How do you create a customer experience aligned with your brand?
How can you communicate your brand mission, vision, and values through the customer’s experience?
In this episode, Jessica Scanlon and Kevin Ring discuss the customer experience aspect of a company’s brand. Customer experience is the holistic experience customers feel and encounter with your brand, product, or service.
As a business grows, the owner and core team need to entrust the customer experience with more people. That’s why it’s important to have a framework built around the customer experience so it can be protected, no matter who the customer is interacting with.
Customer experience can include:
- Logo
- Website
- Color palette
- Business materials
- Customer gifts
- Messaging
- Product/service delivery
- What customers say when talking about the brand
How to Create a Customer Experience Aligned with Your Brand
The brand identity informs the customer experience. Take us for example: Hot Dog Marketing has a fun name, website, colors, etc. So, clients expect some fun interactions when they sign on with us. And that’s exactly what they get!
Identifying your particular brand elements takes a mix of organic and constructed components. You’ll want to tie in your brand’s mission, vision, and values, as well as the value proposition you offer customers.
Messaging Strategy and Visual Brand Strategy
After deciding who your brand is, you can then put the words in place that communicate that. That’s where having a messaging strategy comes into play. Messaging strategy includes things like:
- Conveying your value proposition
- Qualifying your audience
- Using language your audience connects with
- Reiterating the words in your brand promise
- Using testimonials to back up your claims
Visual brand strategy typically comes after messaging because the words used in your messaging strategy will give your designer direction. In addition to aligning with your brand identity, the visuals need to be easy enough to comprehend yet exciting enough to hold someone’s attention and be memorable.
How does your competition’s visual branding look? Your visual branding should be different, but at least on par with the other players. If your brand is too generic, it won’t stand out among the competition and your audience won’t remember it when they are finally ready to purchase. However, if it isn’t as sophisticated or professionally designed, you run the risk of looking amateur and risky.
Bottom Line: When Your Marketing, Messaging, and Visual Brand Work Together, Your Customers Become Better Customers
Using your messaging and visual branding as the foundation of your customer experience will inform your customers on what to expect when working with your company. Alignment through the entire journey creates a seamless customer experience.
It’s no secret that retaining customers is much less expensive than acquiring new customers. Great marketing helps to retain customers and make them more valuable to your company. Keeping your customers engaged before and after the sale will have them returning to your company year after year.
Did you miss the other two parts in this series? Check out What is a Brand? Values, Mission, and Purpose and What is a Brand? Part 2: Value Proposition.
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Are you ready to get strategic marketing the helps your business reach its goals? Don’t wait, contact Hot Dog Marketing to get started.
Amanda built her first WordPress site in 2011 and has since been refining her skill-set in CMS development. Her experiences as a freelance professional and developing for accessibility, cross-browser and device compatibility, and web performance has led her to Hot Dog Marketing. She builds websites for small – medium sized businesses in Round Rock, Austin, surrounding areas, and beyond.