The Only 5 Ways You Need To Create Your Authentic Brand
In the fair world where so many businesses are breathing, how can you establish your brand as an authentic brand?
Brand trust and brand authenticity are significant. Strong and thriving brands have one thing in common: their strong customer trust. Authentic brand building always breeds success if your brand can emotionally connect with the consumers.
Jim Stengel, former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble, quotes, “We’re seeing more of an emphasis on brands building emotional relationships with consumers because it’s powerful and it works. When you do it, you have a much stronger affinity, a much stronger business, much stronger growth, and much stronger results.”
Therefore, brand authenticity breathes life into your brand. If you want a brand that is more human, more transparent and wins business, work on the foundation.
Why Is Brand Authenticity Crucial?
Based on a survey of close to 1500 customers, brand authenticity makes or breaks the buyer’s decision. The community and consumers will invest their time depending on your brand’s authenticity.
Of course, authenticity is at the centre of every business model, best aligned with profits. Without authenticity and trust, your brand will struggle, and you will lack in achieving strong growth and results.
How to Establish an Authentic Brand?
Here are five brand-building strategies that can never go wrong — frankly, they are an excellent place to start.
1. Storytelling Wins
Storytelling is the essence of being transparent and evoking emotions among your customer base. It is a defining factor segregating your business from your brand. In the B2B world, storytelling is often underutilized.
Stories interpret the mission, the rawness, and how your brand came into existence. It instantly connects with a broad audience and generates humanness.
You can find a brand story often on the “About us” page. You can instill authenticity in your brand messaging by rooting it with your values and principles.
Some things to consider:
Your Brand Values
Share your brand story, its values, and how your business evolved while maintaining those values. Interestingly, 64% of people have a brand relationship because of its shared values.
Express Customer success stories
Happy customers, happy brand. What turns your current customer base to your brand, and how do they benefit from it?
Customer success stories are empowering to know because people connect with people. This way, they will be eager to join hands with your brand. Here user-generated content reinforces life. That could be a blog post interviewing customers, a podcast, a blog, or perhaps case studies.
Your Brand Culture
Introduce your real human force to build that affinity with your customer base. Giving a face to your brand by introducing your team most naturally works magic to cater to a long relationship.
2. Stay Transparent
Transparency is critical to building your brand authenticity. You can instill authenticity in your brand voice, messaging, look and feel. But how do you execute what you preach?
Simple! Reinvent your communication to sustain a truly authentic brand that harbors people’s trust.
Launch communication strategy
All the brands mess up here. Try not to reach out only to announce your new product and ghost for the next few days. Stay in their sight with regular communication.
Answer their queries
A brand that practices transparency with its employees teaches the same to its customers. Train your team to be open and transparent with the customers. Don’t ghost when customers’ queries need prompt attention. It is easy to sense scripted responses. Hence, invest time and resources not to shy away from answering questions.
Have the audacity to show up. Remember, it is alright to mess up but learn from it. A fine example is the brand Zocdoc apologizing for its absolute error.
3. Use Real Visuals
According to a recent MIT study, images are processed in the blink of an eye — like 13 milliseconds. So why not experiment with visuals when trying to establish your brand?
Stock images are enticing, but the magic of reality always touches the customer. Presenting your brand products and authentic images in your content marketing is critical as brand-building steps.
Share lifelike visuals in your blogs, your team members’ images, and the functioning of your brand. If you can stretch your marketing budget, hire a professional photographer to fast-track things and come out with top-quality pictures.
Authentic Images used for the brand building have a more significant impact than you can imagine.
- Images help boost open email rates.
- It elevates your brand’s sales.
- It keeps readers hooked.
- It communicates the message faster.
- It is always inked in the consumer’s memory.
BALA footwear is a shoe brand with a revolutionary offering of comfortable shoes for the caregivers, per se catering to their needs. They use their products’ feedback and examples of real nurses in their brand imagery.
The takeaway is to look for images that exude more life to your brand. Brands widely use UGC content globally, and it wins against some random stock model you’ve no relation with.
4. Listen To Your Customers
Spend time listening more than talking about your brand.
Marketing your brand involves a bounty of talking about your product and services. But, it is a big red flag for potential buyers. Because customers show a deep interest in brands that take an interest in understanding their needs and interests first.
It is imperative not to miss the mark and listen to your customers before anything else.
Today, there are enormous platforms for audience research. Gather customer feedback through surveys and social listening. Pay attention to gathering customer feedback and add personalization to messaging.
It is wise to segment your audience and cater to what they want — that’s why personalization is for. Also, don’t dread asking for feedback for effective communication and appeal to their needs.
An oldie example, CSS Hat, asked customers about the features they wanted on the landing page, and it worked.
5. Social Proofing
We all live in a world that is obsessed with social media. Many businesses garner their maximum traffic from social media marketing. It is a no-brainer, social proofing your brand is non-negotiable.
It is one of the best ways of brand building. It is enlightening to your brand. It nudges other customers to buy from your brand and think about the happy customer journey, success stories, and feedback.
And yes, it goes without saying, social media content is widely absorbed. It crosses borders and makes a global impact as far as you’re targeting your audience right.
Building an authentic brand requires more social proofing for your audience to trust your brand and feel human. Vouch for yourself, be it in Tweets, Reels, or LinkedIn, and be your brand’s first cheerleader. If your brand is authentically aligned, customers will follow.
Trello always takes a notch up in offering relatability and life to its Twitter posts, which binds the audience’s trust.
Social proofing has a lot to offer in establishing a brand that customers love, nurture and recommend.
Ready To Take the Next Step?
This is all you need to grant a fail-proof success to your brand. Remember, it is not an overnight process, but having a tried and tested work model can be a blessing.
Always keep an open-ended loop to fit in customers’ suggestions and share your brand values built on trust and authenticity. Getting your marketing material ready is the first step. It is just the beginning of creating a coveted brand formulated on authenticity.
If you want to take your business to the next level and need content and copy help to accelerate your brand, you can connect with me for some high-value offers. Can’t wait to connect with you!
