Two things you recognise most about a company is their brand image—their logo and their atmosphere. When you think about famous brands—like McDonald’s, Nike, and Starbucks—their logos would immediately come to mind. The giant yellow M against a red background, a massive tick over the words “Just Do It”, and the white lady over a green backdrop.
Believe it or not, 94% of people in the world recognise Coca-Cola’s logo and name. But that’s not the only thing they know about Coca-Cola. They know that they promise sweetened fizzy drinks that can lift them out of a funk. They know what Coca-Cola stands for—to Refresh the World—and how their product can do that.
A good brand image can achieve so much—recognition, intrigue, and loyalty. For your business to be distinguishable from their competitors, it is important that you have a unique brand logo and name.
However, that is not the only thing that a brand image entails. Brand image encompasses your brand personality, and the customer experience that you can provide as well.
How do you build a good brand image? Here are 6 tips to get you started.
1) Identify Your Target Audience
The customer is king.
Without customers, a brand is nothing. Whenever you conduct your business, you must keep your customers in the forefront of your mind. However, you should also be aware that you cannot please everyone in the world. Ensure that your brand image appeals to the consumers you want to target.
Once you know what kinds of people are going to purchase from you, you need to align your goals with theirs. You need to know what their pain points are, and how your products can address them, which you can centre your marketing campaign around.
If you can effectively show how your product can help them, then you can be sure that they have a clear idea of the benefits you can give them. Because of that, they’d want to purchase from you.
Data Acquisition
Vouchermatic can help you in this respect by making it easy for you to acquire hyperlocal customer data. By attaching an incentive to your signup forms or app downloads, for instance, you can attract customers to give you their information in exchange for the rewards.
We make the process of filling up the form and obtaining that reward absolutely seamless and in real-time. You can compile data immediately upon activation of the trigger, and you don’t have to waste any time collating data and organising them.
2) Be Clear In What You Stand For
What is your vision and mission, and your brand values? What are you working towards? If you haven’t worked that out, I suggest you establish them firmly.
Once you know what your brand is all about, you have to be transparent about it with your customers. After all, what you want is for your goals to line up with what they believe in.
This has nothing to do with their pain points, but rather, what their core values are, and whether they are the same as your brand’s. 94% of customers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that shares the same values as they do.
Ensure that your brand values are clearly communicated to your audience. You can do this through the various touchpoints in your customers’ journey, such as social media channels or physical stores. When your message and values resonate with your customers, 89% of them could become loyal to your brand.
Be aware of what kind of values you want to showcase to your consumer base. Are you aiming to eradicate world hunger? Reducing poverty? Global equality? 13% of consumers would pay 50% more if they think that your brand is making a positive impact on the world.
But don’t lie. There is no point ruining the relationship between you and your customers for a tad more revenue. If customers cannot place their trust in you, it’s unlikely they’ll do business with you again.
Communicating Brand Values
With Vouchermatic, you can communicate these brand values easily through gamification! You can make use of little plots and characters who embody these values, and they can teach your customers all about them through their repeated interactions. Spice the experience up with a little bit of exciting games like scratch & win, Stamp Cards and Spin the Wheel!
3) Design a Memorable Logo
You have 7 seconds on average to make a first impression, though customers need about 5-7 impressions to even be aware of your brand. Invest in professional design for your logo and image. You want it to look as appealing to customers as possible—after all, you wouldn’t want to lose 38% of potential customers who’d stop engaging with a brand if it has an unattractive layout or content.
The best brands have a specialised design team, in-house or outsourced. If you’re an SME, you may not have an in-house team, which means that you would have to sort it out with a professional.
What to look out for in your logo would be the colours, the font, photography, amongst other design elements. These have to be aligned to the kind of products you sell, and the prices that you are selling at.
Fun fact: 80% of consumers think that colour is a big part of brand recognition. And what’s interesting is that 33% of top 100 brands’ logos include the colour blue. It might be something to consider when designing your brand logo.
Brand Logo Exposure
Vouchermatic allows you to stick your brand logo on your voucher or game wherever you want. As we are a white-labelled company, you don’t have to worry about us stealing your limelight—we won’t put our name on your game or voucher.
Be sure to put yours somewhere prominent—that way your audience can be constantly exposed to your brand. That way, they will remember your brand and associate your company whenever they play your game or receive your voucher!
