Mastering the Brand Experience
There are limitless elements to consider when building a brand. An oft-overlooked component is developing a strategic brand experience where your customers feel a series of positive emotions when engaging with your brand. Designing your brand experience is a thoughtful combination of brand strategy, customer experience, and user experience — and all of it helps improve the awareness and differentiation of your business.
Brand experience is where a brand becomes a symbol and an icon in a customer's life. It is necessary to create deeper connections with your target audience and deliver true value and results. Your brand experience will be the differentiating factor for your customer choosing you over a competitor. Our goal here at Treadaway is to create brand experiences that drive loyalty and capture market share. (Hint: you can't capture market share until you've captured loyalty.) We'll walk you through the key areas to consider for mastering the brand experience from a 30,000 ft view.
Brands need to solve a problem.
To master brand experience, you first need to have a firm understanding of who your target audience is and what they need — you need to solve their problems. If you don't know what solution you're providing, how can a customer know they need it? By focusing your marketing and brand dollars on a specific group with a particular problem, you're more likely to take them from the interested stage to the loyal stage. You can get very detailed, and it will only help you better understand who makes the best fit for what you're offering.
Brands need to plan for awareness.
It's not love at first sight for most customers. They have to become aware of your brand, your solution, your other customers, your competitors. This awareness stage is hyper-critical in the experience process. By determining how your customers will find your brand and what you have to offer, you can begin to influence the narrative before they've ever even made a purchase. Don't wait to start your nurture sequence until they've purchased! Your social media channels and marketing efforts should be intricately designed to 1) increase the recognizability of your brand and 2) provide a solution, not a sales pitch.
Brass Tacks for Building Awareness
Position your brand as a person, not a company, be personable and promote traits about your brand that showcase you're more than just selling stuff to people.
Craft a narrative around your business that will humanize it and provide depth.
Post on social media about things unrelated to your business at a 60% value-based, educational, or personable content to a 20% product or service ratio.
Make all of your content easy for your audience to share.
Brands need to be different and trustworthy.
If your brand experience is going to stand out, it has to stand out from what exists and what your customers may have already experienced. Do a bit of research to determine who your competition is. Can you buy from them? Sign up for their newsletter? DM them with a customer question to see how they handle it? Putting yourself in a potential customer's shoes is the best way to design an experience that is set apart.
Think about the last brand or company you bought from or worked with that broke your trust. How did they do that? Was it their ethics? Was it their customer service? Was it the endless amount of promotional pop-ups on their site? Mastering the brand experience is also about mastering building real trust with your customers. Transparency, authenticity, and personality will help get you there.
Brands need to surprise and delight.
Ask yourself, "How will I meet and exceed my customer's expectations?" Strategize how you can repeatedly deliver that "Wow!" factor for them. Is it including a special bonus in the shipping box? Is it sending a personal note from you, the founder, to your entire email list? A surefire way to lose a customer is to treat them as a number. If you get to know them and their needs well, you'll be able to surprise and delight them at every turn.
Brass Tacks for Delighting Customers
Improve your response time.
Provide a seamless experience across all channels.
Try to get to know them on more than just a transactional level.
Provide value for free — help your customers help themselves!
Involve your customers in the process, where appropriate. A peek behind the curtain always delights.
Brands need to equip and empower.
What does it mean to empower your customers? Simply, it means providing them with something that helps them manage, drive, and design their lives on their terms. Practically, this means looking beyond your own monetary gain of running your business but solving an innate need. You want to provide them with a product, service, or bit of information that they can use long after a transaction is over. Ask your customers to submit pictures with your product in use. Ask them to share what working with you meant to them. Then share broadly and openly! If you're championing them in an honest way, they'll champion you.
If you're at a loss for how to design your brand experience strategically, that's okay. We get it. We've seen many of our clients feel the same way. Consider us your partner in the journey, not another agency telling you what to do. We're here if you need us (and you know where to find us).
The core elements of a brand experience are simple. Identify a problem, share your solution widely, make it different and better than the other solutions, include a bonus or two, and think of your customers as more than a transaction. Every time you engage with your customers is the perfect time to work on mastering the brand experience.
