Brand Communication
Brand Communication: The Art of Speaking to Your Audience
Creating a brand begins long before your first marketing campaign, your first logo design, and even before you hire a brand manager. You lay the foundation of your brand the day you start your business. Your customers hold the power to turn your simple product or service into a renowned brand or a disregarded name. The key lies in communication – your brand needs to talk to your audience, and your brand needs to say things that matter.
Good brand communication can be the difference between profitable organic growth and a business struggling to survive. Whether you head a multinational corporation or run a local business, communication is an essential aspect of a business. Communication differentiates you from the competition, humanizes your brand and helps you make an emotional connection.
Let’s look at some branding statistics.
- 88% of consumers look for authenticity when deciding which brand to support.
- 46% of consumers are willing to pay more for a brand they can trust.
- A website visitor takes 0.05 seconds to form an opinion about your brand.
- 79% of consumers say that user-generated content impacts their purchase decision.
- 82% of consumers favor brands that publish customized content.
- 64% of consumers purchase a product after watching a brand video on a social network
- 77% of consumers are loyal to brands that share the same values as them.
- 64% of consumers would buy or boycott a brand based on its position on a social or political issue.
The statistics above showcase an essential facet of brand communication – it is a conversation. Listening to your audience matters just as much as talking to them. Every article you publish, every tweet you send out, and every brand video, should open a dialogue. Social media has enabled brands to talk to their customers like never before. And content is your mind stone.
Developing a Brand Communication Strategy & Delivering it Right
The primary job of a brand communication strategy is to build your brand’s identity and associate your brand with the correct values in your consumer’s minds. At Content Owl, when we design brand communication strategies, we start with the brand values and build a brand identity that resonates with those values.
The customer experience is the number one driver of brand image. Aim to centre all your brand-customer interactions around the customer. Think about all the touchpoints in your customer journey, and for each conversation, ask yourself these three questions –
- Did this interaction create a stir in the customer’s mind?
- Was this interaction memorable for the customer?
- Can this interaction influence a customer’s beliefs?
These questions can help you know your customers better and define the crux of your brand communication. If we are clear about the brand values, the brand identity, and the nature of brand communication, we can create relevant messaging for your target audience. But this is just the beginning.
Branding is an evolutionary process, and so is brand communication. Your brand’s voice, words, and conversations must evolve as times change. Here’s how we do it at Content Owl –
- Know Your Buyer Persona – Customized content is the new king. Every target audience has a distinctive buyer persona. Map your customers’ habits, interests, shopping preferences, and demographic information. This exercise zeroes in on what your buyer responds to and how you can tailor your brand communication to suit their personalities and values.
- Find Your Brand Voice – Defining a buyer persona helps you identify the chords you want to touch to create an emotional connection. When we make content to give your brand a voice, our focus is to build content that is relevant and stimulating for your customers; but also helps bring your brand personality to the fore.
- Pinpoint the Right Messaging Opportunities – At Content Owl, choosing the right marketing mix is a critical step in good brand communication. Promoting your brand in the digital and physical world together can be overwhelming. But it is necessary to pinpoint the best opportunities to present your brand messaging to make the highest impact.
Drafting a brand communication strategy helps you identify the right language, tonality, and words that can help your brand come closer to your target audience. Don’t be afraid to sound imperfect or immature – it only makes you more relatable!
And in the end, there is nothing better to refresh your knowledge than to learn from the greats. Here is a look at some success stories in brand communication –
Playstation
PlayStation has used consistent and relevant brand messaging in the gaming industry to engage its audiences on different channels. On Twitter alone, PlayStation has a whopping 18 million followers. During the pandemic, they started the #playathome contest. Customers could participate and play in the competition from the comfort and safety of their homes, and PlayStation gave away fabulous prizes.
Amul
Who hasn’t marvelled at the ingenious simplicity of Amul’s animated ads? But apart from the cute creatives, Amul uses relevant and relatable content to create a memorable brand interaction. The Amul ads pick a point of view of the masses to discern a social situation in a simple cartoon. Push this messaging across impactful channels, and you have a brand communication success story.
Zomato
More than once, Zomato has faced a backlash for its advertising policies, hygiene protocol, and mistreatment of their delivery personnel. And more than once, Zomato has turned the situation around. Consider the unskippable Zomato YouTube Ads from one year ago. They turned the game around by running a video contest for their users and pushing user-generated content in their campaigns.
Flipkart
Facing competition from global e-commerce giant Amazon can be an uphill battle. But homegrown e-commerce brand Flipkart countered the competition with creative brand communication. Their memorable video ad campaign with children dressed like adults, talking in adult-like voices, and discussing oh-so-relatable shopping difficulties was a huge success.
Perhaps the most critical factor in brand communication is to know that you are no longer ‘marketing at’ customers, but you are ‘marketing with’ them. At Content Owl, we design brand communication strategies to help your business build lifelong relationships with customers. We create content that helps your brand messaging stand out. We work towards attaining customer advocacy and brand loyalty. Whether you are a new brand looking to create an identity or a seasoned brand looking for upgraded brand communication – Content Owl can do it for you. Talk to us today!