Branding your business right is one of the best things that you can ever do for your ecommerce business.
Proper branding paves the way for better revenue, excellent customer experience, and exponential growth.
In this guide, we take a look at the seven things that you can do to put your ecommerce business on the right path. We look at everything from customer experience to the power of social channels.
It’s All About Your Story
The first step in branding is developing your story.
Remember, your brand is the symbol that your customer can rally behind, and you need to give them enough reason to do so.
Think about brands that you look up to. All of them have great stories and positive traits you can easily attribute to them.
There could be hundreds of e-commerce brands catering to the same market that you are trying to penetrate, how does your company do it differently? Where did you come from? Why do you do what you do?
Take time to tell your story.
This means engineering your “About Us” page to reflect the narrative of why your brand was started and why it is relevant to your customer, getting this message on your social media profiles, and referring to the story in promotionals ever so often. Your vision and mission will come in handy in this part because this has to be communicated in your story as well. If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s important to optimize your LinkedIn profile.
Identifying Your Customer
A brand will attract several specific buyer personas who will be interested in the story that you have.
These personas make up a majority of your would-be customers and consumers, and you must know who they are so that you can effectively target them. Go beyond the demographics and identify behaviors that associate your customers with your brand. For example, if you find that your products and services are for a demographic that likes to have fun, don’t just limit it to a particular age group or income level and go after the behavior of fun (example – TikTok).
This type of targeting will allow you to customize your marketing campaigns and penetrate the markets of the different types of customers that you have. Once you have a handle on the different buyer personas you want to reach, make sure that you have a clear plan to go after each one of them.
Think Social
There are 2.45 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 330 million on Twitter, 300 million on LinkedIn, and 111 million on Instagram. Whatever your product or service is, you’ll find a market for it on any significant social media platform.
And, the reason behind it is simple.
A significant portion of the global population has a social media presence, and wherever your customer is, your brand should leave a footprint there as well. It’s crucial that you take your organization’s narrative and make it consistent in all of your channels. For instance, if you want to be known as a green company, it should also resonate with the posts and identity that you show people.
The content that you release on each channel has to be tailored for that channel and the buyer persona that you are trying to target. It’s tempting to just consistently post content, but there are different ways to leverage your social media channels. Marketers can harness the power of social media to “pre-suade” retarget and reach people at specific instances in the sales pipeline.
Consistency
When we talk about consistency, I don’t mean how often you post on your social media channels, but rather the message that you communicate and the voice that you communicate with.
If you want to be known as a funny company, then your posts have to be fun. If you're going to be known as an organization that thrives on the customer experience, then share stories about your customer. Whatever you communicate, it has to be consistent.
Take time to create a distinct voice for your brand.
Your brand has its own personality, and this has to be reflected in the materials that you release.
Customer Experience and Engagement Matters
Do you want to have a better brand overnight?
Then, work on customer experience. A lot of brands have been built on excellent customer experiences, and a lot of brands have suffered from a lack of it.
Here’s what.
The customer experience can make or break your brand. This means that all their needs have to be attended to from the moment that they look for your brand online to the time that they complete a purchase.
But, it’s not just the customer service during the buying process that has to be taken care of. The buyer journey continues after they’ve bought from your brand.
Providing customer service and follow-ups after the purchase will set you apart from the rest.
These include simple things like a “thank you email,” a follow-up from the sales team asking about their experience, custom advice for the aftercare of the product, and invitations to join special reward schemes to give your customers benefits.
Make sure that you engage with your customers! Developing an excellent customer experience helps your brand because customers feel that they matter. In the digital world, it’s harder to make personal connections and providing reliable customer experience bridges that disconnect.
Produce Great Content
Content marketing is a surefire way to generate inbound leads for any organization, but this is dependent on what kind of content you are releasing. To release great content, you need to know who your customer is and what types of questions or needs they have that can be fulfilled by good content.
Don’t just stick to regular blog articles; there are different types of content that you can use:
- Tutorial videos
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Quizzes
- Tools
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Memes
Articles might be standard, but other content types encourage engagement and are frankly more interesting than blog posts. You should aim to add value and provide solutions for your customers. Don’t just aim to promote your products, but rather help your customers.
Pay Close Attention to Feedback
You won’t be able to grow your brand if you don’t pay attention to the feedback. Being sensitive to what your customers and prospects are saying is crucial in creating better marketing campaigns and highlighting your brand.
This means ensuring that you have a handle on analytics, insights, and other customer data that you garner. Start asking around and interviewing your stakeholders – not all of them, of course – and ask them what part of your brand they like the most, and what would they change. By being proactive, you create a dynamic brand that is attentive to the needs of its customers.
Branding is a continuous process, but what’s important is that you are consistent with the message that you are trying to get across. Think of your brand as a living embodiment of the values of your organization, and once you do that, you’ll find that you’ve been able to set yourself apart in the online marketplace.
Author Bio
Houston Golden is the Founder & CEO of BAMF, where he led the company from $0 to $3M+ in revenue in its first two years and has built a proven process for turning clients into LinkedIn Influencers through viral content that has generated over 300M+ organic views. He enjoys yoga, running and surfing, along with playing his ukelele and dreaming of new business ideas and being a father is his favourite.