A brand is not a reflection of its owners. A brand is its clients' perception of the company. Hence, the essence of this perception has a significant impact on the company and its operations. Let's take a closer look at how to build a brand's strength.
For clients (customers) to remember your brand when thinking of a particular product, you should work on improving brand awareness. Building brand awareness can help you with customer acquisition and forging an emotional bond with your clients.
People buy from brands with a high level of credibility. According to statistical data collected by HubSpot, most buyers follow their friends' recommendations when choosing a brand to buy from. Moreover, 70% of buyers look for online reviews from other clients before committing to a purchase.
Building a Brand
By leveraging the two benefits mentioned above, innovative brands can manage to generate high revenue. New brands inspire people to invest in them, offering novel features, lower prices, or quality customer care. On the other hand, well-known brands can afford to charge more for products with analogs on the market.
To put it simply, buyers pay for the emotions they feel when buying your product. Trustworthiness, reputation, and a multitude of faithful clients allow high-market share brands to launch entirely new products and campaigns more successfully. This marketing practice is referred to as umbrella branding or family branding.
Well-established brands have an immense influence on the market. If you're looking to hop on a niche market, you should be aware of your competition. Strong brands determine the course and orientation for all other brands of the same niche in the space. That said, lesser brands align with the top-performing companies when entering the space. Fresh brands must develop branding strategies according to the blueprint provided by top companies.
Well-known brands are trendsetters. Brand strength leads to fruitful marketing partnerships. Everyone wants to collaborate with the best. That said, such brands draw more investors (money) and can produce more innovative products and expand.
Furthermore, strong brands have the capability to hire the most qualified specialists, skilled practitioners, and creatives. The latter is inspired to collaborate on fresh and innovative ideas while the most competent managers put them out into the world.
Now that you know what it takes to create a strong brand, you should learn how to measure the performance of your strategies.
Measuring Brand Strength
As an up-and-coming brand, you should always make sure the company is moving in the right direction; routinely monitor the effectiveness of your strategies. Monitoring brand strength is not a standalone metric; it involves meeting several goals. Here are some critical KPIs each brand should track.
- Brand Awareness. These forms include carrying out surveys, monitoring traffic from your site from branded keywords, managing your brand mentions and customer reviews across social media platforms.
- Sales Performance. Assessing your financial growth involves keeping track of your sales volume, average transaction value, sustainable growth rate, and customer lifetime value.
- Brand Preference and Brand Switching. Brand preference shows whether your customers prefer your brand among several other competitors. Brand switching allows you to monitor clients who switch brands. You can find out the reason behind each switch with the help of surveys and individual input.
- Competition. Competition is a constant! Always have a sharp picture of how your product is performing in a densely competitive environment. You should know whether you're relevant in terms of product range, pricing, and quality. That said, you should monitor your market share, your customer acquisition rate, and revenue from all channels you use.
Tips to Increase Your Brand Strength
- Examine your niche audience. Your brand can't be the most reliable choice if you know absolutely nothing about your prospects. Define your brand's target audience: gender, age, occupation, location, problems, needs, and inclinations. This will help you better understand your buyers and craft the product to meet their needs.
- Define your brand voice. The way your brand communicates its message to the customers. Your brand voice helps your clients understand your core values and what you're offering. The tone of voice involves using uniform language across all marketing channels. To define your brand's voice accurately, you need to know your audience's needs, values, and preferences.
- Increase customer loyalty and retention. With an intelligent customer retention strategy, brands can save money on procuring new leads, which often involves collecting data about the prospects to generate relevant offers. Loyal customers are the cash-cows for every business because they help companies grow by referring and returning for more. That said, build lasting relationships with your customers, offer a rewards program, and collect clients' feedback to optimize your strategy.
- Partake in events. Event marketing allows companies to interact with their audience offline, generate buzz, promote new products and services, educate potential customers, and boost brand awareness.
- Be everywhere. The more platforms your campaigns reach, the more prospects you can procure. Your clients are everywhere, and you should be able to reach them. Each channel provides a unique set of business possibilities.
Takeaway
Increasing your brand's strength and adequately managing equity has become a number one priority for businesses of all sizes, in every type of industry, in all kinds of markets. However, that does not detract from the benefit of quality manufacturing and production. Both can help propel your product to the top in a market with customers always on the lookout for quality products. The rewards of having a reliable, strong brand are clear. Nothing can stop you from creating a top-notch strategy to build a strong brand with these tips in mind.
