Are Your Customers Engaged with your Brand?

Constantly researching your client base and target market is one of the most important steps in brand development and lead generation marketing

As marketing budgets tighten, the portion of budget available for building the brand is reduced. At the same time, the pressure to be accountable for results increases. Any spend must be effective, the viability of the old ‘trial and error’ method to understand customer needs is no longer viable. Marketers can no longer rely on intuition vs a fact based understanding of their marketplace and their customers. The more factual and in-depth the information that goes into any communications brief, the better the result, producing marketing communications that is on-target, on-brief and set up to achieve the desired result.

Addressing ‘Moments of Truth’

Businesses must understand their customers’ needs and wants, then decide the important ‘moments of truth’ for those customers. A moment of truth is any point at which a customer comes into contact with a business and that contact has an impact on their ‘emotional’ attachment to the brand / business / service. They must ensure that the important key messages are communicated clearly at those moments of truth and across all communications material.

Understanding Target Segments

Businesses also need to understand the profit potential of each target segment, spending more effort on those segments most likely to generate profits for the business. Emerging trends also have an effect on the target market, just as an example, the current economic climate is seeing the consumer return to the security of home and to solace in little luxuries like visiting the cinema vs spending on the big night out…

Brand Building

Cost effective brand building depends on knowing exactly what customers care about and then tailoring the brand positioning and key messages to that. Delivering the key brand messages at each moment of truth and uncovering the relevance of each message and the degree to which it helps distinguish the brand or business from its’ competitors. One brand that Outsource to Us has been working with is Tile Wizards. Understanding the customer is a complex proposition as the market is so broad and it also changes depending on location. The environment and the economic situation impacts directly on customer’s preferences and the brand must be flexible enough to respond to all those customer types. Moments of Truth are many, and spread across multiple platforms (i.e. in-store, online, social etc) and stretched across a long sales cycle. Brand engagement is important to sustain until the possible important moment of truth, the sale! The core of efficient brand marketing is targeting precisely what your customers care about. Then identifying the tangible marketing communications activities that can create those all-important intangible brand associations. Strong brands rest on compelling and distinctive emotional connections with their customers.