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Plant the Seeds of Brand Growth with These Strategies

Building a brand can be downright overwhelming. Between establishing who you are, what you do, and how you do it differently, a challenge presents itself: why should your audience care? If you can excel in three key areas right off the bat, you can plant the seeds of brand growth and watch your business blossom! So what are those three key areas? Let’s take a look!

Brand Growth Starts With Trust

Trust is instrumental to brand growth. The more customers trust you, the more they’ll think of you as the go-to when they need your product or service. At the same time, how can you earn customers’ trust while you’re just starting out?

The most surefire way to build trust is to create a great product. If your customers come to trust what you have to offer, they’ll associate that trust with not just the product or service in question but your brand as a whole.

Remember, brand growth is built around relationships. Customers have to care about the message behind the brand, not just what they can find on the shelves. Be transparent with your brand values and back up your words with actions. If your brand purports to care about a social issue, show your customers you care about it–don’t tell them.

While the bottom line is most important–especially in the early stages of branding–never put a sale before a customer. Offering a “money-back guarantee” shows customers two things: you stand behind your product/service and customer satisfaction is paramount. Be a brand you would want to do business with and start building your brand growth around trust.

What Do You Do Differently?

What will really ignite brand growth is showcasing what your brand does differently. Let’s face it, if you don’t have competition, you probably don’t need much marketing to begin with–you’ve got the market cornered. For everyone else, why should a customer do business with you versus one of any number of competitors?

The answer is your point of differentiation. Whether it’s lower prices, better customer service, faster delivery, or a combination of attractive elements, show your customers what you can do that no one else can.

Your point of differentiation doesn’t have to be limited to your product or service offerings. If you can create content or value that no one else can, that can work as a point of differentiation! For example, if you sell a product that comes with a “how-to” manual or other valuable literature, customers will have more incentive to buy from you than from your competitors.

Listen to your customers. Find out what parts of the customer journey they enjoy and which parts make them apprehensive. Focus on minimizing their pain points, providing value from start to finish, and reinforcing their decisions with confidence.

Brand Growth and Content Marketing

Brand growth can only happen with increased brand awareness. In other words, your brand can only grow if more and more people become aware of not only your brand’s existence but why other people are so keen on doing business with you. What better way to foster more brand awareness than through content marketing?

If folks are liking, sharing, and engaging your content, more and more people are seeing it. Try to create content other people aren’t creating, find insights others aren’t finding, and do what others aren’t doing.

Creating valuable content doesn’t just help plant the seeds for brand growth, it’s a crucial part of search engine optimization. People can’t find your brand online if you have no content–or if your content is poorly configured for SEO purposes. The more your content helps solves problems and adds value, the more highly it’ll rank on search engine algorithms, meaning the more likely folks will find you when they search for relevant queries.

Start Planting the Seeds of Brand Growth!

You don’t build a brand overnight. The most successful brands today got where they are through an efficient approach to delivering excellence on all fronts. At the same time, there are a few common links between the most successful, renowned brands: we trust them, they do something unique, and their marketing is consistently on-point. If you can deliver on these fronts, you can start seeing more brand growth!

February 26, 2025
Marketing Doesn’t End With a Customer Purchase!

5 Post-Purchase Marketing Strategies to Create Loyal Customers

Your job as a marketer is not finished when a customer buys from your brand. In fact, some might argue your work is just starting. While acquiring a new customer is no longer five times more expensive than keeping existing customers, the importance of customer retention can’t be understated. Let’s take a look at five easy ways to create loyal, repeat customers with crafty digital marketing efforts!

Actively Post (And Encourage) Customer Reviews

How important are customer reviews?

More than one-third (38%) of customers agree they wouldn’t buy from a brand with less than 4-star aggregate reviews. But what is most important to customers? Believe it or not, it’s not functionality, quality, price, or availability. The most important part of the customer process is the overall customer experience.

That means brands with an overwhelmingly-positive, visible customer review presence will fare far better than their counterparts. People trust other people’s opinions when making decisions. When a close confidante isn’t available, we turn to online reviews.

It’s not enough to simply encourage and collect reviews. It’s imperative to both respond to them and optimize their visibility. That means responding to as many reviews as possible–both positive and negative. It also means it’s okay to post reviews on social media.

In fact, the latter is a great way to generate new leads. Show potential customers what existing customers are saying about your brand. Start conversations and encourage people to learn more, visit your site, and engage with your content.

Personalize As Much Communication as Possible

When it comes to communicating with your audience, you’re communicating with a complex, diverse group of people. That means a one-size-fits-all style of communication won’t cut it. Whenever possible, look to personalize every communication with your audience–from social media DMs to customer service chats to automated emails.

In fact, according to data from SalesForce, more than one-quarter of marketers saw an increase in revenue of over 20% from focused personalization efforts in 2020. Data from KO Marketing shows that over 70% of brands who ramped up their personalization marketing efforts over the past couple of years have seen a more than twofold increase in their ROI.

Personalization is not just knowing your customers’ names and where they live. It’s knowing their buying habits, their personality types, and so much more. The more you zoom in on each customer’s personal preferences, the more you’ll create a personalized experience.

