Strengthen Your Brand in 5 Steps: How to Optimise Your Brand Experience for Long-Term Customer Loyalty

Don’t blend into the background. Be THE brand that gets your target audience excited. What does it take?

An authentic, consistent and one-of-a-kind brand experience that your customers will remember – this determines how your brand will be perceived and what consumers will associate with it. A positive brand experience converts interested shoppers into loyal customers.

This article will provide you with concrete steps to follow when developing your unique brand message and helpful tips based on practical experience.

Brand Experience: Higher, Faster, Further

In the digital age, »higher, faster, further« is the motto. New companies are constantly being founded and stirring up the market. Established brands are also constantly rediscovering themselves and carrying out relaunches.

Winning over new customers and retaining existing ones should therefore take top priority. Every company’s goal should be to eventually become a »love brand« – think Adidas or Nutella – and turn casual buyers into fans.

Brand experience management is not a part-time job! Rather, your brand design should be a primary focus in order to set your company apart from the competition. Brands are no longer just a logo or a website – it’s about creating an immersive experience around your products and services offered. Today, a good brand experience requires one thing above all: thinking digitally.

Smartphones have made brands constant companions. They fulfil many of our needs, evoke emotions and, in the best case, create a feeling of familiarity and trust.

For you, this means: if your brand isn’t online, it may as well not exist for your target group. A well-thought-out digital marketing strategy is a must to optimally tailor your brand experience.

To achieve this, your brand content should be consistent across all touchpoints. Your target group should associate certain characteristics with your company. Like how many consumers automatically associate the car company Volvo with the word »safe«.

Brand Experience: Where to Begin?

How can you establish certain associations with your brand? With a well-thought-out strategy! Begin by asking yourselves some basic questions:

• How can you create an experience around your brand?
• How can you win over new customers?
• Which emotions does your brand evoke?
• What impressions should customers get from your brand?

Depending on the size of your company, you might find yourselves at different starting points. These can be divided into three categories:

Start-Ups

As a start-up, you usually start at ground zero. You likely won’t have already established logos, banners or other key visuals. This has one critical advantage: you don’t have to worry about any possible preconceptions. Instead, you can prioritise brand experience from the beginning and create exceptional experiences for your customers.

Companies Relaunching a Brand

If you already have a brand, you should always be thinking about and re-evaluating your brand experience. Always keep your brand image up to date and orient yourself to the expectations of your customers. Sometimes it would also be beneficial to completely renew your brand image. This also includes a comprehensive revision of your corporate design and business communication.

Companies Launching a New Brand

If you want to integrate a new brand into your existing brand landscape, this expansion should be visible to your customer base. To do this, you can connect new brands with already existing ones.

Amazon is a good example of this: Over the years, the online retail giant has launched a number of brands including the audiobook provider Audible and the cloud service Amazon Web Services. If you take a closer look at these logos, you will see parallels in the colour scheme and key visuals to the umbrella organisation Amazon.

Enhance Your Brand Experience in 5 Steps

Regardless of when your company is rethinking its brand experience, you should do so in steps. The following questions can help you develop a compelling and well-thought-out brand vision.

Step 1: Define Challenges

First things first: define the status quo. Start by analysing your current situation.

• What challenges is your brand facing?
• What are your unique selling points (USPs)?
• Which emotions and associations should your brand evoke in consumers?

Step 2: Discover Your Brand

The next step is to analyse the market and evaluate what you want your brand to focus on.

• What should your brand campaigns and advertising measures focus on?
• Which target groups do you want your brand to reach?
• What is the competition doing?

At this stage, you should already be thinking about how your decisions will later affect your brand design, your logo and your key visuals.

Step 3: Create Your Brand

This step is about the development of a specific vision.

• What is the concrete message you want your brand to convey?
• What is your mission?
• How exactly do you want your brand to look?

Design your brand in terms of content and develop your corporate identity in the process.

Step 4: Develop Your Brand Image

Now it’s time to develop your brand universe, which includes everything around your brand.

• Do you need a new logo or a revised slogan?
• Should the colour palette be altered or new key visuals be added?
• Do you want to develop your own website with an online shop or perhaps an app as well?
• Which social media sites and other channels do you want to be present on?

Step 5: Make Your Success Measurable

The best online shop, a state-of-the-art website and the newest logo won’t be of use to you if you don’t communicate your brand message to your customers. For a comprehensive brand experience, you must develop a digital marketing strategy: it can help make your brand visible to your target audience and track your success. This is the only way to analyse which measures are well received by your users and what optimisation potentials still exist.

Brand Experience: Checklist

As you can tell, there is a lot to consider when building a brand experience. This is a project in which the disciplines of design, strategy and digital marketing are tightly interwoven and influence each other. Nevertheless, this checklist will help you keep track of the most important aspects in each area.

Design

• Create or redesign a logo
• Determine key visuals
• Select fonts, colours and visuals
• Develop web designs for CMS, online shops and apps
• Ensure digital accessibility of your website
• Establish a corporate design
• Prepare digital and print media

Strategy

• Develop a corporate identity, slogan, wording and style guide
• Analyse the competition
• Review the current corporate design and corporate communication
• Identify target groups, personas and customer journeys
• Define your brands vision, personality and values

Digital Marketing

• Devise a cross-channel campaign strategy
• Establish performance monitoring
• Continuously monitor campaigns

Brand Experience Across All Channels

With dotSource as its partner, the energy company TEAG Thüringer Energie AG developed a comprehensive branding strategy that addresses the entirety of its broad target group. To do this, they updated their internet presence with a user-friendly design and implemented helpful features such as a rate calculator. Additionally, a revised content strategy will ensure greater clarity on the website, in social ads and in mailings.

In addition to tried-and-tested touchpoints such as the service hotline, the energy provider relies on a chatbot and the brand ambassador HuBÄRt, a fuzzy mascot with a wide reach on social media towards the new, younger target group.

This project is proof that a good digital marketing and UX design strategy can lead to more reach and conversions across all channels.

The Right Strategy for a Successful Brand Experience – Download the Best Practice for Free!

You want to update your brand, but don’t know where to start? Get inspired by leading brands such as ESPRIT and BayWa AG in the »Digital Consulting – Digital Success Requires More Than Just Modern Technologies« best practice.

There, you can learn how to identify optimisation potential in your company and how to design change processes in a targeted manner.

Fill out the form and receive a free copy in your inbox!