Brand Communication: Establishing Meaningful Connections

This is a two-way relationship that benefits both your brand and the market. Your market benefits from the products and services you offer while you the brand benefit from your market’s support.

Brand communication is a set of ways a company speaks to its customers. It includes any way a brand communicates to its customers, including any way a brand communicates to its customers, including:

• Advertising
• Social media
• Information campaigns
• Reviews

Effective brand communication means the main message your company communicates is clear to your customers. That message should influence your brand communication strategy. A good branding firm will position brand communication at the center of your marketing materials, how they are communicated, and how they are delivered across channels.

Brand communication is indispensable. Through brand communication, a company can create familiarity around your brand and effectively message its value to potential customers.

But it is not enough for a brand to communicate that it exists: Effective brand communication seeks to understand customers and establish a strong relationship with them.

How to Create Compelling Brand Communication

Companies can pursue a 3-step  approach to creating compelling brand communication that will help you connect and maintain a positive relationship with your customers.

1. Identify your customer base
2. Recognize your customer's motivations (i.e., what drives them to purchase from your company)
3. Create a lasting bond to drive customer loyalty

1. Identify Your Customer Base

The first step is to identify your customer base. Once you’ve specified the market you need to reach, you can now focus on the ways you will communicate with them. You can start creating your brand communication strategy. This will entail research but it’s necessary.

You need to recognize the following attributes of your audience:

• Personality
• Preferences
• Lifestyle

An effective brand communication strategy understands the market it is reaching and conveys a cohesive message. Consumers will feel that they are being valued and not simply randomly targeted to receive marketing materials.

2. Learn What Motivates Your Base

Studies show that having an emotional connection with a brand ranks higher than customer satisfaction. This is not surprising: People don’t want just a great product, they want to connect to a brand they can identify with.

For example, from research, a car manufacturer learns that their customers are likely to purchase cars that give them the feeling of freedom and enjoying the open road. To effectively engage with these customers around that sentiment, companies or their ad agencies should create collateral around “freedom in four wheels.”

Audi used this approach in a TV commercial it produced, titled "Freedom."  In it, a man at work clearly longs to leave his office. He fondles his keys, hops in a car, must wait impatiently in city traffic, then finally is able to escape onto the open road.

Source

The commercial ends with the man, with ski goggles on this head, pulling a snowboard from the storage topper on his car, effectively messaging total freedom relative to his setting at the beginning of the commercial.

3. Create A Lasting Bond

You know your base. You know their passions. Now you must build your brand communication strategy based on what you have learned.

How do you do this?

• Be empathetic
• Cater to their needs
• Engage them about the things they care about
• Make them feel your brand went out of its way to make them feel special

Your goal is to be more than just a brand that your market knows: Leverage brand insights to recognize where customers see you in your market and work to position your brand as their preferred provider

Let’s go back to the car example: Have you met people who buy just one brand of cars? They would never even think of getting another brand. That is the type of brand loyalty you want. Your brand can achieve that by communicating your brand attributes in a way that customers can identify with.

4. Maintain Your Connection With Your Audience

It is not enough that you have created an emotional bond with your customers. It is also equally important to maintain it.

Here are some ways.

• Always repay loyalty with loyalty. The easiest way to lose customers is to betray their trust. Keep open your communication lines with your customer. But avoid hard-selling your brand or make it all about your brand.
• Engage your customers in conversation. Hire a social media marketing agency to respond quickly to customers’ messages.

People who like your brand will talk about your brand. Your customers can be part of your brand communication strategy.

Effective Brand Communication Engages and Retains Customers

Brand communication is more than just telling your audience about your brand and what products and services you offer. It's about finding the right customers for what you are offering, forming a strong emotional link with them, nurturing that link, and keeping the connection.

Effective brand communication boils down to knowing the market you’re talking to and sincerely connecting with them. Customers respond to brands that are authentic and make them feel valued. In the end, your customers are your brand’s best ambassadors.