If you have decided what your brand is but you aren’t continually listening to what people are saying about you and keeping track of the ever-changing landscape, then you are going to rapidly become irrelevant. The economic, social, and technological landscapes are ever-changing, and so your brand needs to evolve with people in order to remain relevant for its current context. You can stop your brand becoming extinct by:
Continually developing customer relationships
Social platforms are for interaction, both between you and people and also between people themselves. Keep informed with what is happening with your brand, but also with your area of business. Respond to people but also know when to simply listen to what conversations are happing around issues that are important for your business and brand. Ongoing relationships are fundamental to continuing loyalty, and social media is a great place to form and develop relationships, and to encourage and facilitate communities.
Managing platforms for conversations with people
Your brand is not a one-way conversation, people now have the ability to be just as heard as you do through channels such as social media. Growing your brand by being open to two-way conversations can ensure that you stay in touch with where your audience is now. Brand is no longer about instructing, but about inviting.
Grow your brand, and business, by developing longer term relationships with people. A relationship requires you to be honest and authentic about your purpose as a business. Transparency can be a very powerful behaviour if you really believe in what you are sharing with your audience.
Give people a platform and an opportunity to feedback on your brand. Then actually listen to what people have to say about your brand with an open mind. Given their external point of view and experience of the brand, sometimes they might well know it better than you do.
Recommending KPI to measure brand equity
Knowing what might be the Key Performance Indicators of a brand can be daunting. Brand doesn’t have direct sales or clicks that can be measured like a specific marketing campaign. Taking more emotional or indirect measures of performance can help to judge perceptions of the brand. You can judge how your view on the brand aligns with the external view of the brand.
Leading the brand to ensure continued relevance
Your brand will grow and evolve. We will review the brand and perceptions, as well as competition and wider environment, on a regular basis. This regular analysis can give simple insight into trends and developments, helping to show what areas of the brand are being most successful in resonating with the audience, and what might need some redirecting.
Image © Kirsteen