The keys to marketing a brand are consistency and making an emotional connection. Your brand needs to be consistent so that it delivers the same message and customers feel you’re a company they can trust. In my Marketing MBA curriculum I learned that this is an element of “IMC”-Integrated Marketing Communications. The emotional connection includes the associations your brand makes in a customer’s mind.
A brand communicates emotionally when it makes the customer’s life easier, it makes them safer, it lets them be who they are, it’s part of their family, and so on. You establish this emotional connection by solving a specific problem your customer faces.
Note that I didn’t say you solve all of their problems. Not only is this impossible, but it’s also not ideal. Instead, you want to focus on one specific problem that you solve and that no one else solves in quite the way you do.
Integrating Your Brand Strategy
You should send a clear message both online and off and integrate all of your marketing channels. A good marketing strategy is interactive and engages the customer.
What does it mean to be ‘interactive?’ In today’s media landscape, consumers are no longer stuck with a few big marketing channels, such as TV and the newspaper. Today, people go out and find their own sources of news and information, including information on products and services they need.
To be interactive is to engage your customers wherever they’re looking for information. You do this by establishing a presence on social media, offering apps, engaging with your website, producing videos, and so on. The idea is to create as many potential touch points as possible with your audience, providing the information they need WHEN and WHERE they need it.
All of these marketing channels need to be integrated so they create a web that sends people back and forth to each. For example, television spots or radio or newspaper ads should include the URL or your website or a message that says, ‘Follow us on Twitter at…’ Your website should have links to all of your social media profiles and a call to action urging visitors to check them out. At every touch point, send customers to all of your other marketing channels.
All of this is backed up with strong SEO. People may encounter your brand but lose track of the name with all of the media noise around them. They’ll then search for you using a search engine or social media search. If you’ve targeted keywords well, your website or profile will come up in their search.
On social media, you need a real person to respond to comments, inquiries and questions. Rather than making it smoother and easier for you, automating your social media can actually cause harm. Some large companies have learned this the hard way when they gave customers laughable canned responses, which were then shared with thousands of others. Social media requires real human interaction.
The final element of an interactive strategy is to track analytics. If you can’t do sophisticated visitor behavior tracking on your website, at the very least monitor behavior using Google Analytics. A wealth of information can be found using this program to help you improve your strategy.
Action Steps:
- Make a short list of what needs your product or service meets for your target audience
- Make sure your social media platforms point visitors to your website
- Make sure your website points visitors to your social platforms
