The retail market in the 21st century has gotten increasingly dynamic and fast-paced, with every brand striving for their customer’s attention. In such a dynamic landscape of an ever-changing consumerist society, the competition can be quite ruthless; hence, brands need to adapt their customer acquisition strategies to survive. The only way to set your brand apart is by differentiating yourself and standing out from the crowd.
How To Harness The Power of Digital Marketing?
In such a noisy consumer world, standing out and staying relevant can be a massive challenge for even the most established brands if not approached tactfully.
Digital marketing is a tool that is accessible to all businesses today. However, not every brand knows how to harness its potential. It’s about how effectively you can leverage digital marketing to achieve your business goals that truly set a company apart from its competition.
To be able to capitalise on this powerful tool and maximise engagement, brands first need to set clear objectives about what they hope to achieve through digital marketing. Start by determining specific goals:
- Is the brand looking to increase traffic on its website?
- Do they hope to enhance brand awareness?
- Generate more leads?
These are some key questions you can ask to formulate a unique strategy.
Another important way to leverage digital marketing is by truly understanding your audience. You can achieve this by formulating your brand’s buyer persona. This helps get a deeper insight into your customers’ pain points, inconveniences, interests, and behaviour patterns.
This knowledge is crucial as it can then guide your content and messaging strategy. The objective is to maximise engagement on social media through unique and distinctive ways so that your customers can resonate with the brand more than just superficially.
Digital marketing is one of the leading avenues that marketers use today. Effective use of digital media can bolster a brand’s sales and enhance its relationship with users. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the most effective tactics and strategies to help you master the art of staying top-of-mind amidst all the noise.
8 Ways To Stay Top-Of-Mind in a Noisy Consumer World
Research shows that a strategic approach to achieving this should ideally combine the 3 Cs:
- Consistency
- Creativity
- Customer engagement.
Here are some ways to help your brand achieve the 3Cs:
Uniform Branding
The first and most important aspect of staying at the “top of mind” in a noisy consumer world is to develop a uniform and consistent identity for your brand. This should be uniform across all your marketing spaces.
This is because uniformity goes a long way in helping user brand retention. In fact, the most famous brands are memorable to us because they have a unique personality that helps their audience to recognise them instantly.
Consistency includes having a uniform logo, design, colour scheme, and tone of messaging. If the consumer doesn’t recognise your brand, how will they remember it?
Content must be value-driven
The content that your brand or business puts out should be of value to your consumers. Content that addresses your target demographics’ needs, wants, interests, and desires goes a long way in attracting new users while maintaining the already established pool of customers.
Valuable content can be in a plethora of forms: blog posts, infographics, videos, customer experience challenges, and even regular targeted social media updates. Some brands are now even venturing into the podcast space.
The ideal goal is to position your brand as the expert and trusted resource in the field.
Social Media is Your Biggest Asset
In today’s world, social media is both a boon and a bane; it just depends on who you ask. If used tastefully and to its full potential, social media can be a great weapon in a company’s arsenal and one of
the best customer acquisition strategies for D2C brands.
This is because Gen Z has completely entrenched itself in social media, spending ever-increasing time on online platforms. This allows brands to actively engage with their target audience on these platforms. Actively engaging with your customers by responding to their questions, liking their comments, starting conversations and participating in fan-led events online is a sure-fire way to attract more users, especially Gen Z.
An incredible example of effective use of social media can be found in the way the founders of Mid-Day Squares use Instagram. They don’t use it for sales but rather to document their day-to-day journey building their brand.
This gives their followers unique insights into what happens behind the scenes, something that no other company is likely to do. They share their triumphs – but more interestingly – are also very candid about their failures and shortcomings.
This unique way of using Instagram sets its official handle apart from the rest of its competitors, making the brand appear more human and personal. It also encourages users to join them on the founders’ journey as they share real-time updates on what they’re working on and where they’re travelling to source better ingredients for their product.
Partnerships Help Attract New Audiences
One of the best ways to boost your online presence and, therefore, the relevancy of your brand is to collaborate with others. This could be in the form of other fellow brands, famous influencers, or even international organisations that happen to share your target audience.
Influencers across different social media platforms have become the next big thing with Gen Z, and they have started to wield tremendous power. Hence, a partnership or customer experience challenges that involve them is a great way to become household names overnight.
Furthermore, partnering with established brands can further propel a growing business to new customers and open up yourself to new audiences. A wider reach translates to better sales. Such collaborations also help to reinforce your credibility and value to users, and they will start associating your brand as equals with other well-established entities.
