Socially, Brands Are What They Say

In today’s social media fueled madness, your brand’s branding is in the hands of your buyers. Don’t even pretend to claim you have a brand when you don’t. Fact, buyers are the ones who determine your brand. Some of you may say that you have a brand because of name awareness, but that is all you have. Understanding how buyers think along with the processes of activities buyers go through, is your task to identify what intersects and triggers brand concept in their minds. In other words, your brand is context dependent.


Social media fuels brand context, because it forces you to take U-turns, and complement consumer pact of community. What a company has to understand is:

• How it aligns with its social community, 
• How its identity can hold value, and 
• How it can lead the community. 

When companies stop adverting at and, instead, hone in on how to improve buyer experiences, a brand is born. This approach allows you to build stories (content) where buyers can ideate their own distinct story. Internally, companies should be continuously asking, “How will our buyers tell their stories about our brand?”




No longer does the funnel of yesterday work. Social media changes the idea that buyers have to go through steps. Relationships win over the notion of short-term revenue gain. Moreover, engagement delight is the leading reason why your buyers recommend as per Forrester Research. Brands that understand the social anatomy of its buyers recognize this to be the grail for branding success.

Here are recommendations for how to open closed social doors, and become a sought after brand authority:

1. Start asking buyers broad questions, find themes, categorize, and ask more.
2. Accept that there are no one size fits all anything.
3. Match the right product, service, or message to the right buyer segments.
4. You can never personalize enough.
5. Welcome that your buyers are dynamic, and that the segment you believe them to be in today can change today as well.
6. Speak and write naturally. Be honest, genuine, and stick to your word.
7. Create and design everything from the buyers’ frame of mind because if a buyer does not find what s/he wants; they will find it elsewhere.
8. Don’t settle ever with what you are doing socially, invest, and continuously improve.

References:

Ryan Levesque, 2015, Ask
Marty Neumeier, 2016, The Brand Flip
Adele Revella, 2015, Buyer Personas
Website Magazine, September-November 2015