How to Delight your customers and get your Brand to stand out in a recession and cost of living crisis

How to Delight your customers and get your Brand to stand out in a recession and cost of living crisis

If you want to get your brand to stand out and inspire loyalty in a recession and cost of living crisis, you need to deliver brand value.

At Brand Dynamics, we can help you deliver brand value.  We can help you understand your customer needs. Using our ‘Breakthrough’ process, we obtain valuable insights into customer behaviour.  We find out from your customers what it is they are looking for from your brand, what is good or not-so-good about your brand, and what it is you need to do to make your brand stand out from the competition and delight your customers.  Action Speaks louder than words.

How to deliver Brand Value?

  1. Understand Customer Needs

Do you know what your customers are looking for from your brand?  How do your customers engage with your brand?  On what platforms?  Have you mapped out your customer personas?  (have you segmented your customers into different and detailed customer profiles?).  Which of your brand values are of most importance to your customers?  What are your competitors doing well?  How does your brand rate against its competitors?

Marketers need to invest in in-depth consumer research to uncover unmet consumer needs and concerns in terms of product and service quality, innovation, value and customer experience.  At Brand Dynamics, we believe that Understanding customer needs and addressing their concerns is crucial to delivering brand value and delighting your customers.

2. Personalise Customer Experience

The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to reach them.  If you understand where they are coming from, their purchasing behaviour and what they need from your brand throughout their “buyer journey”, you can personalise their experience by targeting them with effective content, going to where they are browsing and shopping in order to reach them where they are and deliver relevant messages.  (For example, it is a good idea to encourage your customers to avail of your “special” offers online, by revealing the promotional code both when they land on your website and again at the checkout).  Personalising messages to your most valuable consumers at the point of purchase is key to delivering brand value.

3. Don’t add to Digital Fatigue

Many consumers are inundated with digital communications (recently increasing exponentially due to remote working, studying online etc.,), so with the increasing battle for consumer attention online, you need to engage with your customers in unique ways encouraging them to “tune in” rather than become more digital background noise, from which your customers tune out.  (Some positive and effective samples include; One health insurance company offers its customers free advice regarding their diets, free access to webinars on wellness and particular health issues, free health checks, etc., all free and relevant to members).  Another is a pension company looking for feedback from their customers, offering a chance to “win a competition for a summer holiday” as a reward for their feedback!)

Identifying relevant influencers who can represent your brand value and who connect with your consumers in a meaningful way is also important in delivering brand value.  (Note: the biggest influencer may not be as suitable as a specific micro-influencer!)

4. Only Extraordinary Customer Experience will do

How customers experience your brand value is formed by how they interact with your brand pre, and post-purchase.  How do you look after your customers post-purchase?  Customer service and after-sales support is vital.  If existing customers are left “on hold” for 40 minutes to get an answer to a query on their insurance policy, (after they have already made a purchase!), this obviously leaves a very poor impression.  And when the next “renewal” comes around…guess what? Your customers will shop around.  And what about the customers who find out that “new customers” are being offered a 50% discount while existing customers pay the full price?  Maybe they should shop around too?  And take the long-established brand, “Levis”, who deliver on their “online” delivery promise to the delight of their customers, maybe that is why thebLevis brand is still strong all these years later!

Retaining existing customers involves an investment in providing best-in-class customer service.  Many brands struggling with increased number of calls to call centres blamed “the pandemic” and now blame “the recession” for poor customer service but customers no longer buy such excuses.  As we come out of the pandemic and enter a recession and cost of living crisis, we need to demonstrate brand value so only Extraordinary customer experience will do.

5. Don’t let your focus slip on retaining existing customers. 

We all know it is much more expensive to recruit a new customer than keep an existing customer so don’t let your focus slip on retaining existing customers.  In order to keep your existing customers and deliver brand value, you need to:

  • Focus on promotions that encourage customer and brand loyalty (e.g., loyalty programmes that offer real value, e.g., AA membership offers discounts on tyres, car hire and 3cents off a litre of fuel at Circle K etc.).  Partnering with compatible brands in offering your customers ‘joint promotions’ is a good way to drive brand loyalty
  • Focus on brand value and return on investment – No time for wastage! Optimise your media strategy so that it focuses tightly on your target market (and most valuable customer personas) and offers high returns in terms of brand value and sales results
  • Measure very closely which media channels and platforms are working to deliver results in terms of brand value so that you get the best return on investment
  • Provide excellent customer experience both pre, and post-purchase.  Consider offering Free trials of new products to existing customers: e.g., Virgin offer free trial of extra channels for 6 months

So, in order to delight your customers, deliver brand value. 

