How to use your brand to capture your audience’s attention

WILL YOU MARRY ME?

It never fails to amaze me how the tiniest phrase can have such incredible effects. How what some may see as something insignificant, others may take to Twitter with pitchforks flying high.

At the end of the day, it largely depends on what resonates with who — and at the heart of that thought, one simple word. Engagement.

Did the title above manage to garner your interest and engage you, as an audience? Were you inclined to scroll down just that tiny bit further to see what the heck this guy is talking about?

If that is the case, I have been successful in my endeavor to pique your curiosity, to bring you in a little closer to my thoughts and by extension the point or image I’m trying to get across.

In that case I have understood my audience well enough to form this amalgam of both topic interest & genuine interest, and at this point may have even managed to sneak in some carefully crafted product placements now that we’ve moved closer to establishing rapport with one another.

And hey, maybe I didn’t. That’s fine too. Marketing is all about trial and error. You see what works – you see what doesn’t. You won’t get anywhere by always playing it too safe, or conversely, being overly risky. I chose to take that risk, as I choose to look at the results of that action.

Create, Target, Risk, Examine.

This is a key stepping stone to finding your voice within the audience you’re building. Your products & content are an extension of you. Of your brand.

This can be applied to everything from website content to your products — and in terms of products, a little rapport with your audience can go a long way, allowing you to start creating specific customer personas tailored to different sub-categories of your target audience.

This meticulousness in your research phase will net you information such as:
- Location
- Gender
- Age
- Interests

...and a lot more based on your acquisition strategy.

Most importantly, it’s integral to find your audience before you can start tailoring your website content or product descriptions to match their personas and maximise interest, engagement, and I guess you could call it a ‘personal connection’.

A MENTAL IMAGE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

Finding your target audience and subsequently building you customer personas is arguably the most important part of this whole process. However, nurturing this newly developed foundation is a different story entirely.

Learn to treat all of your content in the same way you would any blog post, or twitter blurb. Insert yourself – your brand – into all the nooks and crannies of your blogs, product descriptions, bios, and start building the image you would like to exude.

Block-by-block, post-by-post, all of this starts to add up, eventually coming together to form this image of your product, brand, of you, that your audience can resonate with.

This content strategy is always a long-term prospect.

The initial content creation push is always the most common roadblock people face when it comes to the consistency that is required in order to brand themselves successfully. However, if you push through that initial slump and get your second wind, you’ll look back and understand how necessary it was to be consistent with both tone and frequency.

Speaking of tone, when building your customer personas, it’s important to look at their buying motivations and issues. By using this ‘flavour text’, you can appeal to the right subcategory of your audience.

Let’s take a pair of black, leather gloves for example. Rather than listing them as ‘black leather gloves’, you could list them as ‘Noir Deerskin, Thick-Leather gloves’. Of course, you should base these titles & descriptions on your prior research. Overall, using a combination of ‘intrigue’ & buyer ‘motivations’ or ‘concerns’ to paint a product image can be a very appealing proposition to the end-user.

Imagine your brand is this massive mosaic you’re building. Bit-by-bit, you’re slowly adding to the whole of something yet unfinished. You can kind of make out bits and pieces and the general image is faintly visible — but it’s still in the making.

Technically, this specific type of mosaic will never be finished as brands are constantly evolving beings of social metadata but once the foundation has been established, that’s it. Everything that comes after that is simply an addition to that which you have built.

NO SHORTCUTS I cannot fathom a marketing-related article without a mention of our dearest friend, the conversion funnel, which in our case holds a very important role in the research phase.

Your content plays a very large role in funneling these customers-to-be through the… well… funnel. However, In order to fully appreciate your audience’s whims and nuances, you have to research what works and what doesn’t. This is where the funnel comes in.

Rather than focusing on a sales conversion viewpoint, shifting that focus to an audience-retention strategy will help you figure out the five W’s. Who. What. When. Where. Why.

Too much, and you risk losing their focus. Too little, and issues of trust and authenticity crop up. You have to keep in mind that the online audience you’re targeting is different to others in so many ways, including focus/engagement retention.

Use that research to understand your limits and always be careful with certain dubious aspects that could have an adverse effect towards your brand.

For example, do not mistake omission for Intrigue. Test out ways to interact and intrigue your audience. See if it works or not. There is a very important difference between leaving stuff out on purpose & leaving stuff out on purpose.

For lack of better phrasing; Leaving stuff out without leaving stuff out can (if done correctly) not only enhance your content – but can even be used as a brand calling card, if you will.

 STICK TO YOUR BRAND

The importance of branding cannot be overstated. For example:

When you think ‘Godfather’, you think GODFATHER.

When you think ‘Starbucks’, you think Starbucks.

A brand is not just an image, it’s a feeling.

They say that seeing is believing. Well, if that’s the case then, feeling is knowing.

Building a successful & compelling brand is the culmination of everything we have discussed thus far. Approach your content in a way that sells your brand.

So, you tell me.

Is it simply Compelling Branding…

…Or Does it Become An Offer You Can’t Refuse.