Brand Equity Part 2: Seven Ways to Build Brand Equity

Last week we talked about what brand equity is and why it’s critical for ultimate business success. Among other benefits, it increases customer awareness, heightens perceived value, generates positive associations, creates brand loyalty and increase return on investment. Probably most importantly, strong brand equity enables your clients to charge a premium to willing customers.

So this week, we move on from defining brand equity and its benefits to talking about how to build brand equity.

1. Good Products and Services

If you want to create strong brand equity for a client, you need to start with a quality product or service.  If their products break easily or are unreliable or if their services don’t deliver, there is only so much you can do. Of course, if you do have a good product or service and build brand equity, then people will value your client’s brand much more than a lesser known brand of similar quality. And that means sales.

2. Product and Service Consistency

It’s not enough to just have a good product or service. The product or service must be consistent and hit it out of the park every time. People will come to expect that level of quality when they do business with your client. That builds loyalty and inspires glowing referrals.

3. Clear Marketing Message

Developing Your Message

If you don’t know who your client is, and if you can’t describe the company in a few well-chosen words, how do you expect the customers to remember the business?

Clear messaging to your client’s customers starts with focused internal positioning. What is your client’s niche in the market? What are their goals? What is themission? Why does the business exist? What sets the business apart from the competition? Are the products more reliable than others on the market? More luxurious? Cheaper while still good quality?

If you can clarify your client’s positioning internally, you are ready to formulate their messaging. Positioning is internal, but messaging is external – what you communicate to your customers and the world. What do they offer their customers? What are the benefits of their products and services? What problems do they solve? Why will doing business with your client make their customers’ lives better than buying elsewhere?

Testing Your Client’s Message Before Launching Marketing Campaigns

Of course, before you launch all your marketing campaigns, you will want to test your messages to find out what is most important to your client’s ideal customers. You can do this through running small ad digital ad campaigns to see what messaging resonates with your client’s customers. You can also take surveys on social media. Basically, you need to collect data and analyze everything you do to tweak your marketing and build brand equity.

Use Multiple Marketing Channels

Of course, marketing to a targeted market with a focused message through multiple channels helps build brand equity. Advertising is great for building brand awareness. Just be true to the brand in your marketing.

4. Presenting Your Company Image Consistently

It’s not only your client’s products and services that should be consistent. The messaging and the look and feel should also be consistent. If a customer sees an ad or a communication from your client, they should be able to recognize the brand before they even read the text.

5. Customers First

It doesn’t matter how great your client’s products and services are if a customer has a bad experience before, during or after the sale. You must always be striving to give customers a wonderful experience at every touch point. This doesn’t happen. It demands strategy from how customers are greeted to having chatbots available on the website 24/7 to answer questions and take orders. Your clients need a cohesive plan to treat their customers like VIPs at every step of the customer journey. Interacting with customers on social media and responding to customer reviews are other ways to improve their experience.

6. Positive Associations

Do what you can to associate your client’s company with positive feelings. For example, if your client has a local B2B business, they might hold a theater event and invite their best customers. If their audience is family-driven, they might hold a contest for all summer passes to a local amusement park. Everything from advertising images to social media should reflect the values the company wants to project.

To create positive associations, Particularly for B2C (though not exclusively), go for emotional pull in advertising rather than coldly listing a lot of specifications. Features tell, benefits sell.

7. Valued, Targeted Content

Today, most customers expect websites to offer a great deal of information and resources. Don’t just throw up word salad with keywords mixed in. Encourage your clients to invest in quality content that brings their customers to their site again and again and keeps them there. That means content that helps them solve problems, entertains or otherwise adds value, not a constant barrage of sales language.

One type of content that helps sell but clients still value are success stories. How has your client’s business helped individual customers? People love a good story, and stories about how your clients’ products and services help their individual customers in various ways helps bring home the message.

Get Help Building Brand Equity for Your Marketing Agency Clients

If you want to help your clients build brand equity, you need a plan. This doesn’t happen overnight but there is little that is more valuable to a business than a strong brand. When your client’s company has strong brand equity, it is recognized. They can demand higher prices and spend less on marketing. Because their audience trusts them, they can more successfully expand into other areas.

Contact Umbrella for a free consultation at (866) 760-2638 to discuss building strong brand equity for your clients.