Eat, Sleep, Communicate, Repeat.

In this article, we shed a little light on five elements that can help you manage your brand successfully over the long term.

Defining your brand
All strong brands start with an authentic brand strategy that resonates with their target audiences and attracts like-minded employees.

It sets the direction for your business. A clear Vision, Mission, and Values are the most recognisable external articulations of brand strategy. But we go further to complete your core brand tenets and give you internal and external foundations that motivate and inspire.

With a strategic platform in place, having a unique identity that is recognisable and differentiated from the competitive landscape is the second part of a strong brand. Identity is more than a logo. We develop the entire visual language of your brand, including colours, typography and visual styling that represents the essence of your brand’s personality.

Achieving consistency
Sadly, branding goes further than adding a logo. To build trust and understanding with your target audience, brand storytelling and clear messaging will create a memorable brand narrative over time. Keeping you top of mind.

Consider coherence with your strategic vision and consistency with your visual and verbal brand identity for each touchpoint.

The trick is to operationalise your brand strategy across all aspects of your business, not just all communications channels. Of course, a consistent narrative and identity across all your touchpoints, from your website to your advertising, social media to trade shows, proposals to emails, and more, will propel brand recognition and value.

However, great brands align every aspect of their activity around achieving a clear and common goal. How does your leadership team embody the values and behaviours of your brand? What about your customer service teams, operations, IT, or finance? Is every department pointing in the same direction and working towards a common purpose?

Monitoring and analysis
To build a strong brand, you’ll want to understand how it’s perceived and understood. Setting KPIs and gathering information from customer engagement, satisfaction, and research will provide valuable insights, so if your brand needs to adjust or address misconceptions in the market to continue to stay relevant, you can move quickly.

It also pays to keep a close eye on your competition. How are they communicating their offers? Are they innovating in product or service delivery? Are there weaknesses that you can exploit? Are there new threats that you need to counter?

Branding is an ever-evolving activity that requires analysis and reflection to ensure it continues to connect with target audiences and encourage loyalty.

Frictionless experience
Mapping out how your target audience interacts with your brand will highlight areas for development. At each stage of the customer journey, people should experience your brand so that it supports the reputation you are trying to create.

Improve digital and in-person interactions to be natural, intuitive, and straightforward. Try to create memorable moments that hook your audience’s attention and keep them returning for more. Find out where the audience’s pain points are in your industry and actively innovate to remove them

Advocates
Look to identify and reward your brand advocates. Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing tools. Encourage reviews and testimonials through the relevant channels. Make videos. Advocates can be internal or external and will nurture your brand through good and hard times. Organic brand advocacy offers authenticity in an increasingly cynical world and, when used to support and verify traditional marketing activity, can be very persuasive indeed.

A Liven, we approach tactical communications with a strategic mindset, so we’re adept at creating attention-grabbing communications that amplify your brand’s core tenets and stories and get results. If you’d like to know more, just get in touch for a no-obligation chat. Call Andrew Myles on 01483 331 250 or email hello@livencreative.co.uk.