And how it makes brand building needlessly expensive. Top business strategist Ben Christensen gives advice on how to avoid critical branding missteps.
Who are your customers and what do they need? These simple but critical questions are often overlooked when undertaking a brand building strategy.
In chasing followers and likes, some companies lose sight of human behavior. Companies are tapping into drivers that don’t match people's needs, and communicating about problems that may not exist. This makes it much more difficult, and therefore more costly, to build your brand.
What does this problem look like in practical terms?
Let’s say you are using paid ads to direct traffic to your site, resulting in x amount of new clients.
You decide to double the amount of money on a particular ad message, to double the amount of new clients, only to find you get zero increase.
That’s when you know. You need to communicate something else. To avoid these pitfalls, get back to basics and ask “what drives people to choose your product or not?”
“It's important to understand how people live their lives in order to offer them relevant products and services,” says Ben Christensen, managing partner of AYAY AS. Beginning your brand build with a focus on the actual needs of the market is critical for successful branding. “By tapping into things like how we as people are and how we behave, it's much easier to work with strategy and brand building.”
3 questions you must answer to build your brand
Taking stock of the main needs of the market and how your company fulfills them involves performing a form of internal medicine. Christensen says three key questions to answer are the what, the how, and the why:
- What are you able to offer your market?
- How can you solve a key problem in a better way than competitors?
- Why are you uniquely suited to meet their needs?
Ideally you will come out of your analysis with an understanding of the main drivers in the market and what solutions your company can deliver for those drivers.
Address customers needs in your communication
Defining a clear customer journey is an important step. “You have to understand how people relate to the products or services that you offer.” This includes how people consider your products, in what channels they consider your products, and how they actually buy your products. This will help you plan your branding strategy.
“If you haven’t mapped out the customer journey, it will be so much harder to focus on the main drivers in your communication.”
Communicating to match the main drivers in the market is critical. “Once you find the main reason people should choose you in relation to covering their basic needs, you should start repeating this in your communication over and over.” Companies can’t undermine people’s needs, so they should speak directly to them. Speaking to and delivering on the main drivers will help build your brand; “if you deliver, they will share.”
Focus your brand building strategy on what you do better than others
Avoid the urge to make your message too complicated. “People tend to look at innovation as something groundbreaking, but often it's something we’ve always had a need to make easier.” The success of big names like Spotify and Tinder illustrates the simple and unchanging nature of human needs. “These are companies that cover the basic needs, but they do it in a new way.” You can harness this when brand building by focusing on how your company will best fulfill people's needs.
Know what brand building should solve for you
It is also important to make sure your marketing strategy is derived from your business strategy. “It’s important to set a marketing goal, but it has to be related to your business goals.” There are many measures and so much data related to marketing that it can be difficult to know what to focus on to evaluate your strategy. So look to your business plan for answers. “Be careful not to focus on the tools of the trade instead of what your marketing strategy should actually solve.” Concentrate on where you want your business to go and evaluate your marketing based on how it contributes to your business goals.
Likes will not save you in the long run, without tapping into main drivers
When planning, implementing and evaluating your brand building strategy, it's important to keep the customer and the main drivers in the market at the forefront. “The main task your marketing should solve is explaining how your company is able to deliver on the main drivers when it comes to your products and services.”
There’s no magical number of followers on social or articles posted, “if you don’t tap into the main drivers of why people use your product or service, it's probably not going to be enough.”
