Let’s consider the brand … If a website is hard to use, potential customers will have a bad experience - something you really want to avoid. Contests and giveaways are a great way to do this. A good example of this is the eco-friendly movement. Companies create their brand’s online presence through their websites, social media accounts, blogs and apps. Strive to build a big brand with a killer branding experience. You can also share pre-existing content that relates to current discussions. A brand experience is about designing a sensory experience that brings a person into a lasting and meaningful relationship with a brand. As long as it’s related and relevant, chances are it’s worth sharing. Apple is an obvious example. If the tonality is at odds with your marketing, you won’t be able to make an emotional connection with your customers. Consistency is important so that your customers know what your brand is going to deliver each and every time. There are several components of establishing a brand, including designing a logo and developing a slogan, but many small business owners stop just shy of creating an immersive experience that can actively engage consumers. It should also be in line with how you have defined your brand and with what you know your customers want. Creating a consistent brand is important. Your Data-Driven Marketing Is Harmful. Brand experience goes beyond your visual identity, your customer service, or your physical products. Often times experiential marketing events seem spontaneous, like with street teams or guerrilla marketing. by Sam O'Brien (Guest Author, RingCentral) Brand experience goes beyond your visual identity, your customer service, or your physical products. Discover a better way to hire freelancers. After there is adequate information on what the buyers’ interests, needs, and requirements are, a brand can adapt its mission statement accordingly. Businesses that want to thrive today need to create a brand experience that isn’t just about what happens at point of sale or even during a protracted shopping experience. The experience needs to feel both organic and relevant. Amplify your business knowledge and reach your full entrepreneurial potential with Entrepreneur Insider’s exclusive benefits. When we say follow trends, we don’t mean just imitate them and hope it works. You hear it and may even say it, “make an emotional connection.” But have you evolved, truly evolved, what you and your team are doing to make good on that claim? You need the totality of your brand experience to create brand loyalty. To create a live experience that feels genuine, buy-in from both the brand partner and consumers is critical. A free set of tools designed to make features of a DAM platform available to everyone. AI for designers and marketing to make your creative more effective and eliminate busywork. You can also focus on making the experience of receiving their order special. If your company is exhibiting at a … For an effective brand experience, you need totality and tonality working together to give a complete picture of what your brand can offer. Let’s face it - The days of creating a visually appealing website and calling it good … Find out why brands trust us to manage their assets. In fact, the experience you build becomes your brand in your customers’ minds. FLUID CONTENT. According to a Nielson survey, 59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them. Plus, enjoy a FREE 1-year Entrepreneur magazine subscription. Some events are highly-engaging brand experiences that use cutting-edge technology to capture the imagination. When thinking about how to present your brand online, a lot of thought goes into social media accounts, digital ad spend, and website design. Brands that were genuinely committed gained new customers and adapted their brand experience into one that was eco-friendly. Become A Member >> Leading marketers are creating a brand experience to meet their customers where they are … and that’s in the driver’s seat. However, there’s a big category of content that is often undervalued, and that’s the material which is user-created. Diversify. The term “brand experience” came to life as many other terms in the marketing industry do — with the evolution of the media and channels that we use to communicate a brand’s message or story. Whatever … The most well known brands that exist today place strong emphasis on brand experience. Successful branding means delivering an experience that feels both complete and consistent. When developing a brand strategy, identify three core components of your business to use as a blueprint for marketing tactics: . What they’ve realised is how important brand loyalty is to the growth of their businesses - esp… When it comes to post-sale, think about what kind of support customers might need. You want your website to be easy to navigate, as well as visually appealing. People tend to trust content created by other customers in a way they don’t trust your own content or influencer marketing - there’s something about it that’s completely genuine. How can your brand make the most of it? by Sam O'Brien (Guest Author, RingCentral). Think about physical storefronts that provide free samples or let you test products in-store before you buy. Do current discounts automatically apply themselves? Part of brand experience is creating a memorable user experience that is in line with the entirety of the