The tools may change over the years, but the fundamentals of brand building do not. Your brand story depends on giving your customers reasons to believe you can deliver. Nowadays it’s easier than ever to get your message out there. Let’s take a look at a blog from a few years back for some proven tips on telling your brand story!
You’ve built your brand story on hard work, offering great products and services that make an emotional connection to your target audience, and the ability to consistently meet or exceed your customer’s expectations.
But what reasons do you give prospective clients and customers to believe you can deliver on your brand promise?
Here are some ways you can give your audience reasons to believe in your brand:
- Highlight kudos from raving fans, either in the form of outright testimonials or as words of praise that might be revealed in the day-to-day discourse of an online community of customers and prospective customers who think highly enough of your product or service to engage in discussions and, in some cases, to promote your brand to others through blogging, social media, and email.
- Showcase your breadth of offerings because seeing is Don’t just talk about your products or services. Show them. Demonstrate them. Let your customers and customers-to-be imagine how your product or service can positively influence their lives. When they can see it for themselves, they’re more likely to believe.
- Feature case studies of how your product or service helped a client/customer face a specific challenge and overcome it. Specify your brand’s role, what and how you did it, and show measurable to demonstrate how you/your brand impacts the lives of your customers.
- Be a thought leader—share what you know about your industry or field by blogging about it on your own website or sharing content through social media or other platforms, such as LinkedIn or other people’s blogs.
- Skills, training, features, and specifications—for most consumers, it’s a given that any person or business providing a service has the requisite skills and training to do so, or that any product designed to meet a specific need has the necessary features and specifications. That said, while simply listing qualifications probably won’t make you or your product stand out from the crowd unless you can feature something really unique, when considered in concert with the rest brand story, highlighting credentials and features can be impactful.
- Awards where others have recognized that you/your product has the right stuff. The satisfaction of winning an award cannot be overstated. However, brands don’t seek awards just to add bling to their trophy shelf, they do it to 1) validate that their product or service stands head and shoulders above their competitors, and 2) to be able to tout the award as evidence from non-biased parties that the product or service is top notch, which will give target audiences additional reasons to believe in the brand.
I’m A Believer!
It’s never been good enough to just “build it” and hope that consumers “will come” to your brand. Some will. But the bulk will simply move on to find the next brand in your field or industry that gives them the most reasons to believe—especially nowadays where moving on to the next brand can be done at the click of a mouse of the tap of a screen.
Give your customers and prospects reasons to believe in your brand and they’ll give you their business and loyalty.
