The brand experience you offer to each customer matters. If customers are loyal and engaged with you, they’ll send more business your way. In addition, they’ll also recommend you to others. If they have a bad experience, they’ll tell everyone they know which can have disastrous financial consequences.
Customers are selective when it comes to choosing who they want to do business with. As such, providing a great brand experience is a no brainer.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Without an exceptional brand experience, you are just another replaceable product or service on the market.”]
What Constitutes Brand Experience?
Brand experience involves a wide range of online and offline activities. Each act as touch points through which customers become immersed in and interact with your brand. Your website or app, in-store or digital interactions with employees, experiential tactics, corporate events and more can all provide consumers with meaningful brand experiences.
Done well, brand experience can cultivate emotional connection. Here’s how to create memorable brand experiences that drive sustained engagement and loyalty.
Understand Your Customer
You can’t create impactful experiences for your customers if you don’t know who they are. A good place to start is going over your customer profiles. You must understand their needs, aspirations and dreams, pain points and what makes them happy.
Understanding your target audience lets you create experiences that engage their emotions. You want to inspire them, make their dreams come alive, make them laugh, or cry. Move them into action by finding out what really matters to them so you can provide this in a compelling and relevant way.
One way to find out what your customers want is by listening. People will tell you everything you need to know online and on social media. Social listening tools have made this easier. By listening, you’ll learn what matters to people so you can create experiences that leave an unforgettable impression.
Make it Bold
Whether hosting an event, staging an experiential stunt or simply driving users to your app or website, the experience must be spectacular for it to leave an impression on your target users.
Brands are built on customers’ emotional and mental affinity. Creating experiences that tap into their emotions and memories will make any brand the go-to for its customers. Also, the more memorable the experience, the better the return on your investment so it’s worth doing it right.
Personalise It
Whatever you sell, you are in the business of connecting with people. Personalisation builds stronger connections with your customers. In short, it gives you a big advantage over your competition.
The better you know your customers, the more equipped you’ll be at creating customised experiences just for them. And, what’s more memorable and persuasive than experiences that are built with you in mind?
Ask yourself, is your website, app, adverts or events creating a memorable and personalised brand experience?
Integrate and Make It Seamless
Is the customer interaction with your brand seamless and consistent? Or, is it compartmentalised?
Have you ever evaluated each touch point with your brand? Consider the people your customers interact with at every point. You’ll be able to identify any gaps that could be preventing customers from having the best brand experience possible.
To create a seamless experience, your brand presentation must be consistent, both offline and online. All your decisions about events, marketing campaigns, advertising etc. should be built around the core values of your brand. So, if your core values need updating then you need to spend time to do this before anything else.
Put People First
Even though your brand should influence your decisions, the experiences you build should eventually be about developing authentic relationships with consumers. Whatever experience you create, make it emotionally meaningful and intimately valuable to your audience. Each experience should be designed to teach, provide opportunities, entertain or inspire. This is the key to boosting long-term loyalty.
Deliver Experiences through Storytelling
Storytelling is at the heart of delivering exceptional brand experiences. It’s through stories that consumers connect, emotionally and mentally. But don’t stop there, engage multiple senses to really create impactful brand experiences. Use mediums that engage consumers’ sense of touch, hearing, vision, taste and smell. By doing this, you’ll deliver memorable experiences that can only be associated with your brand.
Great Brand Experiences Differentiate
Going forward, the most successful brands converge the offline and online world to provide consumers with integrated and memorable experiences. By challenging the status quo, they set themselves apart from the rest.
I like what you said about storytelling and how consumers connect to them emotionally and mentally. That would make sense because we tend to see our own lives as a narrative, so we automatically are drawn to stories. If I had my own company, I would definitely want its origin story to play a big role in the company culture and message.
Interesting blog on building an unforgettable experience, keep it up. Please keep sharing.