Create an Experience to Create Loyal Customers

Digital marketing is a great way to augment sales efforts. At the same time, it shouldn’t be the sole focus of your marketing efforts. In other words, instead of creating sales content, create marketing content.

That means your marketing presence should create an immersive customer experience. Since you won’t be selling all the time, you can make good use of the rest of your content. For example, some content can entertain. Other content can engage and educate. As a whole, your content should move your customers through the sales cycle.

Create an experience and take customers behind the curtain. Show them the nuts and bolts of your operation, including the faces behind the brand. Create a wholesale customer experience with your content and they’ll keep coming back for more!

Build a Community

Here’s where social media is so valuable. You can leverage your pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc to build a passionate, loyal following of superfans!

Of course, it all starts with building a page and maintaining your content. But if you can encourage folks to follow, like, and engage, you’re building the foundations for long-term success.

The more you can get people involved with posting, responding, tagging, and otherwise engaging with your page, the more you’ll build up your community content. And when your customers see other customers happily engaging with your brand, they’ll know you’re doing something right. They’ll then want to experience it for themselves!

Appreciate (And Reinforce) Every Purchase

This one might be pretty simple, but it goes a long way. A sincere show of gratitude for every customer transaction can pay major dividends. You can also integrate your appreciation with a solicitation for feedback, comments, and advice.

“Thank you! We hope you enjoyed your experience! Please let us know how we can improve!”

Add it to a receipt, automate it in an email with every digital sale, or just post a variation on social media. Some brands even go as far as to weave their brand story into their show of thanks. For example, if a portion of proceeds go to a charity, let your customers know what their purchase is supporting.

If possible, show pictures and videos of the people directly impacted from your brand’s generosity. Some people are more than willing to spend an extra few bucks if they can see where the money is going.

Plus, it shows the human side of your brand. Supporting public causes can help people see what you stand for. That can help them better relate to your brand–building crucial loyalty.

Start Creating Loyal, Long-Term Customers Today!

The work of a marketing professional is never over. By using digital marketing content to create an immersive, personalized, appreciative, communicative brand experience, you can turn a one-time purchase into a lifetime of brand loyalty and create loyal customers!

February 1, 2025
Five Tips For Creating More Inclusive Content

As marketers, we want our content to reach as many people as possible. Of course, in order to reach diverse audiences, content has to be both engaging and inclusive. If part of your intended audience doesn’t relate to your content, they’re less likely to want to build a relationship with your brand. Here are five tips for creating more inclusive content.

Accessibility

Some folks–like the colorblind or visually impaired–can’t enjoy your content if they can’t physically engage with it. While building a branded color scheme–and including brilliant visuals–is a crucial part of digital marketing, it’s important to remember to make those visuals accessible to the visually impaired.

The best solution is to painstakingly include alt text in (almost) all your visual content. The basic rule of thumb is that if the image supplements the copy, include alt text. If the image is decorative, it doesn’t need alt text.

Avoid combinations like red/green, green/black, and green/purple. Those combinations can be difficult for people with colorblindness. In addition, avoid stereotypical color associations like blue for men and pink for women. Some colors may even have cultural connotations–so take that in mind while developing your branded color scheme!

Representation

Your customers want to be represented. Just like they want to see other people like them doing business with your brand, they want to see themselves represented in your content.

Think about your typical television commercial. The person or people represented are typically models or supermodels. Does that represent the average person? Probably not.

Instead, look to represent a diverse group of people–your intended audience. Don’t be afraid to show real people (who aren’t supermodels). Dove’s “Real Women” campaign shattered societal norms and changed the way we look at those who use our products and represent our brands.

Don’t alienate real people by suggesting that only the elite or attractive represent your brand. Dig in deep and represent folks from all backgrounds and walks of life. If possible, use real customers in your graphics–with permission, of course.

Avoid Generalizations & Biases

This one’s pretty simple. While we’re all guilty to some degree of harboring inherent biases, your branded content should be bias-free. As marketers, we need to be conscious of avoiding biases in every step of the content creation process.

Instead of designing for yourself, design for those you want to be represented. It can help to build detailed customer personas and profiles to better understand their complex needs. Once you know who your content is for, you’ll have a better idea of how to create it-and you’ll be able to create more inclusive content.

Use Common Language

The last thing you want to do is have someone skip your content because it’s too long or too complex. If you can keep it simple and use common, basic language, you’ll have a better shot of keeping more folks from start to finish.

Don’t use a five-dollar word when a nickel word will suffice. Unless your audience is exclusively highly educated, use the most simple words, bullet points, and even infographics and visuals to supplement your copy.

Tell Relatable Stories

Everyone loves a good story. In fact, people are 22 times more likely to remember a theme, statistic, or fact if it’s delivered via story. If you can tell stories with your marketing content, you’ll capture your audience’s attention more effectively than if you reproduced stats or self-promoted.

Think about each marketing message you want to deliver to your audience. How can you deliver that message while telling a story? More importantly, how can you make sure that story resonates with the folks you want to hear it?

Inclusivity = A Bigger Audience

If you can create more inclusive content, more people will relate to your brand. Look to represent your audience, keep things on common ground, and make sure everything you put online is accessible for everyone!

January 1, 2025