How to Personalize Your Brand to Increase Success
A successful brand is the foundation of a successful company. After all, your brand is the face of it all and will be the main way customers develop their first impressions. It’s imperative that your brand accurately portrays who you are and what you do as well as illuminates the products and the people behind the brand. At the same time, you want your brand to be unique – something that your potential followers haven’t seen before. Try these seven tips to personalize your brand.
1. Start with the Message
Before personalizing the brand itself, it’s important to determine the message that it will portray. You brand message should be clear and concise and it should be uniform across the entire company. If you want to grab attention and build a following, the messaging needs to set you apart from your competitors and highlight your company’s vision. How are you improving your customer’s lives and, beyond that, the world? Once you know your vision and messaging, you can personalize your brand’s voice and personality to match.
2. Show Some Personality
In order to show off that personality, you’ll need to identify your brand’s personality traits. A memorable brand should be consistent, unique, and representative of your message. This is an opportunity for innovative! Ask yourself: If your brand was a person, who would they be? Are they sassy like Wendy’s? Motivational like Nike? Wholesome like Sesame Street? Flesh out your brand to make it as well-developed as possible. The more personable and authentic you are, the easier your followers will connect with you.
3. Stay in Tune with Your Audience
The best brands don’t just stand out, they stand out to their audience. A great brand idea becomes irrelevant if it doesn’t appeal to the target customer. Keep this in mind when you’re working to personalize your brand. Do some thorough research into who your audience is and what they like and tailor your brand toward them. The most successful brands don’t try to please anyone and everyone. As Seth Godin says, “Everyone is not your customer.”
4. Utilize Social Media
Once you know the message and the personality for the brand, showcase it as loudly and proudly. Get on the platforms that work best for the brand voice and that are most likely to be used by your audience. Create personalized content to show off the brand voice and begin using it to connect with customers. Be sure to keep all content and accounts in line with the brand personality you chose. While it’s important to optimize for each individual platform, you also want to be consistent and recognizable as possible.
5. Make the Most of Your Data
Whether you use Google analytics or just the simple data provided by Facebook (hint: you should use any and all of it), it’s important to review it regularly while you personalize your brand. As you’re posting and finding your voice, keep track of what content is performing the best. Then, use that knowledge to inform future posts, hashtags, and verbiage. All of the tools you need to analyze your audience and online platform are available – and often free. Do your brand a favor and use them!
6. Put a Face On Your Brand
One of the easiest ways to make a brand personable and approachable is by adding a face (or a spokesperson) through pictures and videos. Brand mascots can make otherwise simple marketing campaigns memorable. Just think about Flo from Progressive or even cartoon mascots like Tony the Tiger. By adding a face to your brand, customers will feel more comfortable interacting with a person rather than a building or a web page. Again, be sure the face or faces align with the personality you’ve chosen.
7. Ask for Feedback
Your customers have a lot to say and they want to say it to you! Ask your customers what they like and don’t like. Ask new customers what brought them in. If you have failed visitors, try to see what turned them away. Make yourself readily available and accessible on social media and your website. Read as many customer reviews as you can. Customer feedback offers invaluable information directly from the mouths of the people you’re trying to understand. And, most importantly, once you get the feedback, make sure to actually use it.
Personalizing your brand should be an enjoyable part of the company marketing process where the creative sides can flow more freely. This is also a process that the entire company can contribute to if management chooses. The most important thing to remember as you personalize your brand is that the brand is the company and everything involved, so don’t rush it. It’s better to do it well than to do it quickly.