Your brand equity is impacting your business right now, whether you know it or not.
What can you do about it?
A lot!
Simply put, brand equity is how well-known your brand is to your customer, what it’s known for, and how they feel about it. Many factors shape your brand equity and collectively determine the value of your brand. It’s time to harness the power of your brand equity and increase the value of your business.
What is Brand Equity?
Before you can harness or grow your brand equity, it’s important to understand the four elements that are involved.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the degree to which people are aware of your brand. This is often built through longevity, reputation, ubiquity, and advertising efforts. For these, there are no shortcuts.
Other factors such as a memorable name, distinct logo, or catchy tagline can be more easily created. Are these elements of your banding easy to recognize and recall?
Brand Distinction
What differentiates you from your competitors in the eyes of customers? What unique value do you bring? What adjectives would customers intuitively associate with your brand? Are you the luxury option? The cheap one? The easy, fancy, or nostalgic alternative? Are you the underdog? The bare bones brand? The one with the best service? These perceptions go a long way toward defining your brand.
Perceived Quality
How does the customer regard the quality of your brand? This can be based on experience, hearsay, or simply assumptions based on your branding. Perceptions do not always match reality, but they do form your brand equity.
Every interaction a customer has with your brand, be it a purchase, a customer service call, or simply an exposure to your logo has an impact on their assessment of your brand’s quality.
Brand Loyalty
Have you ever noticed that some brands have a massive degree of customer loyalty? Their customers not only purchase their goods or services, but do so to the exclusion of all others, and are happy to tell you about it (even if you don’t ask). This type of brand loyalty is a huge asset and a great contributor to brand equity.
5 Ways to Grow Your Business by Building Brand Equity
Understanding your brand equity is the first step towards harnessing it (or improving it). Listen to your customers in order to identify where you currently stand. Claim and amplify the positive sentiments that are rightfully yours. Address the negative associations that are damaging your brand. The following five steps can improve your brand equity and increase your bottom line.
Grow Your Customer Base by Spreading Awareness
Utilize social media and pay-per-click to get your brand in front of more eyeballs. Breathe life into your online presence with a website redesign. Gather publicity through an interesting contest, a unique product launch, or a fun event.
For established brands, this is a matter of constant upkeep. For up-and-comers, it means thinking outside the box in order to make a splash. The job here is to inform people that you exist and then remind them consistently.
Make the Right Impression by Concentrating on Messaging
As an owner or brand manager, you are most acutely aware of what your brand actually represents. Ensure that the public gets the right idea by emphasizing the right messaging on your website, social media accounts, and through all forms of communication.
What’s the one thing you want the public to think of when they hear your brand name? This should be reflected in the hero section of your website. Emphasize the positive while de-emphasizing (or combatting) the negative. Call attention to any social good your company does.
It may not happen overnight, but consistent messaging will move the needle on brand distinction and perceived quality if it’s rooted in reality.
Pro Tip: Pretend that you know nothing about your company and browse your website. What ideas do you come away with? What subtle clues are creating the right (or wrong) impression?
Influence Perception by Setting the Right Tone
Messaging is not simply what you say, but how you say it. What is your brand voice? When Peak Ed Designs was writing copy for Pawsitively Wild N’ Free, a private dog park, we emphasized fun through the use of puns and comical imagery. Such a tone would obviously not be appropriate for clients such as Genesis Recovery Coaching, who treat addiction.
Although this sounds like common sense, it can be helpful to write out a statement that outlines your brand tone.
Increase Loyalty by Building Community and Emotional Bonds
Loyalty programs are perhaps the fastest and most effective ways to increase customer loyalty. Gamified programs are particularly popular.
Other ways to build loyalty include thanking your customers, emphasizing community, giving out swag, and connecting through social values.
Create the Right Mood with a Style Guide
Different colours are known to strike different emotional responses, so choose carefully when designing your website. In fact, it’s a good idea to create a style guide that determines colours, fonts, and other visual elements that best align with your brand’s desired image.
Next Steps
Peak Ed Designs are committed to providing our clients with crisp, clean, functional websites that reflect the essence of their brand. That’s why our process places an emphasis on getting to know our customer’s business, as well as their goals. The creation of a style guide and writing map help us ensure that we’re on the same page.
Remember: your brand equity is an incredibly important component of your business. In fact, when businesses are sold brand equity is often a key selling feature and driver of value. Proactively define your brand, or else your brand will define you!
I want a website that reflects and enhances my brand.