Aligning Your Brand Messaging to Customer Priorities
The strength of your brand can make or break your business. Even if you have a cutting-edge product at a competitive price, a weak brand can cut your profit margins and drastically reduce your sales volume.
But strong branding is about more than just consistent logos and colors. A strong brand should align with customers’ priorities and act as a point of connection with your consumers. That’s why big brands like Nike and Apple spend more time talking about their values as a business than they do the quality of their product.
A well-aligned brand message makes customers feel at ease when purchasing from your business. It tells them that you have the same values, and understand their needs. This can be a real boon and dramatically boost your sales.
Consumer Behavior
Consumer behavior can be defined as “the study of activities that take place in regard to the purchase, consumption, and disposal of goods and services.” Learning more about why your customers come to you or go to a competitor will give you a great direction to follow for future branded messaging.
It is also important to recognize that consumer behavior is almost always in flux. Even if you are selling a staple product like milk, economic pressures and cultural trends can wreak havoc on your sales forecasts and brand image. This means you must have your ear to the ground at all times and be on the lookout for insights that can help you plan your branding.
Social media gives you a great opportunity to measure consumer behavior. You can use analytics provided by Instagram and Facebook to measure the reach and engagement of your branded posts. The posts that perform best may speak to the shared values or core interests of your consumers. Paying attention to these insights can help you predict behavior and understand the voice of the customer.
Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a great way to assess your business from the perspective of your customers. As a business owner, it’s easy to get lost in your own brand and accidentally operate based on false or outdated assumptions. Keeping the VoC in mind should help you spot misalignments with your messaging and identify consumers’ needs as they change.
You can obtain the VoC by conducting consumer interviews and on-site surveys. These forms of feedback may be more reliable than data you gather from social media, as you know all your participants are legitimate customers. Try to incentivize your customers to engage in these feedback forms and roll out new surveys every so often to ensure that your VoC is relevant.
Trialing New Branded Messaging
Once you’ve gathered data and received feedback, it’s time to create some new branded messaging. This new messaging should aim to align with the customer priorities you established when conducting your research.
When rolling out newly branded messaging, try to keep your overall identity consistent. Learning something new about the VoC doesn’t mean you need to abandon your logos, content design, or color scheme. It just means that you might focus more on value-oriented messaging rather than product-oriented messaging.
If you’re still unsure of direction, use wider market insights to drive your decision-making. At the moment, consumers favor brands that offer availability, convenience, and value. As a business owner, try to align with these market pressures and create brand messaging that seeks to connect with the hardships folks may be facing and the way that your brand can fill that gap.
Feedback
The big day comes and you finally roll out your new brand messaging — what happens next?
Hopefully, you will see a sizable jump in sales as more people get excited about your business and what you have to offer. Whether this happens or not, you need to collect relevant feedback that guides your future projects.
When gathering feedback for a new branded campaign, you’ll want to look equally at financial indicators as well as the reach and engagement of your messaging. Sometimes a short-term dip in sales can belie a long-term gain in customer loyalty and interest. Learning to navigate all forms of feedback is vital to ensure that your business’s brand messaging remains resilient during market fluctuations.
Conclusion
Aligning your brand message with your customer priorities is a great way to boost your profile and land new customers. At the moment, customers value availability, convenience, and value. However, that may all change in the future as market pressures change consumer behavior.
You can get ahead of trends and create consistent brand messaging by learning to hear the voice of the customer. The VoC gives you great insights into the effectiveness of your branded campaigns and can give your marketing department direction. Just be sure to use as much qualitative and quantitative feedback before making decisions that may impact your brand identity.