In a digital age, it’s easy to feel untethered. When so many different platforms, applications, tools, and touchpoints are coming at you, brands often experience a sensation of fragmentation and disarray.
Unfortunately, many customers feel this too. If you seek to create more consistency and continuity in the marketplace, you might start by designing a purpose-driven and compelling digital brand experience that will resonate with your ideal clients.
What is a Digital Brand Experience?
Every company has a digital brand experience – including yours, whether you realize it or not.
As Salsify puts it, “A digital brand experience is what potential customers see, think, hear, and feel about a brand’s online presence. It is the impression people have of your company based on past images, experiences, memories, and stories from your market.”
Although you have a brand experience currently, it’s not fixed by any means. Whether you intend it or not your brand experience evolves constantly; with a little direction, you can improve it. The sooner you act, the better.
How to Upgrade Your Digital Brand Experience
Upgrading a digital brand experience means enhancing it in such a way that it’s: (a) more reflective of your brand’s core identity and mission; and (b) more engaging and compelling to your target audience. Here are some tips to help you do that.
- Create Brand Guidelines
Consistency is a key ingredient for a compelling digital brand experience. You can’t achieve consistency if your team isn’t clear about what your brand represents.
So before doing anything else, go through the process of creating and documenting specific brand guidelines. They should include such elements as purpose, vision, mission, values, messaging principles, and visual guidelines (colors, fonts, logos, etc.).
A solid array of brand guidelines will give you greater quality control, increased customer comprehension, and better brand recognition – all of which feed directly into a superior digital brand experience.
- Start With Your Website
Your digital brand experience consists of every possible digital touchpoint. That may well include email, social media, website content, and advertising. Before you turn to all those other items, should get your website straightened out first.
Your website is your digital “home base.” If you’re going to spend time and resources on any facet of your brand, you should make your website the number-one priority. For the best results, hire a custom website developer to do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to do it yourself.
- Prioritize Engagement
Many brands make the mistake of assuming they can pump out a steady flow of content, pay for ad placement on as many different social networking platforms as they can find, and call it a day. But brand experience centers far more on engagement than mere visibility.
You should always be watching for opportunities to engage with your audience. Treat social media as a two-way street. Employ content to enter and participate in conversations with your readers, not just talk “at them.”
- Emphasize Experience Over Sales
Most firms prioritize sales. Although this makes sense – making a sale is obviously the end goal – you can’t make that the be-all and end-all of everything you do.
“What happens before, during and after the sale are the most memorable parts of the purchasing experience for a customer,” entrepreneur Zeynep Lokmanoglu explains. “This is also described as the three-stage model of service consumption: pre-purchase, service encounter and post-service stage.”
Customers might or might not remember the products they purchase, but they’re much less likely to forget the experience you provided during the process. If you emphasize the three stages of service consumption, guiding your brand experience becomes a much more practical activity.
- Listen and Adapt
Finally, the brand experience is not static. As previously mentioned, your brand’s digital experience evolves constantly. The best way to stay on top of this transformation is to gather feedback, listen to what people say about your brand and sales process, and adapt in ways that will ensure your brand improves.
Not all feedback is worth implementing, of course, but if you monitor the trends, you’ll get the picture. When you keep hearing the same things over and over, there’s likely to be some substance to what people are telling you.
Take Your Brand Seriously
You can’t take a shotgun approach to branding and expect to hit the target with any level of consistency. The trick is to improve your focus so you can engage your customers with greater precision and clarity.
By upgrading your digital brand experience, you can reach more people with the right messaging – the kind that draws them to your brand and cultivates a deep and lasting sense of loyalty.
Do you have any questions about this article? Click here to contact us today.
Leave a Reply