How a brand decides to communicate its values and messages to its audience can have an enormous impact on the business, and shape its relationship with its customers, employees, and the wider world. With constant growth and changes across how both brands and the public use social media, having a clear and well-thought-out brand communication strategy should be an integral part of any marketing campaign.
Here are some helpful ways that you can start to reconsider and evaluate your brand communication strategy, in order to get the most from it.
Listen to your employees first
Your employees are on the front line of all customer engagement and interactions, so their experiences will reveal a lot about how well your strategy is performing. It’s important for businesses to listen to these people and take their feedback seriously, as they may be able to highlight shifts and trends as they emerge; helping you to react and adapt quickly and easily.
Carrying out employee survey questions is just one of the ways that you can work to get more input about what your employees encounter. Ensuring that you have clear channels of communication and opportunities for people to give feedback or flag up issues will also help. Most of all, once you do have this information, it must then be listened to and acted upon in a timely way, in order to reap the benefits of it.
Understand your brand voice
Before you set about changing or adapting your communication strategy, your next step should be to evaluate your brand voice. This means working out and researching who your buyers are and what they are looking for. Developing a buyer persona can be a helpful way of doing this, as this can help you to identify who your ideal customers are, what they are looking for, and how they live their lives or make decisions.
By combining this insight with research into your brand’s own unique selling points, you can then start to develop a clear brand personality and voice, which will guide your strategic plans as you go forward.
Be relevant and honest
While creating content is always going to be an essential part of any brand communication strategy, in order for it to be useful and productive, it should be relevant and trustworthy. Irrelevant material can soon get lost in a sea of busy competitors, while dishonest and unreliable information can have far-reaching consequences for your brand, negatively impacting its reputation. It can take a long time to rebuild a tarnished reputation, as well as cost a lot in resources, so it’s best to avoid a hit here if possible.
Being open and transparent about what and how you choose to communicate does not only create a stronger bond of trust—it can also help to develop awareness of your brand in a wider sense, by enabling customers to understand clearly how you operate, and know what to expect from you and your services.
