Edward Boatman • May 9th
Building a brand is a long process that involves a lot of individual parts. You have to figure out how you want your brand to look, what’s unique about your brand, and what values your brand aligns with. One of the most important things to figure out when you’re building a brand is how you’re going to bring those individual elements together and communicate them to your customers.
Brand communication is a crucial aspect of branding because it affects how people perceive your brand. Whether you’re communicating through ads, emails, or social media, it’s important to consider how everything impacts your brand. Let’s take a closer look at brand communication, why it’s important, and how you can create a brand communication strategy that works for your brand.
Source: Porsche - Integrated Marketing Communications
Brand communication covers all the different ways you communicate with your customers as a brand, including advertising, email, social media, public relations, print media, and TV commercials.
Effective brand communication helps customers form a positive perception of your brand — that’s the goal. It’s not just about marketing your products to customers through advertising and social media, it’s also about getting people to feel confident about your brand and its value.
Your brand communication strategy impacts so many aspects of your brand, from your sales numbers to the public perception of your brand and its products. Take a look at some of the benefits of effective brand communication below.
An effective brand communication strategy is one of the biggest keys to engaging your customers. You might understand your identity as a brand, but how you convey that message to your customers makes a difference. Social media, TV commercials, and other forms of advertising can really help your brand connect with its customers when they’re done right. When your customers feel connected to your brand, the value you provide goes beyond the products or services you offer — and that’s what leads to excellent customer relationships.
Source: X
A lot of people might know the name of your brand, but how familiar are they with its values and the things that make your brand unique? Brand awareness goes beyond brand recognition, and getting people to connect with your brand enough to understand what makes your brand special can be tough. Effective brand communication means connecting with your customers in a way that engages them, which leads to people connecting with your brand and its values on the same level. That increased brand awareness can even lead to valuable customer referrals.
One of the best things you can do for your brand — and your bottom line — is to focus on brand loyalty. When you have loyal customers who view your brand in a positive light and enjoy your products, you can expect them to keep coming back. Your brand communication strategy has a huge impact on how loyal your customers are because people tend to be loyal to brands they connect with. Social media and email marketing can be especially effective tools for building brand loyalty.
A brand communication strategy is a key part of your overall branding strategy that specifically focuses on optimizing communications and resources across various channels. This strategy informs any communication you have with your customers, from the commercials you make for TV and YouTube to direct email marketing and public relations.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the essential parts of a brand communication strategy.
Understanding your audience is a must when you’re creating a brand communication strategy. You’re trying to connect with your customers through your brand, so your message as a brand should be centered around them. One of the early steps in creating a brand communication strategy is identifying your target audience.
Buyer personas can also help you get a better understanding of your customers and how you can craft your message to connect with them. Research and customer surveys can help you create buyer personas based on the audience you’re trying to target, then you can tailor your message to fit individual buyer personas.
But, remember, it’s imperative to keep your personas data-driven, limit biases, and ensure they are based on real business problems to be solved. They cannot simply be demographic and firmographic information — otherwise we target these personas in a way that will miss the mark.
Your personas must encompass both solving a genuine problem to be solved in their business and it must make sense for your business to be the one solving their problem.
This is the meat and potatoes of your brand communication strategy. Understanding your target audience and unique selling proposition will help you craft your message to fit your brand, but the message is the ultimate goal.
We’ll talk about some of the things you can do to find the best ways to effectively convey your message to your target audience later in the next section. The key is finding a consistent message you can use to form your brand communications.
Brand communication strategies should be created with specific goals in mind, and those goals should be measurable to allow you to track your progress. As you’re writing your brand communication strategy, think about what you want to achieve through improving brand communication — whether that’s increasing sales or boosting brand loyalty. Find metrics you can use to measure these goals and fine-tune your brand communication strategy if you need to.
Writing a brand communication strategy may seem overwhelming at first, but it’s simple when you follow the right steps. Let’s take a look at all the steps you need to follow to create an effective brand communication strategy.
Start by setting clear objectives that you can hope to achieve through your brand communication strategy. These objectives might include specific sales numbers, increased social media engagement, or more positive responses to customer surveys. You want to set goals that you can measure in a tangible way to determine how effective your brand communication is and where you can improve.
When you’re developing a brand communication strategy, you have to understand the target audience you’re creating that strategy for. It’s not just about looking at stats and understanding which demographics your brand is popular with — you need to understand customer pain points and values. Create detailed buyer personas and outline the customer journey to get a better understanding of who your customers are and how they perceive and experience your brand.
Next, it’s time to figure out which communication channels you’re going to focus on. Brand communication includes any form of marketing communication, but some marketing channels aren’t right for certain industries or types of brands. Digital marketing channels include mediums such as social media, podcasts, emails, search engines, and video ads. Traditional channels include print media, TV commercials, press releases, and brochures. For many brands, a mix of digital and traditional channels is the most effective.
Once you have the information to craft your message as a brand, you can outline the actual details of your brand communication plan. This is where you can go into detail about the language and tone you want to use in marketing communications, the unique selling point (USP) you want to focus on, and the brand values you want to convey to your customers.
After you implement your brand communication strategy, use analytics to measure the success of your new strategy. We talked about some of the things effective brand communication results in, and those are the metrics you want to look at. Are people engaging more with your brand? Do you have more repeat customers? Have sales increased? These questions can help you measure the success of your strategy.
Source: Haiilo
Brand communication is a key part of brand identity, so it’s important to carefully decide how you want to communicate with your customers. Here are some tips to help you develop better brand communication.
Consumers are smart these days, and they don’t want to feel like brands are trying to pretend to be something they’re not. Be authentic to your brand and your customers will recognize that authenticity.
People also don’t want to feel like they’re being lied to or deceived — which is why transparency is important in brand communication. Let your customers in on the little details that make them feel like they’re a part of the brand and you’ll also build trust in your brand.
Your brand communication strategy is only effective if it’s being implemented across all the marketing channels your brand uses. If you don’t have clear guidelines that all your teams have access to, maintaining consistent and effective brand communication can be a challenge.
With Lingo, it’s easy to keep everyone up to date with your latest brand guidelines. Create detailed brand guidelines with asset libraries and documentation included, and allow team members to get real-time updates when you make changes to your guidelines. Book a demo or contact us to learn how Lingo can help you master brand communication.