brand experience. Creating memorable brand experiences can set great brands apart from average and even good brands. When brands successfully create a brand experience that resonates, customers notice — and tell their friends. Creating a customized brand experience requires extensive research to identify the target audience and buyer persona. Let’s go back to the example of Red Bull. 5 ways you can create a consistent brand right now. Logos and Brand Experience . Consumers quickly rooted out those who were genuinely engaged from those who were ‘greenwashing’ (using green marketing in a way that isn’t representative of their processes). Customer experience is set to be the number one brand differentiator in 2020 (and beyond) 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, Customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 13% (and as high as 18%) for luxury and indulgence services, simply by receiving a great customer experience, Brand experience is all about the emotive feeling derived from the experience, whether physical or digital. From business to marketing, sales, finance, design, technology, and more, we have the freelancers you need to tackle your most important work and projects, on-demand. Simply having a walk-in store is no longer enough to create a full brand experience for your … I understand that the data I am submitting will be used to provide me with the above-described products and/or services and communications in connection therewith. Well designed packaging that matches your brand identity is worth investing in, too. Keep it simple. “I can’t tell you the key to success, but the key to failure is trying … Plus, enjoy a FREE 1-year. I call this tonality. Your brand identity is the “face” that interacts with the entire world. Do you sell makeup? Totality of the Brand Experience: For example, if you present yourself as accessible, with a simple to understand tone, then you don’t want your customers calling in and getting blindsided by someone using a lot of technical jargon straight off the bat. Is it well-categorized with an excellent search tool? Get to know the Brandfolder platform! The more compelling the experience, the faster you will build brand loyalty. I Should Know: I Ran Marketing at Google and Instagram. Regardless, tonality should be a conscious decision on your part. It’s a sure-fire way to help set you apart from the competition. For just $5 per month, get access to premium content, webinars, an ad-free experience, and more! Learn what Digital Asset Management is, and the many ways it can benefit your business. The right combination will make the experience unique to your brand and motivating for your customers. These activities are distinct from traditional advertising activities in that beyond creating awareness of a brand promise, these experiences are designed to deliver proof of a brand’s promise or the benefits of a product or service. Here's how you can use your marketing efforts to make a lasting impression on customers. It builds audience trust in your brand, increases your brand value, and gives your team creative elbow room. For example, if you’re a travel agent specializing in helping singles book group excursions, you need to make sure you have a total brand experience that relates to your specific customer. Another way to create a brand experience at a tradeshow is to sponsor an event to benefit a charity. Some stores are even using augmented reality to add another layer. That’s not to say that your remote working call team needs to speak exactly like the text on your website, but that there should be consistency in communication. In order to create a successful brand experience, you need to know who you are as a brand. As well as sharing and engaging with user-created content that arises naturally, you can also encourage it. Plus, enjoy a FREE 1-year Entrepreneur … When you buy a Red Bull product, you’re buying into this image. Understanding who you are as a brand Creating a consistent brand voice A focus on pre and post sale Encouraging user generated content (UGC) Following current trends Demonstrating brand value. Want to Know How Gen Z Is Transforming Digital Marketing? Consistency: Be able to define what allows you to provide your services day in and day out. If the experience isn’t complete and consistent, the totality won’t be effective in creating customer loyalty. The sky is the limit as far as creating a user-friendly brand experience. Both elements need to be consistent with each interaction. For instance, a makeup brand might say ‘share your best looks created with our palettes and win our brand new range’. Any experience someone has with your brand needs to fit into this image, identifying with the life your brand takes on as part of their own - which is why Red Bull’s website focuses on people who their customers may aspire to be. Knowing these details about your brand and its story will help you craft the experience to match. This takes a little planning to decide what brand experience your company would like to provide. One excellent way to do this is to create informative, unique content. What Is Brand Experience? Your brand can’t be everything to everyone, especially at the start. Brand experiences can make a powerful way to engage consumers. Promotions like discounts and coupons or customer reward programs bring in new business and create positive experiences for customers. Clothing