Jan 18

Jan 18 How to adapt your brand style to your ideal customer profile?

Consistency is critical to a brand's success. However, if you have numerous people engaged in creating and maintaining your brand, it can sometimes be challenging to keep them aligned.

For brands to compete, it is essential to create and foster emotional connections with your target customers with effective marketing, messaging, and engagement. If you don't know your customers in the first place, you can't create a brand that resonates with your audience.

Therefore, it is vital to incorporate the customer personas that define their likes, dislikes, values, hobbies, etc., in your branding style to position your brand effectively.

Your brand is, for sure, the most valued resource in your business. That's why, when branding is done properly, the resulting advantages are quantifiable and instant.

In fact, a consistent brand presentation has been said to increase business revenue by 33%.

Read on for a comprehensive guide to adapting your brand style to your ideal customer profile.

Why should your brand style reflect your ideal customer profile?

Since businesses are built on customer perceptions, it is imperative to align your brand style with the ideal customer profile to ensure consistency. In this forward-thinking, consumer aware society, no such thing exists as static branding.

A brand is an entire experience and is the basis of the relationship between you and your customers. As Simon Sinek said during one of his talks, "…people don't buy what you do. They buy 'why' you do it and what you do proves what you believe."

Therefore, it is crucial to create a valuable experience for your customers, strengthened with strong meaning and an irresistible brand personality.

How to build your ideal customer profile?

Today, customers demand brands to evolve and adapt continually to keep up with the changes in their preferences, competitors, culture, and technology.

When it comes to creating your ideal audience profile, it is vital to take on a systematic approach to collect and analyze your ideal customers' data.

The best way is to consider your customer's buying patterns, understand their challenges and needs. That way, you can narrow things down and garner specific information.

Here are four simple steps to build your ideal customer profile.

Identify and describe your customer base

First, identify and define your target customers as those who are willing to purchase your products and services. Explore your existing customer base to determine the most interested individuals in your offerings and get the most out of it.

Therefore, it is imperative to understand your customers and see how they leverage your offerings. Focus on the customers that help you achieve your objectives and deliver the highest ROI.

Consider the customer journey map

Analyze your customer journey map that is a comprehensive document that defines the customer touchpoints that a typical buyer goes through to get to the final stage of purchasing. You can use templates to develop a customer journey map.

A customer journey map can help you narrow down the details and give you a detailed representation of your customers and their interaction with your brand.

Furthermore, it is essential to consider the different customer base segments, such as demographics, psychographics, behavioral, geographic, and behavioral. This can help you evaluate the processes and give a better idea of your ideal target customer you are trying to reach and their expectations.

Collect feedback and complaints from customers

Next, it's the phase where you interview your most valued customers and ask them about their pain points, preferences, and expectations. This gives you in-depth insights into their overall experience, perception, likes, and aversions about your products and services.

Here your primary goal is to comprehend what specifically appeals to and entices your customers and if you live up to their expectations. You can get real insights when you meet and interview your customers, and the gathered data can be leveraged to describe your ideal customer profile.

Above all, face-to-face interactions with your customers allow you to gauge their real-time reactions and evaluate the raw information.

Create your ideal customer profile

Now that you have the essential information for building a profile of your perfect customer, it's time to devise a well-rounded strategy to reach your potential and existing customers.

Ensure that you analyze the contextual information to get in-depth insights about how your products and services provide value to the customers.

Furthermore, you should also employ a customer-centric e-commerce approach that provides a seamless experience for your e-commerce customers. This includes integrating your brand image across organic and paid initiatives, including social media posts, email, digital ads, and design elements within your e-commerce platform.

This entire process helps you enhance and optimize the customer experience and improve your customer retention rates.

How to adapt your brand style to your ideal customer profile?

Your brand style communicates a sense of who and what your brand is all about. It's imperative to resonate with your ideal customers. This will ensure that you get across the same message and, ultimately, brand consistency.

If you deviate from your customer expectations, it may confuse them. For instance, think of Pepsi and Coca-Cola. If they suddenly change their brand logo, color, and font, their customers would instantly lose their brand's trust and risk the brand identity. 81% of the consumers only purchase from a brand if they trust them.

That being said, there's no denying that brands evolve. However, any changes you make should be done carefully, considering customers, while making the message clear to them why your brand's new version is superior.

What Brand Elements Need to Be Adjusted?

Before you adapt to your ideal customer profile, critically analyze any brand elements that need to be adjusted to establish your brand's identity.

These are some of the key brand components: vision, mission, brand personality, logo design, website design, core values, etc. Consider and evaluate these elements to ensure that it aligns with your ideal customer profile.

That way, you can amend your brand's vision, mission statement, and core values that resonate with your target customers. You can also renew the company's logo that supports the overall brand image and sends out a consistent message to your buyers.

