Your branding is most powerful when it connects with your audience on an emotional level, which is why it is fundamental to know your audience if you are to create a powerful brand.
Unfortunately, too many companies still make the mistake of crafting their branding around themselves or their perception of their audience, rather than what their audience actually wants to see.
Naturally, this then leads to a disconnect in their communication with their audience and an overall lack of engagement with their brand.
This is why it’s so important to have a clear understanding of who your audience is and what they want from you to help drive your branding decisions.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the importance of knowing your audience, how to find the right balance with your branding, as well as present you with a checklist to help determine whether your branding could do with a facelift to help increase audience engagement.
Understanding Your Audience Is Not Only Marketing 101 – It’s Business 101.
While it’s only natural to want to be proud of your branding, the true value that great branding offers your business is when it speaks directly to your ideal audience and positions you as desirable and the best solution to their problem.
That’s why, when developing your branding, it’s important to know your audience. We begin this by defining who your customer is, what their biggest challenge is, and how you solve that challenge and provide them with genuine value.
It’s these core aspects – identity, need and value – that must be reflected in your brand design, as well as the tone of voice that your brand adopts across all communication channels and interactions with your audience.
The Biggest Challenge, However, Is That Many Businesses Assume They Know Their Audience.
It’s not that these businesses haven’t tried to understand their audience, or that they’re completely unaware of the importance of doing so – it’s that they simply assume they know what their audience wants or needs without ever validating these assumptions.
However, it’s important to resist this urge to present your brand and your business the way that you want or think it should be, and instead take the time to determine what your customers actually want.
This is where great branding comes in.
A great brand is based on a strong foundation of customer research to gain key insights and to know your audience, including their buying behaviours and what drives their purchasing decisions.
By taking the time to complete this research, your business has the huge advantage of knowing exactly who you’re talking to with your branding at all times.
To learn more about the power of knowing your audience to build brand trust, check out these Demand Drivers podcasts:
- Episode 2: Putting Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes – Would You Choose You?
- Episode 6: Driving Demand Through Customer Targeting and Segmentation
- The Future of Audience Targeting for Marketing – Know Your Audience
Of Course, It’s Not ALL About Your Customers. It’s About Finding The Right Balance.
Consider the relationship between your customers and your business as a Venn diagram. On the left, you’ve got your customers, and on the right, you’ve got your business.
If your branding is positioned too far to the right, you’re essentially telling your audience that it’s my way or the highway. Eventually, your audience will get frustrated and stop listening altogether.
On the other hand, if your branding is positioned too far to the left of the Venn diagram, you’re essentially just blindly following your customers without considering your own goals and ambitions.
That’s not the answer either.
Rather, the best place to be is right in the middle. The place where you have a clear understanding of your audience and can effectively communicate with them on an emotional level – all without losing your brand identity.
This Checklist Will Help Your Brand Determine How Well You Know Your Audience.
Take a few moments right now to consider your answers to the following questions:
- Does our brand have a comprehensive set of customer personas? If so, when was the last time we reviewed these personas?
- Do the colours and fonts we use in our branding talk to the right people?
- Does our website and social media reflect the audience we’re trying to reach?
- As a guardian of our brand, am I fully immersed in understanding who our audience is? Or am I too caught up in our own brand’s reflection?
- Are we constantly conducting our marketing the way that we want to market our business, rather than marketing the way our customer personas would like us to?
- Be honest with yourself when answering these questions.
In doing so, you can start to gauge where your brand stands when it comes to understanding your audience, and begin taking the necessary steps to improve that understanding so you can better communicate and engage with your customers.
So, How Well Does Your Professional Services Brand Know Your Audience?
At Font & Swatch, we work to develop your brand identity based on a foundation of research and key insights related to your audience demographics, buying behaviours and value drivers. From there, we conceptualise a brand that will earn results you can be truly proud of.
Font & Swatch Starts By Understanding Your Audience To Develop A Successful Brand For You
To achieve business success today and tomorrow, you need a reliable brand marketing partner that you can trust, with the expertise you can depend on.
If you like what you see, give us a call, send us an email, follow us on our socials or come and see us.
An initial discussion is exactly what you need to set you on the course to success:
