Audiences are inundated with possible brands to choose from. Wherever they go, they’re absolutely besieged by marketing—something that can make it a very difficult job for your brand to stand out positively.
You might start this journey by understanding what audiences look to in order to establish if a brand is reliable, and whether it’s worth their time. Obviously, there are going to be any number of subjective elements to consider. This means that you have to tackle both the subjective and objective side of things before getting a sense of what kind of specific image you want to broadcast to your audiences.
1. High-Quality Output
One of the primary things that most audiences are going to want from your brand is simple quality. Strangely, it’s not often the most important ingredient for success – many businesses have thrived off the back of their marketing campaign along with thrifty financial management – but it is something that will make it hard for customers to turn away from you.
If the work that you do is consistently solid, then audiences are going to build up an association between you and quality – and that’s something that’s invaluable. If you’re seen as the benchmark of high standards in your field, then you become the brand which every business is measured against, which can be advantageous to positive word of mouth.
2. Safety and Security
All it takes is one security issue for customers to realize that they’d rather take their chances elsewhere. Even if the fault isn’t your own, and even if you take the right steps afterward, it can be difficult to scrub that association from the record.
You’ll want to encourage audiences to stick around, and to do that, you have to convince them that you’re absolutely committed to making security a priority—they don’t want their sensitive information to be at risk, after all.
This might often mean understanding which approaches are best suited for businesses in your field given the current landscape, leading you to approaches like managed detection and response solutions that can consistently test your own network for vulnerabilities, keeping you ahead of the curve.
3. Customer Service Attitudes
A business can be known to be reliable, offering high-quality output consistently and repeatedly do very well across different types of user reviews, but still come up short in one crucial area that leaves customers with a bad taste in their mouths. If your customer service is lacking—either by being unfriendly, unhelpful, or just plain absent—it might drag the whole thing down.
It can be easy for this to fall by the wayside, simply because it doesn’t feel as though it’s as technically important as everything else, but to neglect it on those grounds would be a mistake. Instead, getting a good understanding of what customers want and expect here can allow you and your team to be as prepared as possible for any interaction.
4. Audience Reviews
These reviews will be the yardstick by which you’re measured a lot of the time, which makes it well worth your time to encourage customers to leave them. It can feel unfair to put in so much work and for your brand to be dismissed due to being rated 4.1 on Google compared to the 4.4 of your competitor but it goes to show how much sway these reviews have.
However, what’s important is that people don’t just judge the score of the review, they also judge how many reviews there are. After all, a large sample isn’t just more reliable, but it shows that your brand is enjoyed by many more people.
5. Customer Experience
The quality of your output and the customer service are two components of the customer experience—what it’s like to be your customer from first engaging with your marketing to using your product or service. This is a very broad amount of time, and it encompasses a wide range of events and moments that are arguably entirely out of your control.
This might seem like a recipe for disaster, but it’s actually important—you’ll want your customers to feel as though they have enough time to enjoy and judge your brand on their own terms, rather than having you constantly breathing nervously breathing down their necks. It’s about exuding an air of confidence, as that can have an impact on the perception of what you do.
