Brand optimization is a key part of any business that wants to become or remain an attractive choice for their potential customers. This article is about the importance of keeping your brand in line with customer expectations, collecting insights, and how to optimize for increased sales.
Ask the right questions: how to make your potential customers like your brand?
People buy from brands that they like. It is common sense, but very important to understand and accept this. If your potential customers like your brand, you will get more leads, more prospects, and the entire sales process will become significantly smoother.
It is not possible to substitute liking with reasoning. You can have the most practical solutions, offer the best value, and have the most innovative technology – your customers will not see you as an attractive option to solve their problems if they do not like how you present yourself.
It is very similar to dating: a candidate can have everything right: a good body, career, a pleasant personality with good manners. If he fails to be exciting for his target dates, women will only see him as a secondary option after the more exciting guys.
Why 78% of small businesses fail to grow their brand? What prevents startups from B2C scaling?
Branding and marketing communications are possibly the most effective tools to increase sales and revenue without further investment. To optimize your brand for more sales, the first question you need to ask is: how to make my brand more popular? How to make people like your brand more?
To answer this, you need to collect insights from your target customers. If you understand that asking your potential customers will return the most valuable feedback, that means you have already done better than 78% of small business owners.
According to a recent survey we conducted with over 2,000 small business owners and marketing managers working for SME – over 50% are guessing answers, 28% works with an external branding and marketing expert, but only 22% will take the effort to collect feedback and insights from their audience.
Making your brand and marketing more attractive to your target audience requires knowing what they expect from a company like you.
How to collect feedback from your potential customers? Know the basics.
When getting feedback from your target customers, you need to keep the following things in mind:
- You need at least 1,000 feedback to make your market research representative
- You need to be able to target your potential customers very accurately
- You have to ask the right questions to get valuable answers
At this stage, a brand audit company such as Brand Auditor can help significantly. Brand Auditor specializes in customer perception-focused market research, collecting thousands of feedbacks from narrowly targeted campaigns.
It is also possible to conduct data collection in-house, if you are familiar with fundamental data collection and surveying frameworks. Tools like SurveyMonkey are great for designing surveys that you can distribute yourself.
The most significant cost factor of brand audit is the cost of data collection. To minimize market research costs, you will need to optimize for the following:
- Cost efficient survey distriubtion
- High response rate
- Low survey abandon rate
To achieve these, the best practice is to use short-form surveys with simple yes or no questions, as well as score ratings that respondents can use to express the level of their liking or disliking.
Most market researchers fail to get the necessary quantity and quality of responses because of using too long surveys, and asking questions that are difficult to answer. Surveys that can be completed in 30 seconds are having an excellent completion rate, so it is best to design accordingly.
Understand your brand feedback data: How to understand your market research insights?
Once your market research data is in, it is time to move on to organize all that information into actionable insights. Once again, brand audit specific solutions like Brand Auditor are a great help in this, as their system automatically organizes all feedback data into insightful reports.
Ideally, your brand audit report should focus on the following insights:
- What potential customers like about your brand?
- What potential customers dislike about your brand?
- Does your brand look better compared to competing brands?
- Would customers buy from you? Why or why not?
This structure can be replicated to analyze various aspects of your brand, such as:
- Brand identity
- Perceived benefits associated with your company and products
- Marketing communications
- Pricing and value related customer perceptions
- Website user experience
- Perceived credibility
- … and a lot more
The point of organizing your market research data into brand audit insights is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your company, benchmarked against your competitors or similar companes that you want to over perform.
When reading the results of this analysis, marketers tend to become defensive and protective about their work. Revealing poor performance and shortcomings is never a pleasant experience, but accepting the issue is the first step of solving it. Making meaningful improvements can be only done by addressing significant issues, so do not be afraid to reveal harsh thruths about how how people think about your company.