Repositioning Your Brand to Increase Its Value
Why are customers willing to pay more for some products, than others? Why are some brands able to generate higher profits than others, even within the same industry?
The answer lies not in marketing or advertising strategies, and many times not even product quality but rather in brand positioning.
Brand positioning will ensure you attract not just more customers, but more of the right customers.
Customers who have an affinity for your brand and are willing to pay more.
Brand positioning ensures you increase profitability, while increasing revenue.
Positioning a brand effectively requires differentiation.
Too often, marketers focus on explaining why a product or brand is great, when in reality, customers no longer believe, much less listen, to marketing messages.
Advertising campaigns are increasingly less effective, not because of the quality of the campaigns but rather buyer apathy. Buyers don’t care what brands say…they want to know why your brand is different, as well as how your product will make their lives better. It’s about them.
Look at your website today and ask yourself these three questions
- What percent of your site is about your product/service?
- What percent is about the benefits of your product/service to customers?
- What percent of your site includes customer testimonies and case studies?
The best way to differentiate a brand is to tell stories about how customers are using your product today.
A good example of a company that does this very well is Airbnb. They use their customer’s experiences to represent their brand and tell their companies story. Not only do they have a community forum on their website for hosts to share their experiences and connect but they also are consistently showcasing the experiences of the guests as they stay all across the world.
The second best way to differentiation your brand is to tell stories about your team and culture, and place these stories on your social media pages.
Buyers don’t buy from social media, but rather use your social platforms to get a “peak” into who you are.
Telling a differentiated brand story is more than just being a thought leader. The primary story you want to tell is how the brand helps customers solve problems, or how the product adds value to the buyer.
A company that does a great job at sharing their story both through customer experiences and through their company culture is CustomInk. Their products bring many companies, organizations, and even families together to celebrate events of all kinds.
Finally, engage your customers, staff, and partners in sharing stories about your brand.
Find ways to create easy to share content that your team can be proud to share. Some brands use PR effectively to accomplish this, and that is extremely effective.
Another way to achieve this is through story-telling mediums such as YouTube, Podcast and Earned Media (PR).
According to many recent studies, 68% of customers prefer to learn about a new product or service through short videos. Additionally, 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video and 72% of businesses have seen a higher conversion rate with the use of video.
Statistics support the use of visual storytelling mediums, in particular, YouTube, which has an easy to implement platform for effective storytelling for brand differentiation.
A great example of this type of differentiation is in Random Acts of Bo.