For instance, PosterMyWall, a feature-rich design platform, offers almost everything that can help you promote your brand better. You get everything from customizable fonts, graphic effects to typography, and appealing visuals. All you need is to have a design idea for your brand, and PosterMyWall makes it happen for you.

How to adapt your brand style?

It is imperative for brands to make customers feel valued and ensure that you send a consistent message to their existing and potential customers. And for that, you need to align the brand style to your ideal customer profile.

Here are a few best practices that can help you adapt your brand style to your target customer profile.

Involve your ideal buyer

The key to effectively adapt your brand style to your customer profile is to test it with your ideal audience. Your customers are one of the most important assets that can provide you valuable insights that can help you develop an effective rebranding strategy.

Ask specific and open-ended questions from your customers. The answers will help you discover what they like most about your brand, their pain points, why they prefer your brand over the competition, as well as their positive and negative experiences.

After all, you are analyzing and testing what works for you and your customers. If you don't consider your customers' choices and understand their concerns, they may move on to another brand that's more in tune with them. As a result, it could be a long shot to recapture your customer's loyalty then.

Keep brand elements cohesive

Another vital aspect that many brands and designers overlook is to develop a cohesive brand image across the board.

Every element of your branding should work in consistency with one another to demonstrate a complete picture of your brand. While all these aspects don't have to appear the same, they should fit together similar to the puzzle pieces. It will portray your brand as a whole.

All of your brand aspects should adhere to a coherent theme that gives your customers a sense of belonging and that everything is connected. But how can you make your brand cohesive?

An effective way to keep a cohesive brand design is to define well-thought-out brand guidelines. From logo to color to website to printed tri-fold brochures, your brand's cohesiveness goes a long way to develop trust and loyalty with your ideal buyers.

For example, PosterMyWall can enhance your designing efforts with various customizable templates, themes, and a simple editor. It is a full-fledged online tool that helps you create and design high-end images and videos exclusively for your brand.

What is a brand style guide and why do you need one?

A brand style guide is referred to a distinct set of rules that describes how your brand wants to portray itself to the audience. It includes font, logo, color scheme, design, iconography, images, website layout, tone, etc.

A style guide can guarantee that your brand appears the same to the audience, even if different people have worked on marketing, sales, customer service, and design.

Think of your brand style guide as the essence of your brand as it contains all the specifications. It helps you stay consistent with your brand identity.

A brand style guide ensures that your message is consistent across all channels and supports your marketing initiatives. It also helps the content creators convey their message with consistency to the audience.

For example, Spotify provides an exceptional digital experience to its users. Their brand style guide centers on graphic designing's best practices and does an outstanding job describing use cases for its resources.

Spotify delivers a seamless user experience, which depends on its distinctive design language and is the reason for its market dominance. Spotify's brand style guide is an ideal example that outlines all the rules that create and ensure the consistency of their brand and message.

Let Your Ideal Customers Know About Your New Brand Style

Rebranding a business is more than just tweaking a name or a logo. It is an extensive process to align a company's offerings better with its target audience. Simultaneously, it is imperative to let your customers know about your brand's changes by formally announcing it to them.

Here are some of the ways you can let your ideal customers know about your new brand style.

Social Media Campaign

Social media campaigns are a great way to announce your rebranding to customers. You can create ads that focus on your rebranding efforts and help your audiences explore this brand new visage of your business. Those kinds of Facebook or Instagram ads will help with generating buzz around your brand, in the form of likes and comments, giving it social proof.

For example, Apple, a tech giant, ran a social media campaign "Shot on iPhone" to promote its smartphones. This campaign entailed various offline and online advertisements, creating original content to highlight its range of smartphones.

But don’t worry. You don’t have to do all of these things manually. Social media automation tools like Blog2Social can help you get your campaigns running.

Email Campaign

Another effective way is to leverage an email marketing campaign that lets your audience know that they will see new things related to your brand. Explain your reasoning and goals for the rebrand, and reassure them that you'll continue to offer great service but now with better branding.

There are several tools like Moosend or Constant Contact out there that can help you with those email campaigns.

These popular email marketing services allow you to easily segment your customers based on any data you collect. This then enables you to send laser targeted emails, which theoretically should boost your response rate.

This powerful email marketing campaign example by Lush dedicates their entire email to communicate what their brand stands for. It is a great email copy, "Our values are in our products," with appealing visuals that highlight the production chain and the product while reinforcing the brand values.

Personal Reach Out

Reaching out to your customers can also help you communicate about your new brand style and the changes you made to rebrand your company.

In Conclusion

Your business must have an impactful brand identity – it's really as simple as that.

Investing time and efforts in adapting your brand style to your ideal customer profile will help you ensure clarity and cohesiveness across all channels.

Customers are at the heart of your brand.

Deliver exceptional experiences to your customers, care about them, wow them, and they will reciprocate.