Where Does Brand Building Figure in Marketers’ Priority List?
Unlike their traditional counterparts, the one thing that’s notable about today’s social-savvy brands is that they’re more sensitive to consumer needs. Consumers today place great emphasis on qualities like trust and transparency, while pricing is becoming less important. According to the 2012 CMO survey:
Given the importance of brand value in consumer minds, how are marketers responding to this? The study shows that spending on overall brand building is expected to grow 26.3% over the next 12 months.
The Role of Social Media in Brand Building
The survey also highlights that half the B2C marketers weren’t sure on how to leverage social media for brand building. Whether a B2B or a B2C company, there isn’t one single magical formula for social brand building.
Getting Started
- Assemble Your Social Tool Kit
While Twitter or Pinterest could be popular channels, they may not be suited for all your brand building needs. If you have a lot of video content, a YouTube brand channel may be better. Or if you have a lot of active fans on Facebook, focusing efforts and budgets there on a long-term strategy might be a better bet.
Select the Right Channels
- Select platforms that add maximum value to your brand.
- Twitter, for instance, is a great tool for identifying the influencers and leveraging them to promote/build your brand.
- If informal is your style, then Facebook is recommended.
- An accurate approach would be to determine where your target audience is and focus your brand building efforts there. To do this, we suggest using social media monitoring tools like Thismoment’s Brand Monitor.
Along with building brands, marketers need to also build relationships.
- Establish Emotional Connections: Consumers associate every brand with a specific emotion. Your brand building greatly depends on what emotion you want your brand to be associated with. Start with trust. Relationships are based on trust, which is a combination of ‘reliability’ and ‘delight’. Do your social messages showcase your brand as ‘reliable’? Are consumers ‘happy’ with your product? Working on these parameters is a great way to emotionally connect with consumers and invoke a feeling of trust towards your brand.
- Don’t Talk ‘at’ Consumers, Have Conversations: Consumers expect more than creative campaigns from your brand.
- They want to be heard, to have conversations with you.
- Talk to consumers on social media. Engage with them.
Ford’s Timeline is a great example of how marketers can build their brand(s) in the social space. The company engages with consumers by conversing with them, thus developing and sustaining a trust-based brand-consumer relationship. Ford’s brand building strategy is centered on the “It’s not about me, let’s talk about you” approach.
Brand building greatly depends on creating content that adds value to your brand. How can marketers create content that’s different, yet strengthens their brands?
- Develop a Consistent Brand Voice: Your social content should reflect your brand personality consistently across all channels. Consumers look for consistency in communication. The Garnier Canada YouTube and Facebook channels (created using Thismoment’s DEC) showcase a uniform brand personality that’s consistent across both channels.
- Build Awareness: Creating awareness through social messages is a lot more important than designing content that’s high on the sales talk. P&G’s ‘Thank You Mom’ campaign (powered by Thismoment’s DEC) does not promote the company’s products. Yet, the recall rates of such campaigns are much higher because they feature content that builds brand awareness.
In the Social Age, What’s the Role of Traditional Media in Brand Building?
Although social is direction where brands are headed, this does not mean the end of traditional channels. Billboards, print and other forms of traditional marketing are and will continue to thrive, but the difference now is that offline campaigns have a strong connection to online components. For building a solid brand, the key is to integrate the two successfully. How can marketers do this? By simply thinking of social media as an extension of your overall marketing strategy.
- Shama Ahmed
Thismoment
