5 Factors That Can Make or Break Your Brand Success Strategy

Did you know that more than 627,000 new businesses are started each year, according to the Small Business Association? Having in mind this number, it may seem like launching a brand is a piece of cake.

However, the same organization also witnesses more than 595,000 business breakdowns yearly.

So, building a brand from scratch requires a lot of time and energy if you want optimal results.

To be able to develop a successful branding strategy, you have to create a clear and precise concept of your brand identity and values, and make it a reality before trying to sell your product or service. And this image refers not only to your product quality but also to numerous other market factors that will significantly impact your internal organization, business position, and relationship with stakeholders.

So, if you want to get to know what makes a brand successful, read on. In this post, we’re showing you the essential factors of successful branding strategies and ways you should approach them to make sure not to fail.

The Essentials Of Successful Branding Strategies

#1. Target Audience Definition

It’s not only the lack of target audience definition that frequently makes brands fail. It’s also about the way you define it when you do.

On the one hand, if you aren’t precise enough when determining your target customer, you risk wasting time and money trying to sell your products to those who don’t need them. On the other hand, if you are too specific, you may end up narrowing down your audience way too much, and, therefore, losing chances to sell your product.

Now, if you’re wondering how to know whether you’re defining the target audience well enough, let us guide you through the two most important stages of this process.

I. Clearly define the purpose of your product.

You can only determine your target audience reliably if you can easily explain how your product helps them. Once you’re aware of your product’s purpose, you can proceed to:

• Analyzing if your potential customers are aware that they need your product or you have to raise brand awareness;
• Investigating the causes and consequences of the problem that your product should solve. (This step helps improve the understanding of your target audience behavior, expectations, and interest in buying your product, and therefore, enables you to develop a successful branding strategy.)

II. Document your ideal customer profile.

Only when you’re fully aware of how your product can help someone you can proceed to target that someone. Some of the parameters that you should pay attention to when creating the ideal customer profile (apart from their need for your product) may be their:

• age and gender,
• education,
• income, profession, or occupation,
• location, ethnicity, religion, etc.

So, once you’ve combined all these pieces of information and created the ideal customer profile, you can easily track down your target audience across different platforms, communities, etc.

Finally, remember that you should be extremely careful in this process since unrealistic customer profiles won’t do you any good. Keep your feet on the ground when creating the image of your audience and pay special attention to everything that makes them different from people that would never buy your product. The worst thing you can do for your business is to base your branding strategy on approaching the wrong people.

#2. Relationship With Available Technological Solutions

The era we live in offers stunning technological possibilities for our businesses. Not only can we automate all types of monotonous and repetitive tasks, but we’re also paying more and more attention to artificial intelligence and incredible software solutions powered by this technology.

However, there are two types of extreme cases that usually can’t succeed.

While nobody expects you to hire robots instead of humans, you can make use of different types of amazing software at your workplace, such as:

• Live chat software for customer service;
• Knowledge base software for internal or public purposes;
• Employee training software to efficiently help your new workers get around;
• Cloud-based solutions can help you improve business performance in more than one way.

On the other hand, there are also those businesses that can’t get enough of automation and technology, but they don’t use it wisely.

So, if you’re planning on introducing advanced innovative technological solutions for the sake of bragging, you may as well consider not doing it. The only thing worse than ignoring technology in the IT era is using it in a way that has no visible impact on work efficiency and also causes losses.

#3. The Way You Look Online

No matter whether you’re offering a physical product or a service, if you don’t promote it online, you practically don’t exist outside your local market. And that’s why it’s incredibly important for your web presence to be flawless.

Luckily, today, you don’t have to spend enormous amounts of money to have your website look decent. You can do a lot of things on your own because there are some convenient ways of building an attractive business website. (Click here to check out the best free website builders.)

To develop a successful branding strategy, you should pay special attention to the way you feature your products online. One of the main predispositions for your brand to succeed is an impeccable landing page that will motivate your website visitors to convert.

So, what should you avoid on your landing page if you want to develop a successful branding strategy?

• A large amount of text in endless blocks
• Too many bright-colored areas and different fonts
• Numerous menus, multiple-choice areas, and excessive calls-to-action

And what should you do to make it flawless?

• Use a theme with a straightforward, minimalistic design
• Make your landing page responsive and mobile-friendly
• Create an intuitive page by eliminating excessive content and complex navigation
• Make the essential parts of your landing page easily visible and attention-grabbing (particularly your call-to-action)

#4. Communication With (Potential) Customers

If you want to develop a successful branding strategy, you should base it on quality communication with your prospects. Only if you can communicate your message to your (potential) customers and understand theirs, you can expect positive results. In the process of developing adequate communication, you should pay attention to its three important elements, which are:

I. The culture in which you’re trying to position your business

If you don’t pay attention to the environment in which you’re developing your branding strategy, you may end up being misinterpreted.

