How your customers and potential customers perceive your brand directly impacts your bottom line. So how do you make sure you position your brand effectively in the mind of your customers?
Here are six questions to help you ensure your brand is more engaging and appealing to your customers, now and in the future.
1. What do you want your brand to stand for?
Work out what your brand stands for, what the purpose of your business is – beyond making profit and what you’re passionate about. What is your vision? What difference do you want to make in the world? What do you believe in? What problems are you solving? Do you have a cause?
When you know who you are as a brand, you not only communicate better with your customers and potential customers, you appear to be more authentic. The decisions and actions you take as a business owner can also be considered more carefully to ensure you stay true to what you stand for.
2. Where do you want to be in the market place?
Determine where you want your brand to sit within your market. Do you want to be the luxury, expensive brand of your industry, the cheaper alternative or somewhere in the middle? Do you want to be seen to be more exclusive to a certain group or available to the masses? Are you the optional extra or the essential?
3. What do you want to be known for?
When your customers and potential customers talk about your business or give you a testimonial, what do you want them to say? When someone sees or hears your business name what do you want their first thoughts to be?
Is it your results, professionalism, creativity or innovation? Is it your consistency, quality, simplicity or availability? Choose what you want to be known for and determine what products and services you need to offer, what actions you need to take and customer interactions you need to have in order to achieve it.
4. What personality do you want your brand to have?
Your brand’s personality describes the way your brand thinks, speaks, acts and reacts, which then gets reflected in your social media, blogs, marketing messages and your day-to-day communication with your customers, suppliers and business associates.
Do you want your brand to be humorous or more serious? Relaxed or professional? Enthusiastic or refined? Elegant or cheap? Choose what human characteristics you want your brand to have in order to make it more relatable and engaging to your customers and potential customers.
5. What emotions do you want to spark?
A brand, by definition is a collection of thoughts and feelings about your experiences with it. When you create the right emotional affiliation with your brand, you increase awareness, sales and retention.
For this reason, it is important to work out what emotions you want your customers and potential customers to associate with your brand. Is it safety and security? Love and passion? Awe and wonder? Confidence and trust? Hope, excitement or happiness?
Keep in mind that this is different to how you will appeal to your customers through your marketing, as you will normally use more negative emotions like frustration, fear or guilt in order to motivate them to act.
6. What do your customers want from you?
Once you have answered all of these questions from your perspective, answer them from your customers’ perspective. What do they need and want? What are they looking for from you and from your industry? What do they prioritise as most important?
While you may own your business, your customers are the ones who keep you in business, so always make sure your brand is aligned with what they want.
How did you go about positioning your brand in the market place? Are you happy with where you are or is it time to make some adjustments?
Amanda is the founder of Velocity Media and Communications.
