6 Guaranteed Ways to Boost Your Brand – And Your Business
You’ve covered all the branding basics. You know who you are and what you stand for. You have a tagline and logo your customers are familiar with. You’re pretty consistent and your customers seem happy. What more can you do? A lot.
Brand Your Content
You probably already have a blog, maybe you’re even guest posting for business partners or on other industry blogs. Wherever you place your content, your brand is there for all to see. Showcasing your knowledge is an important step in both creating a memorable brand and nurturing relationships with other businesses. But it isn’t just blog posts you should be concerned with branding. Every piece of content coming from your business should make people remember your brand. This can be as simple as including your logo or a watermark on an infographic to creating memes in your brand colors for a more subtle reminder. Branding doesn’t apply only to static images, but video and audio content, as well.
Update Visual Branding, Carefully
While striving for continuity and recognizability, don’t let your image grow stale. A total overhaul of your brand can cost you memorability and customers. It’s not a decision to make lightly. Fortunately, you don’t have to change everything to freshen up your look. Consider the logo evolution of major brands over the years: always recognizable, but never stale. This is a good time for SMBs to work closely with a professional designer, rather than try to Do-It-Yourself.
Single Brand Voice Across Channels
Your brand voice is the personification of your company; who you are in your market and to your customers. It’s vital to keep your brand voice consistent wherever you interact with people. If you have more than one person communicating with your customers, create a persona for your business. The persona defines your public voice. Include details like important values and personality traits. For example, some companies engage customers with sarcasm and humor, while others are careful and circumspect.
Consistency is important in every interaction. A CRM with social media can help ensure your interactions are on point across channels by giving your team instant access to a customer’s social media profiles and past interactions with your business.
Ensure Interactions are Relevant
Are you trying to sell something your customers don’t want? If your customer already purchased something from you, should you keep trying to sell them that same item? Probably not. You could cross-sell them complementary items, but you can do better than that. By tracking their purchases, you can offer customers items or services they may want in the next stage of their relationship with your company. Use CRM to boost your brand by using your customer’s purchase history to keep future interactions relevant.
[Tweet “Your #branding could be better! Discover 6 guaranteed ways to boost your brand & #business.”]Personalized Customer Service
The personal experience doesn’t have to stop with your mailing list. Make sure your customers feel important when they reach out to you by giving everyone on your team quick access to each customer’s data. Using a CRM, your team can view purchase history, social media activity, payment history, and even previous interactions for a specific customer so they can personalize the interaction and make your customer feel important.
Listen
It may seem obvious, but too many brands don’t listen to their customers. Collecting data and personalizing interactions, content, and ads give the customer the impression that they’re important to you. However, if you fail to listen and address things your customers are telling you, they won’t stick around for long.
You can learn a great deal by documenting complaints and using analytics to understand customer behavior. Pay attention to what your customers do after they talk to you and what they do before they make a purchase. Data isn’t only helpful in identifying trigger points for sales, but also in identifying problems with your customer relations. Most importantly: take action to fix your problems.
Branding involves so much more than a consistent visual or building authority. Make sure your customers know who you are and associate your brand with all the right things.