The culture shapes not only communication and relationships among your staff but also the way you should interact with customers. If you start to talk to them in a way that they are not comfortable with owed to cultural settings, they will be likely to develop a negative feeling towards your business.

So, if you want to break these cultural barriers, you should pay attention to the ways people are used to communicating. And this is easily manageable by simply following the patterns provided by successful local businesses.

II. The way you manage social media communication

Social media branding makes a huge impact on the success of your general branding strategy having in mind that a large number of people follow their favorite brands online. So, if you want to make sure that your social media approach has a positive impact on your business branding, make sure to follow the tips below:

• Never communicate in a way that can jeopardize your brand image, no matter how frustrated your followers are.
• Adapt the way you react to your followers’ comments to their profile. Depending on your target group, your communication can be more formal (resembling an email or letter form) or absolutely relaxed (with abbreviations, slang, and emojis). Still, it’s highly important to make it convenient for your audience.
• Try to respond to your followers’ messages and comments as fast as possible. The whole point of business social media accounts is to make your brand more available to your (potential) customers, so make sure to use it this way.
• Use social media to communicate everything that is happening in your business. You know what they say: if you didn’t post it online, it never happened. So, use your social media influence to motivate followers to check out your products, discounts, events, etc. but make sure not to spam them with unnecessary information.

III. The ways you handle customers’ negative reviews

The way you interact with your existing customers, no matter whether they feel satisfied or frustrated, speaks a lot about your brand. Not only does it impact each customer’s impression of your brand, but it also makes a general impact on your business reputation. So, to make sure that you’re not threatening your business image by the way you address customers’ reviews, try to:

Provide reaction to their reviews as fast as possible. (Don’t even think about leaving them unanswered!)

• Don’t take anything personally. What you should do is keep the objective, pleasant, fact-based attitude even if you don’t agree with your customers’ opinions.
• Offer an apology for any poor customer experience. And don’t forget to keep a friendly and positive vibe.
• Promise what you can deliver. This way, you will avoid their further frustrations caused by inadequate feedback or low-quality problem solution.

#5. Support System Effectiveness

Two important customer support aspects can make or break your branding strategy. On the one hand, it’s about the way you communicate, and we’ve already covered this aspect in the previous section. On the other hand, it’s also about the means that you use to communicate with them, especially if they are in a hurry for additional information, help, or have special requests.

What makes a brand successful in terms of customer support is its availability. More precisely, 79% of customers opt for live chat support as this system lets them receive instant feedback. And if you’ve built your business website on the WordPress platform, you can increase the effectiveness of your support system by simply installing live chat for WordPress.

So, with a WordPress live chat plugin, like ProProfs Chat you get to develop a successful branding strategy that will position you as a trustworthy, reliable, and efficient business. And this is based on numerous perks that this system provides, including letting you:

• Personalize each of your chat sessions;
• Streamline messages and requests from different channels, increasing your productivity;
• Use canned responses for more generic questions, saving time for both agent and customer, and speeding up the communication;

Create a non-intrusive proactive approach with live chat triggered at the most convenient time, based on your visitor behavior on your website.

Finally, if you add live chat to WordPress, then you choose to use the best means of support for further development of your branding strategy. Plus, this cost-efficient solution doesn’t require physical space and automates all the simpler tasks.

Summing Up: What Makes A Brand Successful?

Successful branding strategies comprise numerous types of factors, each of them leaving a specific effect on your (potential) customers’ impression. So, if you want to optimize your business performance and develop a successful branding strategy, you should:

• Define your target audience as thoroughly as possible and understand the way they think;
• Make use of available technological solutions to increase your brand efficiency;
• Improve your online reputation and build a landing page that maximizes customers’ engagement and conversion;
• Take your communication with your potential customers to a higher level;

Provide a stable and reliable support system that will make your prospects more comfortable as they’re getting familiar with your brand.

Unfortunately, numerous businesses only become aware of the importance of these actions once they’ve already failed. And to avoid becoming one of them, you should realize that what makes a brand successful is the ambiance created around it. So, do your best to motivate your target audience to get to know more about your product or service by being engaging, consistent, and reliable.

About the Author!

David is a customer service expert and technical writer at Assignmaester. As a customer service strategist and execution expert at ProProfs, he has offered unique strategies to website owners who wish to learn deeply about WordPress Live Chat Plugin to build a delightful experience. Follow David @Davidmiller4312 or connect on LinkedIn.