Six Keys to an Effective Brand — Part 2: Be Appropriate
Learn everything you can about your audience to create an unforgettable brand.
The first of six key ingredients used to craft an awesome brand.
Read the series Introduction.
I learned some alarming news six months into my first Creative Director role.
Our homepage received thousands of visitors a day, but they weren’t converting into customers fast enough. Nothing seemed to work, and the situation was becoming desperate.
I pulled my team together to brainstorm solutions. We tossed around ideas we thought might work, what we might find interesting. We looked at what other sites were doing, both within and outside of our industry.
Nothing felt right.
After a while of going in circles, a key thought finally occurred:
What if we did some research and found out more about our audience? Maybe that would give us some ideas?
Over a series of meetings, we learned that certain product features left our prospects absolutely floored when they first experienced them.
Now we had our idea — and went to work on the homepage. We created a video that captured those key moments of interaction our audience responded well to, and put it at the top of the page, alongside an unambiguous message — what had been difficult and painful was now magically simple.
We launched the page, held our breath, and were delighted to find that people got it. They understood how their pain could be instantly resolved and saw the tremendous value in our product.
This breakthrough led to a massive increase in new customers and many millions of dollars in new revenue. It was a huge success.
Know your audience
We were able to create an appropriate brand experience because we came to understand what our audiences needed.
Seek to understand what your audience responds to, what makes them tick. Find out everything you can about them:
- Where they live
- How old they are
- What they watch or read
- The pain your product truly solves
- Their education level
- What motivates them
- How technical they are
- What makes a good day great
- Other products they love
Every signal can provide key insights.
Research everywhere. LinkedIn. Paid research. Focus groups. Speak with folks on your team who engage with them often. Watch and listen carefully at trade shows.
Test ideas and hypotheses. Digital display ads are quick to produce and easy to measure. They allow you to test messaging and visuals. Start small to gain insights. Build on those.
Don’t give up when you fail — failures are some of the most valuable insights and lead to incredible breakthroughs.
Services like usertesting.com offer quick, inexpensive ways to reach your target to test anything from product mockups to TV commercial variants.
Get scrappy. Use your imagination. Be inquisitive. Stay curious. Uncover absolutely everything about who they are and what they respond to.
And don’t forget that audiences change over time. Keep at it, measure, and learn.
Put it to use
Everything you learn should be applied to your brand platform.
Capture your insights in an organized way. Look at the data and draw conclusions. Make your findings available to everyone.
Use your insights to make careful brand choices. An illustration style that will reach your audience. What colors they’ll most likely find appealing. Messages that will land. Marketing programs that will light up. Video content they’ll love. A tone of voice they can relate to.
Allow every insight you gain to guide what your brand looks like, feels like, how it sounds.
Collect enough findings to put a stake in the ground, but don’t stop learning. Gather insights until you need to perform an overhaul, or iterate over time — whatever is manageable and will work for you. Learn more, gain more insights, and revisit.
Always move forward, evolving as your audience does.
Create a brand they love
Behaving appropriately as a brand means knowing who your audience is, what they need, what they prefer, what they respond to— and creating an expression that takes all these things into account.
Learning as much as you can about your target audience will allow you to craft a brand that they will flock to. A magnetic brand that draws them in.
Know your audience, craft a brand they can relate to, and you will earn their trust, their business, and their loyalty. They’ll love your brand.
