by Lewis Robinson
Communication is the essence of developing a brand strategy. From the very moment of a company’s inception it needs to start building up a network that produces more contacts and more meaningful relationships between itself and its audience. The goal is stimulating more engaging conversation that changes public perception, identifies consumer expectations, and brings the company into open dialogue.
The first step is defining your brand in terms of relatable character, philosophy, recognition, and market position. But no matter how appealing your concept, without a core strategy your marketing campaigns are often a gamble. Luckily, much of the guesswork in measuring ROI has become much more easy to track: analytics allow you to establish data-driven goals and measures across marketing channels, streamlining and focusing your efforts. Furthermore, tools like a business intelligence dashboard let you easily visualize and track your progress towards these branding goals.
The basic idea behind utilizing analytics to optimize your brand is to learn what data will be of value in helping grow your marketing reach. Whereas before
1. Demographics.
Market segments are key. Collecting demographics on your customers will suggest market segments such as age, area, gender, or education where your best sales prospects fall. For instance, 20 percent more college graduates have smartphones than high school graduates. You can then adapt your marketing to target this specific audience more effectively.
2. Customer patterns.
Branding is accelerated through using data captured in customer shopping and purchasing patterns. This helps you understand how to both adapt to the most common needs and personalize the customer experience. The more you can personalize shopping, the more the consumer will relate to your brand.
3. Market gaps.
Analytics can also point out market limits. By following trends, marketers may discover indicators that suggest consumers are looking for innovations or services your company doesn’t supply. This can tell you where your brand is weak with your target market and needs improvement, as well as suggest new directions for expanding your market.
4. Experimentation.
Data analytics can help improve the creative process by tracking audience reactions. New visual schemes, channels, media types, or campaigns can be launched concurrently in a limited fashion to compare and evaluate which ones are worthy of further emphasis. Counting social shares or mentions, for instance, can tell you which idea most appeals to your audience.
5. Feedback.
You can more easily gather and analyze customer feedback. More in-depth comments can tell you exactly what kind of reactions you’re getting, either positive or negative, in regard to emotions and expectations. Input from your actual customers, in near real-time, can also reveal in clear terms what they want from you.
6. Grow your community.
Most of the major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter now provide built-in analytics that you can use to monitor your customer interactions over those networks. Among retail companies, 91 percent are using at least two social media channels. You social audience is communicating not just with you, but each other. You can find ways to elevate some of these fans into brand advocates that will do your brand-building for you. The more dialogue you can inspire, the more you learn about connecting with your audience in every stage of value creations, from ideation and crowdsourcing to design, pricing, and even how consumers want to be marketed to.
Brand marketing strategies driven by analytics enables marketers to discover faster and more accurate insights into product development and customer engagement. It can help to build brand marketing that not only connects with your market, but optimizes your efforts to provide better ROI.
Lewis Robinson is a business consultant specializing in social media marketing, CRM, and sales. He’s begun multiple corporations and currently freelances as a writer and business consultant.
