A brand of a company is more than just a logo or your companies name. Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, the perception that clients or customers have of your business and the voice that defines your organization as a whole to recognize the value of potential here; however, requires different branding strategies encapsulating each element.
The rules around branding are evolving more rapidly than ever, thanks to a changing consumer environment. The rise of Millennials, social media and thought leadership are pushing brands to think differently and engage with their audiences in new ways.
In a world where 64% of customers pursue relationships with brands based on shared values, companies need to identify branding strategies that are designed to make people stop and pay attention.
In simple terms, if you want to succeed, then you need to learn how to create a brand that becomes your customer’s best friend. This article is 1 of the 3 splits which will tell you how efficiently you can make your company a brand. In the first article we say about what branding is but now we are going to see the necessary things a brand needs to have to be a brand:
Emotional Connections
Customers are more “emotional” in their normal buying choices than you might generally think. In fact, even B2B brands get more sales when they use “emotional care for the clients” rather than logical marketing messages.
Emotion is the component which makes average branding strategies, great. If you can find a way to connect with your customers on a deeper level, you can enhance engagement and develop a more sustainable relationship for the long term. For instance, Apple is the best examples of a company that uses emotions to establish a strong relationship with the public.
The Apple branding strategy uses clean design, simplicity, and a desire for innovation to connect with a wide audience. Apple is powerful because it appeals to our need to be a part of something that’s larger than ourselves. Apple recognizes our need to be social, and our desire to be a part of an important “group” dynamic. That’s why we see people lining up for days just to get their hands on the latest iPhone or Apple release.
Employee Empowerment
Finally, while your customers are an important factor when it comes to helping your company thrive, there’s another group of people who are frequently overlooked in the business space, and that’s your employees. Whether you’re investing in a new type of social media branding, or you’re building a brand from scratch, you need the insights and buy-in of your customers to be successful.
Integrating a brand advocacy strategy into your branding strategies could help you to create an image that’s inherently more powerful. After all, if multiple people are saying the same things about a company, they’re far more believable than just one voice. What’s more, your marketing messages reach up to 561% more people when shared by employees.
Employee advocacy reinforces the company culture and values that you rave about in your press releases, and through your website “about” page, showing how concepts can translate into real behaviours and campaigns. For instance, Patagonia publishes an employee-generated content onto their own corporate blog to showcase their position as a perfect sustainable lifestyle brand.
Employee Advocacy
Your staff is the people who live and breathe your identity every day, and according to the Edelman Trust Barometer of 2016, employees are three times more trustworthy than CEOs.
Employee engagement (or an absence of it) can affect your brand perception, and how much your customers trust your company. While brands are beginning to recognize how important their teams can be to their branding strategies, you might not know how to tap into the true potential of your employees when it comes to social media branding.