4) Build Up Your Brand Personality
A brand personality is the human touch that you give to your brand. Customers want to connect with the people, and not the unfeeling, inorganic brand itself. In that case, it means that you have to inject a sense of humanity into your image.
Make your brand seem like a human. You can turn them into a character—give them features that make them seem human. This can be done through the tone and visuals you use to present the brand across your channels.
Ensure that your brand personality is appropriate for your target audience. If your target audience are edgy teenagers, then you wouldn’t want to make your personality seem sophisticated with cursive fonts and boring colours. If your target audience is part of the silver generation, you should invest in creating an atmosphere that is more vintage and familiar to them, maybe even with music from the 80s or 90s.
You can also use storytelling to better express your brand personality. Tell your customers your story—it makes your brand seem more human; you have your ups and downs, your joys and sorrows, like a regular person. If people can relate to your brand, they would resonate with its personality more.
64% of women and 68% of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand. By eliciting that emotional response, you can encourage them to stay loyal to you. Loyal customers lead to greater revenue, as 43% of customers would spend more money on brands that they are loyal to.
Brand Personality Exposure
As with your brand logo, Vouchermatic can help you incorporate various designs and themes that you can use to communicate your brand personality. If you have a brand mascot, we can transform them into little micro-animations that dance on your e-Vouchers.
This can add a little more glitz and glamour to your voucher campaigns and leave your customers feeling wowed. They can be more exposed to your brand personality and experience the human touch behind your brand.
5) Ensure that Customer Service is Approchable
Another effective way of expressing your brand image and personality is through your customer service agents. Whilst having a brand personality is giving human characteristics to an abstract entity, your customer service agents are the very real people that your customers interact with.
That means that whether the customer engagement and experience are favourable will depend heavily on how the customers are being treated. It is literally a make-it-or-break-it for your company. All it takes is one instance of a poor experience without good recovery to render your branding efforts moot.
It’s in your best interests to ensure that you have a solid customer service recovery strategy in place.
Your staff need to be polite, helpful, and, most importantly, embody your brand values and message as a team. In addition, you can offer customers gifts to show that you value their patronage. Incentives can keep a customer happy despite having gone through an unpleasant experience.
If your customer service is good, then you can be sure that your customers will feel cared for by your brand, and they will derive a positive experience from shopping with you.
73% of consumers say that they love a brand because of helpful customer service, so make sure that your service staff are authentic when providing their insights. Treat your customers right, and customers will treat you well in return.
Customer Service Excel
With our voucher management system, you can easily send dissatisfied customers vouchers when they complain. This keeps your customers happy since you have provided compensation for their negative experience.
This can soothe over customer frustrations and give you ample time to address the cause of the issue and rectify the problem. With good customer service recovery, you can expect customers to return and purchase from you.
6) Consistent Content Across Social Media
The main thing about the hip-and-happening omnichannel marketing is to make use of as many channels as possible to create many touchpoints for your customers. However, this method requires you to provide a seamless shopping experience—that means that no matter which channel your customers use, they should experience similar content.
Ensure that your content is relevant and up-to-date. If your social media pages are not consistently maintained, and the content is different across your channels, customers may grow suspicious of how professional your business is. In other words, pick channels that you will maintain and stick to them. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Like how you present your brand personality at other touchpoints, you need to be authentic and transparent on social media too—which 86% of consumers want companies to be.
If you manage to maintain your social media channels efficiently and effectively, customers will see you as professional and would rather shop from you than at a shabbier brand. You can expect your revenue to increase by up to 23%.
Consistent Branding
Even across your gamification or voucher campaigns, we offer you the ability to customise their designs. This way, you can be assured that these designs will corroborate with your overall brand image on your other channels like your website and social media platforms.
Conclusion
Having a strong brand image has so many benefits—better lead generation and conversion, more loyal customers, and a higher sales volume and revenue. However, it takes a lot of work to maintain a brand image, not to mention overseeing the sheer number of factors that go into it.
If you’re looking to make your brand seem more fun, have a more enjoyable shopping experience, you could consider our services. Vouchermatic specialises in developing and incorporating gamification and voucher management systems in your web pages or apps.
With gamification, you can make your brand appear fun-loving and vivacious—drawing the up-and-coming millennial generation of customers. With incentives, you can instil kindness in your brand personality—people will see your brand as a compassionate being.
Establish your brand personality today with us today! Contact us here for more details on how we can help!
