It would be nice to think that your brand will only ever experience plain sailing. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tend to represent reality. The occasional hurdle is almost guaranteed.
These might be from within your business. Others — such as the current economic uncertainty — will be beyond your control.
This makes it vital to make your brand as resilient as possible. Some focused strategy in this regard tends to mean customers are still willing to engage with your business amid challenges.
Such measures can also mean you can practically keep connecting with your target demographics without disruption.
Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the key digital marketing strategies that boost resilience.
Provide Clarity and Consistency
A resilient brand demonstrates clarity and consistency. If you think about some of the strongest brands — Apple or Nike, for instance — there is no question as to what their companies stand for. As the branding design companies usually do.
If those businesses left the market for a month or two and returned with a new product, there’s a strong possibility that the brand connection would be intact.
People would still know what they stood for and how to engage with them. Even if they experience ethical issues, their consistency may give them a pillar to stop the whole house of cards from falling down.
Therefore, you should focus your efforts on consistency and clarity in your digital marketing. Even amid challenges, this helps you maintain a reliable presence for consumers and the wider market.
Some of the ways you can achieve this include:
- Establish clear brand standards: These should include voice, color palettes, image styles, and your company values, among others. Your standards are the foundation upon which other components of your brand are built. Create documentation outlining the brand standards and ensure all staff are trained on them.
- Create templates for your content: Establish some solid format templates for each type of digital content you produce. This helps your staff maintain standards and sets expectations for consumers. It also enables you to quickly produce impactful content in response to problems.
- Aim for consistent and clear customer engagement online: Commit to consistently interacting with your consumers through digital marketing channels. Set out standardized maximum time scales for social media comment responses. Outline the tone your marketers and customer service staff should use in online conversations.
Consistency isn’t the same as saying your brand has to become formulaic or stagnant. Think of these elements as the framework that supports your brand’s evolution. These make sure that even as you develop, your brand is robust in the face of challenges.
Strengthen Relationships
The quality of your relationships with customers impacts your brand’s resilience. After all, if consumers don’t feel meaningfully connected to your brand at the best of times, they’re unlikely to stick with you when challenges arise.
Therefore, it’s important to commit to gradually building your relationships and strengthening your affinity through your digital marketing.
Focus on a range of digital tools that encourage customer loyalty. Some of the most effective approaches to this include:
- Personalized communication: When your marketing materials are personalized to customers, they may feel less like just another source of revenue to you. Personalization can be as simple as addressing them by name in emails or providing recommendations for products or content based on their history with your brand. These measures support a solid experience that may influence how loyal they are to your brand during uncertain times.
- Simplified interaction with materials: When you’re facing challenges, you don’t want to scare customers away from engagement. Therefore, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to interact with your marketing materials. Simplify the navigation process on your website. Optimize your search features to produce products or valuable content from keywords.
- Online trust signals: Any long-lasting relationship is built on trust. Therefore, your brand resilience can rely on reinforcing that your audience can feel secure in interacting with you. This is particularly important during uncertain times and customers are already hesitant to engage. Make certain your website has clear security symbols. Cite recognized trusted sources in your content. Partner with other trusted brands and individuals on projects.
Alongside connecting with customers, another important relationship to strengthen is that with your marketing partners. Meaningfully engage with a solid range of influencers, blog owners, and podcast producers.
Keep in regular contact with them and be open to mutually beneficial exchanges. They may be more willing to provide support or use their reach when the tough times hit.
Diversify Wherever Possible
Building business resilience during periods of economic uncertainty requires strategic thinking.
Alongside steps that enable continuity and promote flexibility, some of the most impactful actions surround diversification.
Expanding your product or service range means that you’re not reliant on a single consumer demographic. Diversifying suppliers gives you alternative options when the chain faces shortages.
The same principle applies to making your brand more resilient in your digital marketing.
Some of the ways you can diversity for strength include:
- Diversify your channels: Making smart choices about which marketing channels you use enables you to capture the audience most likely to interact with those platforms. Diversifying which platforms you use can help you be more resilient. This isn’t just your social media channels, but also your owned channels, such as websites and mobile apps. Diversification can help you to reach different market segments. It also gives you alternative options should there be disruptions on the primary platforms you use.
- Diversify your partners: Brand development benefits from joining forces with people outside of your immediate team. This may include influencers, graphic designers, content creators, and perhaps other brands. Diversifying who you collaborate with when it comes to building your brand creates a more robust ecosystem for your marketing projects. This way, if one partner isn’t able to deliver, you still have other collaborators to leverage.
Remember, though, that there’s a balance to be achieved here. Diversification shouldn’t be at the expense of your hard-fought consistency and clarity.
Make certain to maintain strong standards throughout your efforts to branch out into other tactics, tools, and relationships.
Demonstrate Authenticity
There are various types of challenges your brand might face in the years to come. Certainly, economic uncertainty is a prevalent one.
But, you may also find the brand comes against crises of ethics or cultural missteps. One characteristic that can influence your resilience throughout each of these is a sense of authenticity.
All consumers know that brands will occasionally face challenges. Demonstrating that your brand is responding honestly to such issues can have a positive influence on its resilience.
Avoid “managing” your public image with half-truths or avoidance. Rather, use your digital marketing to be transparent.
Involve executives in creating blog posts that openly discuss the struggles the brand is going through. Have them provide clarity on how these are being addressed for the benefit of staff and customers alike.
If there are issues of ethics or security, use social media to keep the public regularly informed throughout the response and recovery process.
That said, it’s vital not to give the impression that authenticity is a new tactic to handle reputational problems. Start implementing it into your regular marketing as soon as possible.
Use your podcasts to discuss the challenges of your industry or business. Respond openly to poor reviews in a public forum.
These types of actions help your customers to see that you strive for transparency and can be trusted.
Keep Assessing Your Brand
True brand resilience doesn’t just come from implementing various digital marketing techniques. It also comes from an honest and accurate understanding of your brand’s place in the market and with your customers.
The last thing you want to do is make decisions based on your perceived image of the brand or what you hope it represents. Therefore, you must commit to keep assessing the current state of its position and its resilience.
Perhaps the most valuable approach is to perform some regular voice of the customer (VoC) research. This effectively provides you with insights into what the public perception of your brand is.
Do they think you represent quality? Is your customer experience perceived as positive? What do customers think are your unique characteristics? Take the time to issue surveys and gather online comments related to brand perception.
Use these insights strategically. They may help you to identify why your relationships with your customers aren’t as strong as you’d like.
They could show what markets you’re not quite connecting with. They might highlight what content types you use tend to deliver the most powerful messaging.
From here you can adjust your digital marketing campaigns to address problems or lean into particularly strong elements.
Conclusion
In an increasingly online business landscape, digital marketing is a powerful tool for your brand’s resilience.
It’s important to adopt strategies that strengthen your presence in the market and how willing your customers are to keep engaging with your brand.
Some of these will be focused on establishing trustworthiness, while others help to make meaningful connections practical in difficult times.
That said, it’s always important to take a tailored approach to any brand development or strengthening. Your business is unique and may well face more nuanced challenges.
Take the time to review the likely risks your business may face. From here, you can better adapt these resilience measures and identify others that fit your brand’s needs.
About the Author!
Katie Brenneman is a passionate writer specializing in business, marketing, education, and ethical management. When she isn’t writing, you can find her with her nose buried in a book or hiking with her dog, Charlie. To connect with Katie, you can follow her on Twitter.