retailers might have behind-the-scenes exclusive videos at fashion events. Creating things that will keep people coming back, even when they’re not specifically looking for a product, is the key. If so, are you looking to appear luxurious and exclusive, or youthful and fun? Not so long ago, the approach many brands took could be summed up like this: sell and forget. If you sell a small business phone system, do you want to focus on silicon valley style entrepreneurship or updating traditional mom and pop stores? When creating your brand, ... For just $5 per month, get access to premium content, webinars, an ad-free experience, and more! This can be anything provided by a user - a review, a photo, or even an off handed mention. Sam has a passion for innovation and loves exploring ways to collaborate more with dispersed teams. Copyright © 2020 Entrepreneur Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Ask yourself, what is your brand experience? Create a niche within your industry. The perfect blend of enterprise features and an intuitive interface make Brandfolder #1 in usability and user experience. Brand experiences can make a campaign more engaging but they can also facilitate the purchasing process. Others may refer to it as brand personality or voice. Focus. Related: The Secret to a Strong Branding Message? Follow him on LinkedIn. Related: Change the Rules: 5 Ways to Bring Mission Into Your Business, Marketing Master - Author - Blogger - Dad. Rebrand to stay relevant by building defensible brands in the age of hyper-competition. Watching existing customers talk about their positive experiences of a brand gives potential customers assurance that they will also have that kind of experience. Without both totality and tonality, you won’t have a great brand experience, and without a great brand experience, you're just another product. He has written for websites such as Keap and Hubspot. It’s time to go a step beyond selling your products and start selling your brand as top of its field. How does a business owner go about creating one? Denver•Chicago•Los Angeles•New York•San Francisco, Copyright @2020 Brandfolder Digital Asset Management, The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Successful Brand Experience, The ability to look up order details easily. Purpose: This explains why you are in business and the specific customer needs you fulfill. Sam O’Brien is the Director of Digital and Growth for EMEA at RingCentral, a Global VoIP, video conferencing and call centre software provider. It’s no longer enough to have a nicely designed website and a good range of products. … If it’s International Women’s Day for instance, maybe celebrate by sharing some interviews with the women on your team. Understanding who you are beyond what you sell is vital to crafting a successful brand experience. Change the Rules: 5 Ways to Bring Mission Into Your Business, Promoting Your Business Offline: 5 Tips to Connect With Customers Off the Web, 3 Tips for Effective B2B Marketing Outreach, 3 Vital Marketing Strategies Businesses Should Adopt Post-Covid. Sometimes it’s the little details that make all the difference. According to McKinsey , brand experience drives word of mouth more than any other factor, accounting for up to 80 per cent of pre-purchase word-of-mouth marketing. Nowadays, what most brands are aiming for is a continuous engagement with their audiences. Pick your focus and personality. Take One Look at Wendy's. Is it clear when something has been added to the basket? Brand experience influences how customers feel about a brand through a simple but meaningful encounter. Make no mistake about it: a recognizable and loved brand is one of the most valuable assets a company owns. This should be applied across all points at which a customer may interact with you, from social media to phone calls. For just $5 per month, get access to premium content, webinars, an ad-free experience, and more! Storytelling. Think about some well-known brands. Branding your business is a delicate task that requires constant refinement and effort. Get heaping discounts to books you love delivered straight to your inbox. For instance, if you see a lot of talk about what the technology means for business, you could share content about the future of work. If it is a charity whose mission connects with your business, then you are going to give people another thing to remember about your brand. Some things you can do to improve the post-sale experience include having: Many brands are redefining the customer relationship, encouraging an ongoing,rather than a one-off, transaction. You sold your product or service, the customer went away and the contact between you was complete - until the next transaction. This approach is creating a positive brand experience, even for people who might choose to leave - at least for the time being - without purchasing anything. For example, a restaurant can have the most welcoming website, amazingly warm online reviews and an incredibly inviting front door entrance, but if the host and wait staff are obnoxious throughout the experience, the overall tonality of the experience is tarnished. Examples have included simulations where people could see the world from the eyes of a product, or experience actually using a product or service in a realistic space. Experiential marketing refers to the idea of using an actual experience to create a memorable link