How To Build A Brand With Staying Power

So when looking at your brand, ask yourself these questions:

• Do your customers know what your brand promise is?
  
• Are you delivering on that brand promise?
  
• Would your customers agree?

Marketing is all about the experience you deliver to your customers with each and every interaction.

The more personalized the experience, the faster you will be able to build brand loyalty.

In fact, the experience you build becomes your brand in your customers’ minds.

The Customer Experience

In order to build a successful brand you need to implement a system that enforces your brand promise, and tracks how well you’re sticking to it throughout the entire life that a customer does business with you.

This lifecycle is called the Customer Experience and it’s the new battleground where customers will be won or lost.

That’s why you need to map out the entire customer experience for your business so you can ensure that the promise you make to your target market will be carried out on a consistent basis.

The Customer Experience Lifecycle

The customer experience lifecycle starts way before a transaction is made. It starts as soon as a potential customer becomes aware that you exist.

The first interaction, the awareness stage drives the customer toward the consideration and then to the decision stage ( these 3 stages make up the buyer journey), and eventually to a post-purchase process (customer journey).

Together these 2 journeys make up the Customer Experience Lifecycle.

Ultimately you can think of the lifecycle as three stages that can be broken down into smaller steps that are unique to your business.

1. Before Purchases
   
2. During Purchase
   
3. After Purchase
   

How do you differentiate your brand from the competition?

It starts with having a deep understanding of your customer.

If you drill down into the needs of your customer you’ll recognize that:

“People are not looking for products, services or technology, they are looking for solutions to their problems.”

It’s your job to construct your unique value proposition to reflect this deep understanding of your customer.

At this point you may be thinking, “Yeah, I know what my customer wants.”

Stop right there.

A survey by MEC labs of 275 businesses found that only 2% could succinctly describe a strong UVP for themselves.

Ready for this, on a scale of one to five, 86% scored a two or lower for their propositions.

Don’t let this be you!

So many entrepreneurs skip their value proposition, then get confused when they fail to connect with their customers.

Skipping this step can be the difference between a successful brand and one that struggles.

Develop A Deep Understanding Of Your Customer

How do you develop a deep understanding of your customer?

It might sound simple, but it’s often overlooked by most small businesses.

You need to perform customer research.

To get started, identify a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your database that you can survey and interview. 

So where do you keep all this valuable data and insights?  Look no further than your buyer personas.

Buyer Personas

A Buyer Persona (also known as an Avatar) is a tool that puts you in the shoes of your ideal customer so you can fully understand them and develop and develop products and services based on their needs. 

Building a persona is going to help give you clarity on how to develop and content and marketing strategy.

How to implement a strong brand strategy

Think of your personal brand as your blueprint for success.

First things first: you need to identify what is unique about you. 

Determine what it is that makes you stand out from the competition. 

It is imperative that you are able to figure out your brand’s current position and identify your closest competitors. Doing this can give you that competitive edge that will make your brand shine.

Knowing how your competitors brand themselves will also place you in the position to compare, and through comparison, discover a distinct and value-based position. 

Once you do this and create your brand statement, as mentioned above with Geico, you can begin to further what’s really important: your purpose.

This purpose can be viewed in two different lights, the functional the focuses on the instant commercial rationale and the intentional which focuses on the worldly impact.