6 Tips for Creating a Better Brand Marketing Strategy in 2020

If your sales figures start to fall behind the curve, you’ll likely wonder how to rebrand your business and create a brand marketing strategy that will produce better results. When brands focus too heavily on themselves and fail to take into account what their audience wants, the result is obvious – they no longer fit into the lives of consumers.

This kind of mindset applies to rebranding as well. A company may create a rebranding strategy that centers exclusively on the changes the company heads think need to be made. Once again, the result is that a brand disregards the wishes and problems of their customers, resulting in a rebranding effort which will fail to truly connect with the target audience.

To avoid this, it is important to embrace a different perspective and put your audience first. The following tips can help you create a new corporate branding strategy that truly reflects this.

1. Focus on Your Audience

Everything starts by putting your audience in the limelight. When you first created your brand, you made it to suit your taste. But since you’ve recognized the need to make some changes, don’t make the mistake of turning your brand into a slightly different version of what you think it should be. Instead, let your customers show you what they want and how to rebrand.

Start by thinking about the best ways to reach your potential customers. Not all businesses benefit from the same communication channels. To increase the effectiveness of your marketing outreach, carefully observe current trends and develop a marketing plan that recognizes the target audience’s preferred communication channels.

Then, consider the information your potential customers need to make a decision. Once again, you know what you believe are the strongest points of your product or service, but the audience may have other priorities. Identify those priorities and center your brand marketing on them.

2. Use Customer Data and Feedback to Pinpoint Their Needs and Expectations

Focusing on your audience may sound easy in theory, but it requires a lot of data to pull off in practice. The good news is that you already have access to such data, you just need to use it.

Observe social media platforms and your followers. Also, look at your competitors and their followers. Notice what kind of content they like and what they share. Take notes of their feedback.

You can also use email to reach out to your audience or create short surveys to collect customer feedback. Offer discount codes or similar perks to incentivize people to take the time to answer your questions.

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3. Use Empathic Marketing

The dream of every marketer is to create a brand that customers trust and care about. The best way to do this is through empathy. If you show your audience that you understand how they feel, they will relate to your brand.

The first two points of this list naturally lead to empathy. Therefore, you need audience insight to create an effective brand marketing strategy. This means you need to understand the emotional motivation that drives your customers and the problems that are preventing them from fulfilling their needs. Don’t just offer products – offer solutions.

You can also combine empathic marketing with the previous tip to acquire even more customer data. For instance, if someone visits your website but doesn’t make a purchase, have a prompt that asks which problems you failed to address and if there is any way you could do better in the future.

Empathy allows your brand to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Listen to and understand their pain points, put them first, and try to help.

4. Make Video Marketing a Priority

Quality video isn’t easy to make. It also isn’t cheap. For that reason, you may prefer to steer clear of it. But that is a mistake.

Simply put, consumers love videos. More than 80% of them are willing to share video content that interests them. People also spend significantly more time on websites that feature videos.

There are many ways to apply video to your brand marketing strategy. Explainer videos, product demos, Vlogs, tutorial videos, presentations, interviews, customer reviews, promotional videos, live streams, and webinars are just some of the options you can consider.

By utilizing videos you can achieve top-of-funnel marketing awareness in just a few seconds. Another perk is that you can reach people on the go and across all devices.

5. Tell Stories on Social Media

Social media platforms are continually adding more ways for you to sell products or services through them. For instance, you can now add product tags to Instagram posts, and the platform is also introducing a “checkout” feature. But, that doesn’t mean selling is the only thing you should be doing on social media.

You should also engage with your followers. And telling stories is one of the best ways to do this. Find a way to inspire them, motivate them, or even tug at their heartstrings. A general rule of thumb is to follow the 80/20 ratio – 80% story and 20% hard sale.

Your followers know you’re running a business so you don’t need to remind them about this in your every post. These figures aren’t set in stone, of course, and you can focus a bit more on sales from time to time – just remember to not let your engagement suffer.

A few years ago, Budweiser ran a video ad about drinking responsibly. The story focused on a dog whose owner may not return after a night of partying (he does). It was such an effective story that it exploded on social media. This is the blueprint to follow.

Even though Budweiser’s video was a TV ad, you can use different social media platforms to produce similar results at a fraction of the cost. You just need a good story, and the audience will latch on to your brand.

6. Work with a Rebranding Expert

Finally, it always helps to get expert advice, particularly when it comes to topics which are as multifaceted as rebranding and marketing. You need to research your audience, plan an ad campaign, think whether you want to make changes to your logo, and so much more.

This can overwhelm anyone but is particularly troublesome for businesses which are going through their first rebrand. A rebranding expert can set the right tone, ensure you put your audience first, and help everything run smoothly.

Strong Brands Understand Their Target Audience

Rebranding your business and coming up with a better marketing strategy is a complex but worthwhile endeavor, and The Ultimate Guide to Rebranding Your Business holds even more answers. But to put it as briefly as possible, your audience holds the key. It’s about understanding their needs and catering to them. Once you do that, everything else will start to fall into place.