Brand Experience Basics and Tips

With consumers becoming a lot more comfortable with digital purchases, online sales have reached an all-time high. According to research, during last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, consumers collectively spent $14 billion online. While businesses have been shifting toward offering online purchasing benefits to consumers, they’ve also been facing certain issues, such as crowded markets, which make the competition very steep.

This has resulted in a struggle in the field of brand experience, which means companies also have to provide their consumers with positive brand experiences to create positive impressions and drive more sales.

Brand experience is the long-lasting impression that consumers have of a brand; an impression that includes their perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and reactions to a company’s business operations. This is similar to user experience, but it captures the broader perception of a brand. Meanwhile, user experience comes from the interactions that consumers have with a company’s social media profiles and website.

Personalization

Although generic and all-encompassing marketing campaigns can help companies produce positive results, with the help of personalization, businesses can encourage consumers to really connect with a brand. This can be achieved when companies use engagement data, social media interactions, and data that the users provide themselves. All of that information can be turned into efforts that create more personalized brand experiences for consumers. These types of personalization efforts can help businesses create stronger connections between the needs of their consumers and their own solutions.

Prioritization

It’s not possible to create brand experiences that are going to connect with every single consumer available. Doing that can actually undermine efforts to create brand experiences. It’s best to select a specific metric, such as repeat purchases from consumers or positive mentions on social media, and prioritize those metrics in an effort to improve brand experiences.

Perception

One of the key elements of a given brand’s experience is customer perception. That includes visual, audio, as well as any tactical interactions that companies provide to consumers, and that allow those buyers to connect to a company’s promotional campaigns through a specific sense. It’s similar to the way a particular smell can bring back past memories. Companies that are successfully able to appeal to the human senses with their marketing efforts can create deeper connections with their consumers, and drive more sales.

Participation

It’s a lot more likely that consumers are going to be walking away from an interaction with a business with a positive experience if they’re able to participate in that experience instead of simply watching it happen. Participation can include allowing consumers to interact in branded online forums or submitting their own suggestions, or having them interact with a product to provide feedback for it.