Consumers are feeling the squeeze (i.e., the tug-of-war between consumers’ desire to buy what they want, and the need to make concessions based on the higher prices they have to pay).  Don’t allow your customers to postpone a purchase or worse still, treat your brand as expendable, unnecessary or unjustifiable.  Brand owners need a strategy to face rising costs, thinner margins, price-sensitive shoppers who are buying less and less often.  This strategy to remain competitive is to Deliver Brand Value and Delight Customers. 

At Brand Dynamics, we can help you gain insights into your customers’ needs. We believe that understanding customer needs and addressing their concerns is crucial to delivering brand value and delighting your customers.

Be creative, Be brave, Be bold!

Does your brand delight or disappoint?

Delight
disappoint

How often should I SEO my website? What content should I post in order to improve my rankings?

seo

How Often should I SEO my website? What content should I post in order to improve my rankings?

If you want to increase sales and generate new leads, getting high rankings from search engines is essential, (Good SEO means turning up on the first or second page of a list of search results).

SEO, is more than stuffing your web pages with ‘keywords’.  All major search engines favour websites with fresh content. Yes, those dreaded words, ‘fresh content’. But ‘fresh content’ can be highly varied. It is not just writing blogs, it can be a mix of twitter and Instagram feeds, video, cross-references with social media, it can even be a re-write of your landing pages or an up-date of a previously written article, or simply re-sharing content on social media to increase traffic to your website. Basically, any ‘engaging and relevant’ (i.e., valuable) content that users are encouraged to like and share, works well for search engines. So small changes, often, works better than an annual SEO overhaul.

What are your Brand Values?

The impact of Brand Values on your companyWhat Are Your Brand Values?

Brand values are part of your brand’s DNA. Brand values capture the core of who you are, what you stand for and what you want to become. The most powerful and most successful brands stand for something. They have strong brand values that differentiate them from the competition.

  • So, what are your brand values? What do they mean to your various customer segments?
  • Which of your brand values are of most importance to your customers?
  • How do you communicate these brand values to your different customer segments?
  • How do you communicate these brand values internally?

In determining brand values you must ensure that your brand values can:

  • Clearly differentiate you from the competition in Ireland and abroad
  • Be relevant and meaningful to your target audiences
  • Be externally and internally focused
  • Be bold, futuristic and challenging
  • And most importantly, be an energising force in the formation of the next phase of growth for your company.

At Brand Dynamics we can help you develop relevant and meaningful brand values. We do this by talking to your customers and employees and find out from them what it is they are looking for from your brand/company, and what it is you need to do to stand out from the competition.  Actions speak louder than words.

 

 

 

 

 

Developing Personas for your Target Audience

Developing Personas

 

Do you really know your target audiences?  Do you know their demographic profile? Does this tell you anything about their motivations and buying patterns? Developing personas could help you reach your target audiences by targeting them with more relevant and effective content.

So, who is your target audience?  What are their needs, motivations and requirements?  From where do they get their information? What media content do they consume?  What blogs, newspapers and publications do they read? Do they download podcasts? Subscribe to newsletters?  What search engines do they use, what websites do they visit? What groups or forums do they follow? Who are their major influencers?  Who do they trust?

These are all the questions you need to ask in order to develop personas.  Buyer personas are not target markets and they are not industry specific because it doesn’t matter what the industry or sector you are in, particular personas will all have the same issues.  So we focus on the general things they have in common. What are they trying to achieve?  What are their universal goals, wishes and dreams?  And with all this information we define common behaviour patterns and we map them on a ‘need state’ axis so you can target them with relevant and effective content by going to where they are engaging in order to reach them.

An example of a familiar persona is Always on Annie.

 

Always on Annie

 

Juggling work, motherhood, marriage, a house, thirty something Annie is ‘Always On’, digitally online but also available to her family using digital marketing to advantage her family as well as her career.  Annie travels for business regularly so spends a lot of time in hotels and airports on her iPad.  She does not use Facebook as much as previously, but uses LinkedIn to connect with work and professional colleagues.  She rarely tweets, doesn’t have time.