Engaged customers are key to keeping your brand front-of-mind. Max Eaglen, director at Platform, offers five steps to help your message resonate with your audience
Brands are complex things. They exist in a state of flux especially in today’s changing customer environment.
Traditionally, services and products were created, given a name and sold to customers. The better they were the more they sold. The more effort the creator put into maintaining and developing the product or service the longer it lasted until eventually it developed its own ‘gravity’ whereby it was the product of choice above all others.
As the market develops, brands have to fight for air among the noise that is the over saturated, highly competitive, plagiarist marketplace in which they now live.
The biggest challenge for those in business today is how to differentiate your product or service in both the short term and the future and how to really engage with your customers.
1. Stop the talk, and listen
Sounds obvious but it is amazing how many brand guardians don’t listen to their customers. The days of selling your product and service by shouting loudly to them are gone. Now you need to listen to your customers and find out what they really want and need. Sometimes, they will not know, sometimes, you need to listen and then deduce what their needs and desires are and how to meet them.
2. Know your market
Finding out what your customers want is the first step, but you also need to know who else is talking to them. While you are perfecting your product, your competitors could be creating the latest evolution of it, so stay one step ahead, think what your customers need now and for the future.
3. Personalise your message
This is really where understanding your market comes into play. Successful brands nowadays need to be fighting from every corner. Customers are everywhere and expect you to be too. Some want to engage with your brand on their mobiles and tablets and some through printed material. You need to understand which audience likes which vehicle and personalise your message and your delivery.
This doesn’t mean huge marketing budgets or even a massive marketing campaign, it means connecting all your brand messaging, having cohesion through your activity and a real integrated approach in everything you do.
4. Customers will want it all
There is no doubt customers of the future are already far more technology savvy than their predecessors. However, it’s a myth that the internet will be the only way to shop for products and services going forward.
The human race are social animals at heart, they like the face-to-face contact of the everyday. Brands need to embrace the changing technology and combine it with the human touch.
Why are pop-up shops and restaurants so popular? People love to feel and share their experiences. The brand journey of the future will include coveting something in a magazine, looking it up online, tweeting, digging and sharing it with friends, meeting friends to head to the bricks and mortar of a shop to try it on, buying and then tweeting and posting about the experience via social media. The journey may take a few different turns but fundamentally it is about engaging your customers in a way they want.
5. Use a 360-degree process
Once you have learnt how to really engage your customers, how do you keep the momentum going and ensure you are always one step ahead?
It’s back to the beginning – listening to the customers. The Brand Experience Centre was born from the desire to build gravity around brands by creating spaces in which, unhindered by competition, the product is king.
At Platform, we work with a number of clients including Vodafone, British Gas and Accenture, to design a place where ideation and co-creation sit together and where customers can take an active part
in developing brands throughout the product lifecycle.
This space allows the brand guardian to create an environment that produces stories to tell, and triggers a new set of responses from their customers, helping them shape and evolve their brand for the future.
Importantly there is now a greater interest in B2B experience centres as companies realise the need for greater engagement with their enterprise and SME customers. This kind of engagement becomes a haven for developing and maintaining long term relationships with clients, suppliers, staff and resellers who may not have the marketing budget to develop and run such a space themselves.
What is more interesting still is that as these centres develop they may well exist in mirror image of what they are now, being driven or even run by the customer rather than the brand owner, generating ideas and projects that can be picked up by the brand and delivered back to their target audience.
The world has become a different place, but the one thing that remains is that the customer is the king. Acknowledge and accept this and you have the answer to customer engagement.