Using Brand Stories To Connect With Your Customers

How can you ensure that the brand story you tell is one your customers will respond positively to?
The answer…well, there are of course enormous differences from one organisation to the next. Nevertheless, there are a few key strategic guidelines to follow, which can help in all instances.

In fact, proceed in accordance with the following five steps and you may find it difficult to go wrong:

1.  Show your customers, don’t just tell them
First of all, it is not simply enough to tell your customers X, Y and Z about your business. After all, you could just be saying it for the sake of winning them over. Instead, you need to think of appropriate ways and means by which you can show them, rather than tell them. Or in other words, demonstrate what your brand represents, how you do what you say you do and what it is that makes you different. These days, evidence speaks louder than all the words in the world.

2.  Focus on long-term stories
It’s also a good idea to ensure that the brand story you tell is long-term or on-going in nature. The reason being that if it is only relevant and/or convincing for the time being, it may not have little value for your business. As with most marketing, the focus should be on the long-term benefits for your business, as opposed to quick-fixes. What’s more, you should tell the type of story that you can and will continue to tell and update along the way. Think of the kinds of evergreen qualities that sell and the kinds of stories your customers will want to keep up to date with.

3.  Be authentic
Or in other words, don’t think you can get away with faking it. Whatever type of story you decide to tell or persona you choose to assume, it needs to be authentic.  Which is for two reasons – first of which being that most consumers can spot fakes miles away. But even if they don’t, you cannot expect to keep up a voice, attitude and façade that go against who you really are and what you really do. Sooner or later, the whole thing will come crashing down - hence it isn’t worth bothering with in the first place.

4. Grab their attention
You cannot expect your customers to delve too deeply into your story if there isn’t something to hook their attention early on. Attention spans these days are minimal at the best of times. Which means that no matter how deep and compelling your story is, you need to ensure you grab their attention as early on as possible. First get them hooked, then move on to the details.

5. Study their habits
Last but not least, the better you come to understand what makes your customers tick, the easier it will be to create compelling stories. Study their habits, get involved via social media and discover the kinds of subjects, voices and anything else that engages them. Not to mention, the kinds of things that generate discussion, or perhaps send them in entirely the wrong direction. This way, you will have nothing less than a blueprint for the creation of not only a great brand story, but the rest of the content you publish across the board.

Why brand awareness is is commonly overlooked by UK SMEs?

Constraint is the word that comes to mind every time an employee or a business has an excuse. Why is a project not completed? The deadline was not realistic. Why is a website not ranking in search engines? The cost involved is too great. The questions and excuses are never ending, but that doesn’t solve the issue that is on the table today.

It is the constraints that business owners connect with brand awareness that mean many SMEs throughout the UK are not necessarily avoiding brand awareness, but overlooking it completely. They assume that time and money invested in brand awareness can not be measured in terms of return on investment (ROI). Of course, when developing a cost-benefit analysis, ROI is important, so without a measurement, an analysis can not be developed.

Brand awareness is slightly different to a marketing campaign that is designed to promote or sell a product. Brand awareness is creating awareness within a demographic about a brand and its products. This helps potential consumers to assign a certain value to these products. Ideally, the brand and the products on offer are the first things that this potential consumer is going to think of when they are need of a product, without seeing a direct advertisement.

Effective brand awareness takes time, money and strategy, but is it really worth it? For those that are looking for a few sales on eBay, no. That being said, for those people that have a vision of creating a leading brand in their industry, brand awareness engagement is something that should be considered part of their every day business activities.

In fact, starting to create a brand image might not be as complex, expensive, or time consuming as many people might imagine. Even well designed banners, located in the right places can start to implant a seedling into the brain of a consumer that can grow into something of high value. The more diverse brand awareness strategies become, the more a customer will relate to that product. Look at the likes of Coca-Cola and Red Bull, both brands that are well known by people across the globe; thanks to brand awareness.

Let’s assume a brand is a manufacturer of extreme sports casual wear. By visiting extreme sports events and consistently placing banners at these events, they will start to create awareness for their brand. They might not be able to instantly and effectively measure the ROI of their efforts, but the end result is that next time a potential consumer walks into a retailer, that stocks their products, they are likely to look twice, knowing that they have “seen that brand before”.

The impact of that initial sighting of the brand is not really measurable. The potential consumer gets in the spirit, at an event relating to their passion, they see the advertisement and assign this with their passion. From here they see the product in a store, buy it and who knows how many like minded people buy the same product as a result of a positive review?

Why Is Branding So Important?

Branding is the process of differentiating your company so it can be identified as distinct from your competitors on the market. Sadly, in today’s highly competitive marketplace it is no longer enough just to develop and produce outstanding products. It’s a fact that even more inferior goods can sell well if they are launched together with a slick branding campaign.

For many companies, creating a strong brand is so important that they will hire in a marketing company especially for that purpose. So what is it that makes branding so crucial? One of the main functions of strong branding is to build a trusting relationship with your client base. For example, think about Coca Cola, one of the world’s biggest known brands: Its logo is instantly recognisable so wherever consumers are in the world they will feel this is a product they can rely on. This is a huge power to have, and Coca Cola have achieved it through a careful branding strategy.

Secondly, of course, branding is intended to increase sales. Whilst strong products are important, it is not quite true that ‘a good product sells itself’. What sells a product is a good perception of it. Consumers tend to buy with their eyes, and it’s well known that they will make the majority of their purchasing decisions within around 10 seconds. If you are successful in creating a strong image for your product or service that appeals precisely to the needs of your target customers, good sales results are far more attainable.

So how do you begin to go about creating a strong brand? Firstly, you need to identify what is important to your customer base and what will appeal to them. Your branding message should be based around this. Also, isolate what is unique about your brand and think about how you can communicate this. What are your brand values? A memorable tag line can work wonders and the simpler it is, the better. Something like Gilette’s ‘The Best A Man Can Get’ has worked very well for the brand.
It’s a good idea to hire in some marketing expertise to help you in these initial stages.

Next, come up with a design theme and logo which can tie all products under the brand umbrella together. Not only will this make your brand stronger as a whole, it will also make new product launches easier as they will already be identified with an established name. After this, you should get your brand out there by any means you can – whether it’s television advertising, online, in printed media, attending trade fairs or one-off promotional events. Everything helps.

Finally, don’t just assume your work is done when the brand is launched. It’s essential to get regular feedback from your target market and be prepared to make adjustments if necessary. If your brand doesn’t seem to be building consumer confidence you have to look at where you’re going wrong.