between the brand and the consumer. Related: 4 Ways to Spring Clean Your Brand. As a small business, you may be competing against big brands with devoted customers and unlimited marketing budgets. They also sell a lifestyle, focused on extreme sports, accomplishment, and risk-taking. People may go to them to buy energy drinks, but they also go to them to find out about upcoming extreme events, read about aspirational figures, and watch videos about unique subcultures. You need everything to be consistent for your customers to feel good about engaging with your brand. Know Your Personas. If you provide an ongoing service - something like SaaS marketing, subscription-based software, or IT support - then this is especially important. You must think about both the totality of the experience as well as the tonality. Establishing a successful brand experience is no easy task, and no two brands are the same, but there are some guidelines any business can follow to achieve an engaging identity that their audience will find continually relatable. Brand experiences lead to brand loyalty, active referral of the brand and increased profitability for the brand (Morrison and Crane, 2007). Having a local office with beautiful brochures may be a good start, but without an online experience that appeals to the social nature of your customer, your brand won’t be complete or consistent with your customers' needs. SENSE - Immerse people in your brand, and everything it stands for, by creating an experience that is flexible enough to appeal to all five senses. The pre-sale and post-sale experience is just as important as the actual sale itself when it comes to meeting brand guidelines.. Instead, you need to bring your own unique - and sincere - take on whatever is current. Tonality of the Brand Experience:  Bring offline marketing events into your online branding efforts. Brand experiences encourage loyalty by creating emotional connections through an engaging, compelling and consistent context. It’s an amalgamation of everything that happens between a customer and your business. The following is the third in the series "Marketing Like the Big Brands," running every other week in which marketing expert Jim Joseph shows entrepreneurs on a small-business budget how to apply marketing strategies used by big brands. Many marketing and business leaders tend to over complicate everything about marketing. This kind of content makes your brand worth engaging with, and creates an experience beyond an individual transaction. Tonality is about the spirit of the experience. Execute your marketing consistently in both totality and tonality and you will have a winning formula for your brand. We’ll feature a different book each week and share exclusive deals you won’t find anywhere else. Homeware stores could create visual DIY guides or troubleshooting suggestions for common home problems. This includes engaging with your customers through the various ways they live their lives. But that's all changed. A flexible, secure, no-code platform for dynamic collaboration and workflows across the enterprise. Your logo serves as the visual foundation of your brand, and that is a hugely important point to consider when creating brand experiences. SmallBizLady: Tell us more about this Branding Experience. Let’s face it, we love it … If you’re a software company, you could have guides on topics like ‘getting the most out of your devops’ or ‘security and the cloud’. The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Successful Brand Experience. Brand experience builds consumer awareness and often creates brand-faithful customers. Done well, brand experience can build valuable and lasting relationships with—and affinity for—your brand. This will lead to a huge amount of images being shared around that advertise pre-existing products and help build hype for the new ones mentioned as well. Some smaller independent sellers add little bonuses like packets of sweets, whilst larger retailers might add some free samples or a discount code for use in future. Red Bull is a great example - at their core, they sell energy drinks. Creating catchy jingles or slogans may cement a brand in a customer's mind. Focus. As it grew more popular, brands started to jump on board and start talking about what they were doing to help. Create a Brand Experience at an Existing Event for Experiential Success. Now you know who you are, it’s time to craft a distinctive brand voice to reach your audience. To really stand out, and to keep customers coming back, you need to have an exceptional brand experience. Teanna Ross: A branding experience is all the interactions people have with a product, service, or organization. Marketing is all about the kind of experience you deliver to your customers with each and every interaction. This isn’t just about what you sell, but what brand values you represent. It’s an amalgamation of everything that happens between a customer and your business. The Secret to a Strong Branding Message? Media may be an element aimed at driving impressions and engagement around the experience, but brand experiences are not media-driven, rather supplemented by media whether via social influencer, digital, social, print or TVC. The ultimate goal is to elicit positive emotions and feelings from consumers concerning a specific brand. Totality is about the completeness and consistency across your various marketing elements.