Branding isn’t just about the popularity of your company. Its greatest and penultimate goal is loyalty in the long run, where your customers don’t just believe in your product but also return for the message and the values your business upholds. Therefore, as much as you would want people to recognize your brand spot-on, the bigger challenge of branding is to get them to cross from mere familiarity or recall and towards becoming your actual returning client.
How do you ensure then that you are reaching this goal? There are quite a few common mistakes that you can learn from so that you don’t end up with expenses spent on a failed investment and we’ve listed them down below:
If the goal of your marketing is to reach anybody, then it is not much different from trying to speak to no one at all. The risk of practically targeting just about anyone can weaken the powerful message of your brand and eventually make it less efficient.
The solution to this is simply to focus campaigning on your specific target audience and allow that to be the one to bring in the increase in brand awareness. It goes without saying then that you and your team should know who your target audience is. Take the following instances:
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A business that sells soap wouldn’t just go for a general target audience of those looking into sustainable and affordable new products.
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A smarter way of reaching a specific target would be to limit or to focus your target on a specific age group that is conscious about sustainability matters, specific locations where the product can actually be purchased, and to check in on people actually looking into household and cleaning tags.
Remember: A good brand has a great message and a great set of values that is memorable to its target audience.
As previously said, branding’s penultimate goal is brand loyalty. This means that if you’re approaching a strategy, you aren’t just focused on trends now, but that you are considering if the approach will also speak volumes of the message that your brand has to say in the long run.
Campaign tracking is limited to giving you a report of what your present audience is saying about your brand. However, this doesn’t guarantee that they will recall or will partake of your message given a few months from now. You can address this concern by taking the following into consideration:
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Your team should be checking on results across durations of time to be able to check which of the strategies you’re applying are actually working well for you over time.
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If you’re starting up, this meeting and review can be done every quarter or so.
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However, if your group has grown in number, you might need a more frequent approach which can go from a monthly review and even to a greater extent, a weekly report.
Yes, you’ve done your work and have requested the necessary reports to show you the numbers that measure if your campaigns are effective. However, do you really know what these numbers mean? Do they fall in the normal range of increase and/or decrease in relation to the size of your company’s overall growth?
Knowing the normal rough estimates in gauging marginal changes to check these numbers is essential in order for you to make necessary and informed decisions regarding your brand marketing. Oftentimes, we usually just read the positive reports and get lost in the negative ones.
Negative results do not automatically mean that the method of brand tracking is at fault. Give due consideration that realistic changes can happen in just a 3-5% margin. Most importantly, this does not mean that the campaign is already a failure.
Here are some numbers you might want to review in relation to the size of your company:
If You’re New to the Game
5 to 7 is the range you’re looking for in terms of interactions per possible client. If you go below this, they might likely not remember your brand at all. This goes without saying then that you should make sure you give possible audiences enough access to your brand to reach those number of interactions.
Loyalty
A big company doesn’t always guarantee that it will be on top of people’s minds. Loyalty is a product borne out of your company’s clear message and values. For bigger companies, evaluate if your customers know what your values are because that is what keeps them coming back.
Lack of Research
Whether big or small, market research is essential for you to understand what your customers value. By delaying the relatively tedious task of market research, you are risking the chance of not being able to immediately build connections with your possible audience.
Brand Tracking is powerful only when it is accurate. There are ways for you to track your data but as seen in the examples below, most of them are quite limited:
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Services done over Google can track impressions. The limitation to it is that it can present current data alone. It cannot give you an accurate projection for you to see if you are hitting the goal.
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Social media listening tools can also only track within the specific social media platform.
You can address this by strengthening your tracking approach through surveys and by looking into brand tracking software that can give you more accurate data. Surveys are great to help as they allow you to get actual data from where your customers have heard of your brand (thus, revealing to you which campaign strategy worked for them). Additionally, this can also show you which of your campaigns needs more work.
Whether this means copying off of your competitors’ design or worse would be copying their writing styles, there is something off about sounding like you are not yourself. Additionally, with people’s declining attention span, reposting the same content across all of your platforms is also a repetitive approach.
What you can do to address this is to maximize the uniqueness of each platform’s strengths and make it work for your campaign. Consider the following examples:
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What makes Instagram different from Facebook?
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What makes a Google ad different from a YouTube ad?
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Are all your ads containing the same content?
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Are they using the same format as well?
Whatever your team and you will find in this discussion can greatly change the material of your campaign for each social platform.
Additionally, by having the same design or voice as that of your competitors, you’re ironically making your brand into theirs. Instead of simply looking at your competitors’ materials, you should be evaluating why their strategy works for their target audience and turn that evaluation into action towards your own target audience.
As for writing copies, having a team who can grasp the right word choice and tone that matches what your brand has to say, which is uniquely yours, is the perfect asset to send your message across.
The goal here is not to sound like different people across different platforms. Instead, it’s making your brand like writing a piece of music: cohesive and creative but still very much unparalleled.
Consistency begets commitment and self-awareness. This is why it is important that the bigger goals are clear to everyone in the team and that all are working towards the same goal. Take the following examples:
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What is your brand?
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What are your brand’s message and values?
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What is brand awareness to you?
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More importantly, are your answers the same as that of everyone in your entire team?
Branding is part and parcel of every aspect of business and is not merely just a specific job description of your team under marketing. This means that your brand’s values and the message are consistent across how you pitch, how you deliver and design your product or service, how you communicate to your possible or current consumers, and most importantly, how you troubleshoot.
Knowing your brand amongst yourselves will lead you to see your strengths but also your weaknesses. If you’re made aware of the latter, then you’ll know when and who to consult with to make your weaknesses become areas of growth.
Additionally, having a consistently safe environment for feedback to be given and received can help you make wiser choices as you adapt to changes. Remember: Changing too much and/or too fast will risk losing your unique voice and refusing to change when it is already needed will translate to wasted efforts.
So, What Now?
Welcome evaluations regularly, especially if it is about the efficiency of results from campaigns. Survey across your company to ensure that everyone is seeing the same vision and are working together to hit the target.
Subsequently, be sensitive towards the needs within and outside of your company. Partaking in social issues isn’t just a trend but it also will greatly reflect your values. Within your team, how they describe your company is also of great importance as this reflects directly on what message or values are being sent across–more than what you think you’re saying.
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