It’s important to keep every touchpoint of this brand experience positive, as even a single point of failure can undermine your entire brand. One tweet from an angry customer complaining about your online store’s shipping process can go viral and tarnish your reputation in such a way that could take months to repair.
Conversely, a good brand experience drives engagement, instills loyalty, and can even produce ambassadors that will sing your praises to other potential customers. So when creating memorable brand experiences for your business, keep our five tips in mind:
1. Establish Your Brand’s Purpose
Before you can communicate anything with your brand that will stick with your customers, you need to define what its purpose is.
Your brand’s purpose distinguishes it from all the other brands that you are competing with. It helps you come up with a clear message you want to convey to customers while also setting the tone for how you deliver that message.
Your target demographics play a crucial role in establishing your purpose, as the ultimate goal is to satisfy your customers’ desires. For instance, if you are marketing to Gen Z gamers that devotedly follow esports streamers, your brand’s purpose could be to equip your audience for competitiveness to be as skilled as their idols.
2. Foster Spaces for Meaningful Engagement
The consumer’s voice has never been so impactful as it is today in the age of social media. People want and expect brands to listen to them. You need to give your customers the space to engage with your brand in a way that they find meaningful.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are obvious spaces to build for customer engagement. Just remember that you need to encourage audience interaction with a proactive stance, asking conversation starters and answering questions with a tone that matches your image.
3. Reinforce Your Messaging
Branding hinges on consistency. You can’t put on a warm and friendly face with your advertising then have cold and distant responses with your customer support. Whatever the avenue your customers take to interact with your brand, your messaging has to be reinforced. Consistent messaging breeds familiarity, and from our basic understanding of human psychology, people gravitate towards the familiar.
Repetition in branding applies to processes as well. If your customers can have the exact same user-friendly experience navigating your website on a desktop computer or on a smartphone, you avoid frustrations that could influence them to look elsewhere for solutions.
4. Structure Your Digital Presence
As businesses transition more and more toward digital spaces, especially in light of the pandemic, it’s standard practice nowadays to have a presence on major platforms. However, an effective brand strategy goes beyond merely having a Facebook account or an e-commerce store. There has to be synergy across your online channels, with each one having a specific goal and leveraging its unique strengths.
Your own website serves as the foundation from which all your other digital spaces should be built upon from a design perspective. It’s where you have the utmost control over how your brand is experienced, from its aesthetic to its interface.
5. Implement Visual Elements in Storytelling
The vast majority of consumers process information visually, and this holds true for how much attention they will give to your brand storytelling efforts. Your touching personal story of how you started your small business as a way of humanizing your brand would get much more traction if it’s delivered with pictures than if it were just in plain text.
Strengthen your storytelling by integrating other visual elements. Consider your color scheme, your typography, and your logo design when you craft content and how such elements work together to underscore your message.
6. Expand Your Design Bandwidth
Brand experiences are exactly that—experiences. They should immerse customers in the totality of your brand’s purpose, storytelling, and aesthetics. So much of these aspects rely on the design being striking and cohesive, without which the whole brand falls apart. Remember as well that brand experiences are supposed to be personal and every touchpoint needs to be effectively designed to reflect that.
The unfortunate reality, however, is that there are businesses that do not have the bandwidth to do branding design work justice on top of their current workload.
The good news is that your company does not have to lose the opportunity for brand innovation even if your internal design department is already stretched thin. Design Force can be the creative support your team needs to execute your strategy by providing high-quality design. And if you’re wary about long-term contracts and unsure about the scope of your future projects, our team offers flexible on-demand design services that allow you to scale up or down our involvement at any point.
Reach out to us today so we can help you design better brand experiences.