long-term competitive advantage based on being the lowest-cost company in your segment. Counter-intuitively, it’s easier to focus on quality. This is because fighting to be the lowest-cost producer will force everyone else into a price war with you, so unless you have a real advantage, your profits will erode away. What you want is to focus on quality. Quality at every step of the customer journey, all the way to the final product. That will ensure that customers are happy to be your unpaid marketers, spreading the word about your products and services.
- Focus on Community
Businesses often forget this: but every business is part of a community. Your business activities have both negative and positive effects on your business. You want to engage with your community to make sure that you alleviate or eliminate any negative effects, and to maximize all the good work you are doing. Interact with your community through established organizations, social media platforms, and other avenues.
- Use Content Marketing
We are in an age of content marketing. You cannot succeed without creating bite-sized content that customers can consume and share over social media. This is essential for building brand awareness, and trust.
- Have a Purpose
It’s essential to have a purpose. A purpose will clarify your decisions, by acting as an organizing principle around which your business can operate. A purpose will inspire your staff and be felt by your customers. A purpose will act as a differentiating tool and allow you to solve the major problems affecting your business.
- Leverage the Power of Customer Reviews
Social proof is an important tool that you can marshal to your ends. In essence, social proof refers to what happens when people see other people doing, or recommending something. In your case, positive customer reviews make it more likely that customers will buy your products or services, because they will have social proof that they are worth getting.
- What’s So Special About You?
Venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, said that product-market-fit is the “only thing that matters” when it comes to determining the fate of a business. What this means is that your business’ success is all about whether you have a great product with a large and growing market for that product. It’s not enough to just have a great product: you have to have people who are hungry for that product and can’t get enough. Another way to view this is to ask yourself what your value proposition is: why should customers buy their products from you, rather than the many other brands out there? What makes your product so special?
- Give a Great Customer Journey
All along the customer journey, you want to deliver bliss for your client. The customer journey is not simply about the point of sale, it’s about every touch point between you and your customers. If you can deliver a blissful customer experience all along that journey, you will form positive associations between you and your brand.
- Ease Customer Pain
Then, you want to look outward, into the lives of your customers. What pain points do they have in their lives that you can ease or completely eliminate?
If you can find those pain points and ease or eliminate them, you can focus a good deal of your branding efforts at telling customers about how you do that.
You can learn more about how to build your brand by clicking here.
