Engage Externally When Branding Your Product

Engage Externally When Branding Your Product!
Effectively Communicating Your Product Value to a New Generation

“It is not the employer who pays the wages – employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.” –Henry Ford

Consumers want engaging encounters and companies want to find ways to captivate product consumers. Engrossing customers in your marketing message could make the typical customer experience anything but. To do this your products have to excite your customers. No longer will the one-sided marketing conversation with customers on the “whats” of your products be enough. Customer interactions must advance to the next level, requiring a connection with customers (see Young Professionals – New Employees, Same Problems). Building off of traditional marketing methods, a new form of marketing is required to begin engaging an evolving market. This new counterculture market wants information, connections, customized/personalized experiences and involvement. This market repays this connection with deep loyalty and consumer insight.

How do you engage your customers, convey your product message and market effectively to key customers now?

Understand Your Audience

Research your target market on how purchases happen, how research is done, how the customer interacts with your product and any touch points, what customers are looking in their customer experience and with your product, and how the customer operates. Your company may be focused on features and benefits, but your consumers may just want a basic service – just take a look at the differences between Gillette and DollarShaveClub.com.

Understanding the audience also includes getting into the mindset of your customer: when engaging with your products/services, when make a purchase, what the end goal is for that purchase, what attributes qualify during a purchase and why they purchase your product/service. Any time you engage your customers, you must have a specific goal in mind to drive to, whether it be sales, research and development, continuous improvement, loyalty, competitive analysis or otherwise. This interaction with customers impacts all areas of the business and blends the communication which was previously siloed in different division of the company.

Create Personal Connections – Become Relatable

Create a forum where customers have the opportunity to offer feedback, have open conversations, ask questions, and learn about your products – this will help improve your brand, products, public relations, and services. Treating customers as knowledge sources also creates opportunities for research and development or continuous improvement to your products, services, and message. As goes with any interaction, the more organic, unprompted and personal the communication seems, the more engaging your brand will be. Brands must embrace an interactive exchange in the form of “story-doing”, giving consumers the opportunity to co-design products, interactions and messages to the “why” of your product – not just the “what”.

Interaction

Engagement starts with interactions. This interaction is not a string of one-off events, but an ongoing dialog. Similarly, this interaction isn’t about just selling your product, but to create a passionate community around your product or service. It means taking the component you produce and interactively show the applications it goes into, how it works, and what it can control. It means interactively displaying the explosion-proof testing that is done to qualify the material. It means sharing the information that you learned and interesting things that you absorbed to tell a story to customers. This engagement idea entertains and educates – bringing the experience to a whole new level. And this experience helps customer buy as customers who engage with brands online report spending 20-40% more on that brand. Engagement and the customer experience is the battleground of today. Utilize technology to tell a story to customers, enabling them to learn and quickly retain your message.

Create Imagery

Due to the sheer amount of inputs, media sources and stimuli customers intake, you can separate yourself from your competition and stand out amongst the noise by creating videos, infographics, pictures and other creative visual stimulants. For maximum engagement the marketed imagery must be inspired by and align to your consumers to create the most effective messaging. This could be a simple infographic on how your product addresses a market with some interesting statistics or a simple picture of how your product came to be.

Stay Fluid and Test the Market Constantly

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” –Charles Darwin

Consumers are looking for brands and products that reflect what they value and how they customize that solution for a need. Diversify from mission-driven activities and engage new audiences with new methods. Also, expert or celebrity endorsements add value and credibility to products. Per the Pew Research Internet Project, 50% of online consumers would follow recommendations for products or services. As the newer generations seek input from peers and experts, any feedback and endorsement outside of the company will command more attention.

Using small bets, take risks on novel ideas, products, and services. Determine market acceptance can be determined by staying social and connected. Web-intelligent business plans effectively and efficiently engage audiences where personal interactions are not feasible. Per my previous post (see Every Company Should Have a Blog!), you can see why investing in engagement is important, not only to build brand loyalty, but to actually build sales. This business plan would also ensure that there are reviews, information, and research available to consumer to suffice a background on your products or services. Backing up your digital strategy are two facts from MacWorld: 75% of consumers are more likely to buy a brand they saw online and 58% of consumers are more likely to buy the brand they follow online. Engage in ways which would make them want to share – interacting facts, pictures, inspiration, technologies and new discoveries to keep them on edge and participate in your brands.

Essentially, to engage your customers is to not just market your products to them, but with them.  John Russell, VP of Harley-Davidson stated, “The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

-thePonderingNick