How to Prepare Your Brand for the Future
Your branding is the personality of your company. It’s the core identity and ethos that customers and leads connect to, which is critical if you want to build the kind of relationships that will stand the test of time.
But your brand is not static. It should evolve over time, meeting customer needs and exceeding expectations as those needs and expectations change. If it doesn’t, you could be heading for a problem. Outdated branding will not resonate with your target audience, making it harder to acquire and grow customers.
So how do you ensure your brand is future-proof? Let’s take a look at some key points to focus on.
Revolution vs. Evolution – Choose the path for your brand
Before you can prepare for where you want to be, you need to know where you are. This is where a brand valuation comes into play. If you haven’t had a formal review of your brand in the last three to five years, you’re essentially flying blind – you have no idea what works and what doesn’t.
Conducting a brand assessment means collecting and assessing all the key points of your branding. Logos, color palettes, fonts, packaging, printed materials, landing pages, digital images, web content formats and layouts: all these things need to be gathered and analyzed. Do they align with and support your company’s identity? Do they elicit the right reaction from your audience?
Receive quantitative and qualitative feedback from your customers and other users. Survey what customers think of your brand’s visual presentation and tone, and assess conversion data to find out how these elements drive sales and growth.
All of this information will help you make a decision revolutionize or develop your branding. When you decide to keep your current brand designs and evolve them, it’s brand evolution. When you decide that everything needs a complete overhaul from the ground up, this is a revolution.
Identify and strengthen core values
Your business should be built around three to five core values—the core tenets that matter who you are and What you are all there For example, you might choose to place inclusivity and diversity, support for the local community, and a commitment to customer service at the heart of your business identity.
These core values impact every aspect of your business, so everyone on your team should know what they are right away. If your team members can’t recite your core values, how can you expect them to engage with and embrace those values? This disconnect will hurt your branding initiatives down the road.
So what are you doing? Well, first you need to identify and evaluate those values and understand what you need to improve and what you need to change in your branding. Remember that these core values not only impact your brand but the entire organization as it evolves, so you need to make sure you’re focusing on the right things. Next, you need to communicate these values to your team so that these core principles inform their actions as well.
Aligning the brand message to differences
While branding is certainly about getting your business noticed in the marketplace, there’s a little more to it than that. It must also show what sets you apart from your competitors and what unique value you offer your customers. Basically, your message needs to be aligned with the key differences as your brand evolves in the future.
The easiest way to achieve this is to focus on a problem-solution dynamic. Identify what your audience expects from you and what problems they need to overcome. Then develop solutions that perfectly meet these requirements.
Of course, developing these solutions is only part of the struggle. You still need to make sure your audience is fully aware What you can and how you can do it. Building your future brand message around a problem-solution dynamic supports this and helps your prospects visualize how your company fits their specific situation.
Development of a formal content strategy
Many companies are under pressure to publish content frequently, and they go to work by releasing articles and content of varying quality as often as possible. But this kind of scattergun approach will hinder rather than help your brand, and a more formal strategy is needed to get the most out of content.
First, you need to rate any content you post. Does it meet Google’s EAT guidelines? Expertise, authority and trustworthiness? Has it been optimized for search? Does it fit into a clearly defined acquisition or nurturing funnel? And last, but not least, does it align with your problem/solution focus and differences?
You will also need a content calendar.
Maybe you have seasonal products and services that you want to promote – make sure your content generates interest in those seasonal offerings beforehand. You might want to publish a series of articles that demonstrate your expertise in the field and reap all the high-quality SEO benefits that come with it – plan this carefully so each part flows into the next.
Also, don’t forget the calls to action. Decide what action you want your audience to take after they browse your content and create CTAs that drive that.
Remember that your content will be the first point of contact between many of your users and your business. For other users, your content is the continuation of their journey – a process of adjustment that is key to building lasting relationships. Either way, your branding needs to take center stage in every article you publish and reinforce your business identity.
Updating Your Website Experience
The experience you offer on your website is key to your branding. As many as 88% of consumers say they won’t return to a company if they have a bad experience on the site, so you need to make sure you get the design right.
If you haven’t checked your website’s performance in a while, now is the time to do so. View your analytics by metrics like cart abandonment, page bounce rates, customer churn, and user journeys to product pages. Analyze the loading speed, interactivity and stability of your pages – three factors that contribute to Google Core Web Vitals. Reach out to your users for qualitative feedback on their experience.
Customers today expect more than they did ten years ago. They will no longer put up with slow page load times and want to be able to connect with help at any time via chat tools and support bots. While the visual branding of your website is important, the experience is also crucial – your audience will associate this experience with your business, and so it will be a cornerstone in the evolution of your brand.
Prepare for brand success
You may have noticed common themes here – the themes of direction and development. Your branding must move in a defined direction that supports you and your customers in achieving common goals. It also needs to evolve and grow over time to keep pace with changes in the industry landscape and the expectations of your customers. With solid preparation, the next steps for your brand will become clearer.
Written by Ryan Jenkins.
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