While often used interchangeably, partnerships differ slightly from collaborations. Partnerships tend to be more long-term in nature, usually making a celebrity or influencer the face of their new line of business. An example of a partnership is Puma and Virat Kohli coming together to create a brand called “One8”, which features a new collection of sports and athleticwear.
This partnership, with Kohli as its face, helped propel it to overnight stardom. They achieved this by leveraging Kohli’s fanbase to incentivise them to buy the brand’s products and were thus able to hit the ground running!
A collaboration, on the other hand, is usually just for a shorter period of time. An example of such a collaboration could be seen when L’Oreal Paris collaborated with Aishwarya Rai for their Indian line of products.
Similarly, in the US, on Halloween, it’s not uncommon to see major brands collaborating together during the festive period in the spirit of jest. Here’s one example below:
The Power of Email Marketing
Email marketing is often overlooked when it comes to staying top-of-mind. Brands should maintain an email list of their existing customer base and make it a point to send regular updates and newsletters to their subscribers. This helps the user consistently stay up to date with exclusive offers, the latest promotions, new products and the best deals, as well as what the company has been doing lately to ensure a better personalised customer experience.
Brands can also send valuable information that is engaging in different ways, such as insights into the industry, which will further help keep users looking forward to emails and perhaps forward them to their friends who share similar interests. This also serves as an organic way of building up a bigger target audience through a snowball method.
Focus on Personalisation
Statistics also show that brands that regularly tailor their communications to individual preferences have customers who demonstrate high brand loyalty. Personalised recommendations, deals, offers, and content show that you care about your clients’ unique interests and needs, and this effort is rewarded by consistent sales by the user.
When it comes to staying top-of-mind with your customers, one of the most efficient and resourceful ways to do it is by providing a personalised customer experience. When the user is made to feel like they are special and valued by the brand, they are much more likely to remember that brand.
Innovative Campaigns
We all have that one advertisement that we really like and cannot forget regardless of what happens, don’t we? Whether it’s because it was funny, thought-provoking, or just downright silly. We remember it. And that’s what makes that ad campaign so successful.
An example of a famous campaign that resonated with everyone was the “Just Do It” ad campaign by Nike. This campaign was so successful because Nike was the first brand to use ‘motivation’ as a sales strategy. Their campaign encouraged audiences to pursue their dreams, overcome obstacles, and take action. Wearing a Nike product meant you embodied that same go-get-it ethos!
Moreover, Nike ensured the campaign stayed relevant through the years by keeping their branding constant but using different athletes in their primes as the face. From Michael Jordan to Roger Federer, they captured sports fans in every market!
Running a creative and memorable marketing campaign that captures the audience’s attention is perhaps the greatest way to cement your brand into the customers’ minds. But there’s more than just ads. It could also be in the form of influencer-led viral challenges, multi-national contests, bonafide giveaways, or even limited-time-only offers. It’s this sense of novelty, coupled with the need to be a part of a global community participating in a trend, that helps bring in new users and helps shoot your brand instantly to #trending!
An example of such could be the brand OnePlus setting up its own photography awards, which encouraged customers to use their OnePlus devices to click photos and send them in for a nationwide competition. Lucky winners received several prizes as well as recognition on OnePlus’ social media platforms.
Be You, Be True
The best way for brands to stay relevant and stand out from the noise is by being themselves. A brand choosing to be their authentic self is a courageous act in today’s world, where every business is busy pandering to their customers.
Brands can set themselves apart from their competitors in a number of ways. For starters, they can establish a certain personality for themselves. They can do this by taking a stand on moral or societal issues and incorporating activism into their content. Identify an issue that aligns with the brand’s core values, and be daring enough to take a public stand. The brand can use its platform to speak out, give opinions on trending topics, share perspectives, support different causes, and engage in meaningful discussions with its audience.
This helps break the fourth wall between the brand and its followers and goes a long way in establishing loyal consumer relationships. Advocacy done authentically has repeatedly been shown to build strong connections with users who share similar values.
Best Way Forward
So, there we have it. These are 8 of the most efficient and helpful ways in which you can help your brand stay top-of-mind in a consumer world. Remember the 3Cs of consistency, creativity, and customer engagement.
The best way forward would be to combine these strategies and witness your brand cut through the noise and establish a lasting presence in the minds of its customers.
Want to know how OgmentO can help you stay top-of-mind among your target audience?