Brand experience is an integral part of marketing. A large part of brand experience concerns the product, vibe, and emotional responses people have when they come into contact with a company. Brand experience also has to do with customer experience: whether it’s easy to transact, how smooth it is to engage across different channels, and being sure consumers don’t feel like they are constantly being treated like strangers when they’ve already signed up for an account or given a brand their business. The key to this kind of pleasing experience is good use of customer data. With robust data, companies can treat buyers like they know them, build personalized interactions, and make sure they get relevant content.
Bespoke, custom, curated
Brand experience is vital because every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to leave a good impression and strengthen the relationship with an individual. The best brand experiences are personalized to the customer, so you need to know and understand who you’re targeting with your content and offerings. To do that, you should collect and analyze data to get to know your audience on a deeper level. Examples of great brand experiences:
Efficient customer service: Customers will need support and should receive it seamlessly. This means customer care reps having all of a customer’s information ready at hand, knowing their entire history with the brand, and providing smooth service. For example: Marie calls the Functional Fits Company’s customer service number because the dress she received was the wrong size. The agent on the phone pulls up her order information in seconds, helps her speedily process a return, and puts in a request for a new dress to be sent to her. She doesn’t have to jump through hoops to verify her identity or wait on hold while the rep digs up her transaction history.
Offering personalized experiences: Stand out from competitors with strong personalization on your website that’s based on the previous engagements someone has had with your brand. This might look like smart recommendations for products and services that complement what someone has already purchased, or if the prospect hasn’t yet transacted, making recommendations based on the preferences of other existing customers who have a similar-looking profile.
Strong brand experiences create a self-fulfilling feedback loop — when someone has a good experience, they’re more likely to give you their business again. This provides you with tremendous value that attaches them to your brand and keeps them coming back.
Why is brand experience important?
Turn customers into loyal fans First-time customers that turn into faithful fans are the ones that will continue to invest in your brand time and time again. They’ll consume your content and engage with it. They’ll purchase your products and services. That’s because they have built up a level of trust to feel you’ll do right by them. With a group of brand loyalists lending their support, you’ll increase sales with a repeat customer base of people who love what you do.
Generate more brand awareness over time It takes time and effort to get your brand noticed online, let alone in the market at large. Websites and content need to be optimized and tricky social media algorithms must be battled to boost post engagement. But when you’ve established a following, people will follow you and even talk about you to their friends and family, recommending them to check you out. Word-of-mouth marketing that costs nothing will generate tremendous brand awareness.
Encourage people to choose you over a competitor We live in a time where customers are spoiled for choice and can have their pick of brands that offer the same products and services. Because of this, you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd, so people are inclined to choose you over a competitor. One approach to this is having excellent customer service or tailored loyalty programs — when you gain a reputation for having an exceptional brand experience, more people will want to shop with you and support your brand.
How to use data to improve your brand experience
Understand who your customers are and what matters to them
You need to know your target audience to create a brand experience that resonates. What are their interests? What do they need from you? What’s frustrating them, and how can you help resolve them? What channels do they prefer? What kind of offers do they respond to? Knowing this information will allow you to cultivate an experience that speaks to them. To find this out, you need clean data. The right customer data tools will help you sift through and organize piles of data to help you get a better picture of your customers so you can answer the questions above (as well as more granular ones, like “how many customers spent $1500 over a two year period but haven’t transacted in the last three months”).
Measure results to determine if you’re meeting customer expectations To check if your customers are satisfied, run A/B tests, use control groups, and use smart segmentation to build different audiences. Pinpoint any issues people are experiencing when connecting with your brand through interactions on social media and customer service calls, then try different ways of engaging and see what’s working and what’s not. Odds are, you’re not going to get it right immediately, and that’s okay. Instead, you’ll need to analyze data and make a note of any areas that stand to be improved. If your customers are complaining about slow returns, then focus on speeding the process up and stay in touch with them as they wait for their items. As you make these tweaks, you’ll want to watch for things such as increased engagement and conversions to see if these new strategies are resonating.
Cultivating a strong brand experience is something that will take time. It’ll require you to experiment, measure, and constantly tweak until you can get it right. Even then, you may adapt your experience as your brand grows and evolves.
Good data is the basis for enhancing brand experience
Great brand experiences cannot exist without a solid foundation of customer data. To create a brand experience that truly captures the attention of a target audience, companies need to personalize content, service, and offerings to individual customers’ preferences and needs.
Customer data tools will help brands sort out chaotic data and allow them to customize and set strategies for personalization, boosting customer success and retention.
Download our guide to learn about personalization at enterprise scale.