Do you find that your marketing and online marketing efforts are consistently falling flat with your audience? Perhaps your targeting is not tight enough and you are trying to be all things to all men? As a Glasgow-based removals company, we know from experience the importance of targeting and finding ‘the right space’ to inhabit!
A lovable brand
Brand building is absolutely vital in today’s competitive landscape, and I’d say the only way to really connect with your target users and leave a lasting impression is by meeting their needs and adding real value. I admit that ‘adding value’ can sound like a fairly unspecific term, but that’s because what generates value can vary so much between industries. In essence it means being better than the norm; distinguishing yourself from competitors by having a significantly better offering in some way. Here, however, comes the rub: it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to have distinguished at everything you do.
Wanting a relationship
The way to find your way into the hearts of your audience is to narrow that audience. Understand who are your most valuable customers (it could be most profitable, or most loyal) and try to understand what specific concerns and needs they have in their lives. You should be able to identify distinct groups and shared demographics across your target customers, and use this to understand their needs. Once you’ve mapped this out and understand your key demographics, you can work on providing what they, and just they, want from a relationship. This is the key: companies generate customers, whereas brands generate relationships – it’s relationships that will lead to the long-term success you’re likely seeking.
How do you identify where you can ‘add value’? How do you spot opportunities for growing interest and loyalty? The starting point is always to really get to know your audience. Question them, meet them, profile them and build personas around them. Only then can you understand desires and pain points in their lives, and see if you can help them out. The important thing to note is that you absolutely shouldn’t just consider their interactions with your service: instead think about their wider concerns and interests.
Meeting the family
OK, perhaps you need an example. As a removals and storage company we work with a very transient audience: people often need your services when they move and then have absolutely no interest in you afterwards. This situation makes it very difficult to build a lasting brand impression. While we have gained a fantastic reputation for the quality of our service, which helps to increase our stature with word of mouth, this is only half the job done.
We know that the audience we serve best are larger households. Larger households generally mean larger families and certain age-groups and finances. As such we look to deliver lasting value to family groups, producing high-quality content on our blog that provides advice and entertainment to parents. You can then push this content, in our case like ‘Tree houses you wish you could build for your kids‘ and ‘Cardboard box Halloween costumes for kids‘, through places like social media and use the paid promotion options on Facebook and the like to highlight this content to your specific target demographic. You can combine this with local offline efforts, such as sponsoring local kids sports teams like us, to really build your presence in the right crowds and move them past just liking you to really valuing your input and loving you as a brand.
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