Whether it’s a business, a person, or a corporation, one quality everyone strives for is resilience. The ability to sustain and endure is an important quality that all brands must possess to succeed, but few businesses focus on it strongly from the very inception.
As a rule of thumb, only the most resilient brands survive harsh economic downturns like the one that the world is currently going through.
If you’re a business owner, now is the time to focus on and build your brand to be as resilient as possible to survive the next couple of years of the economic slump.
For those who haven’t much thought into making their brands resilient, here are a couple of basic things to keep in mind.
Be Relevant
The first thing you need to focus on to build brand resilience is your brand relevance. In simple terms, brand relevance means your company’s ability to connect with public sentiment.
Public sentiment is very fickle, which means trends often tend to change very quickly, except for some customer bases and industries.
As difficult as it might be to stay on top of your customer’s minds, your company needs to adapt to these trends and stay relevant. Note that your focus should be on capitalizing on how customers feel as opposed to what they think.
The latter is just as important, if not more, but keeping up your customer’s emotions should be our main focus here.
To understand your customers’ emotions, you must listen to them effectively. This has never been easier, thanks to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
Just interacting with the customers in the comments section of your brand’s social media pages is one of best ways to do so.
Once you’ve gained an understanding, create your marketing strategy based on those findings to create effective brand relevance for your business. Thankfully digital marketing has made it much easier in today’s age of the internet.
By leveraging the power of search engines and SEO, you can easily find brand mentions using SEO SAAS services like Ahrefs.
Learn more about digital marketing and how to leverage certain practices like how to find unlinked brand mentions with Ahrefs, a platform that includes features to help with keyword strategy and enable brands to stay competitive online.
Establish Your Brand’s Core Values And Stick To Them
Many businesses make the mistake of not conveying their brand’s core values to their copies as they prioritize getting quick attention from customers instead of conveying their brand identity in their marketing efforts.
Oskar Lubeck, the owner of Bold, a Swedish brand, says, “Brand loyalty doesn’t come from staying true to the environment or people, but from being true to yourself.”
In the process of utilizing customer sentiment in your brand’s marketing, it’s also essential to establish your brand’s core values and stick with them to make your brand stand out.
Finding your brand’s purpose and understanding why your business exists is a very powerful way to stay ahead of competitors.
When you stick with your brand values, you create a customer base with similar personal values and, therefore, a reason to return to your brand again and again. So it’s best to establish your brand values once you’ve researched your target demographic.
The right brand values will go the wrong way to creating a positive perception of your brand that will help you in rough times.
Be Authentic
One of the main reasons most businesses never make it big is that they’re not authentic. When you copy someone else’s formula for success, it might seem sensible since the product and messaging have already proven their success.
But this approach doesn’t create a unique identity for your brand, so customers quickly forget your brand and move on to the next.
There are two ways to build brand authenticity: being consistent and being real. Your brand messaging and marketing should be in sync so customers can never call you out for hypocrisy. For today’s younger generation, this matters a lot.
And as for being real, in most instances, it boils down to sticking to your brand’s principles and never compromising with them, even if it’s for profit.
Resilience is Patience
Building a resilient brand is currently tougher than usual, thanks to the historic global recession that is happening right now.
So don’t get discouraged if the results of your efforts take some time to show, as people are very choosy about what they’re spending their money on.
If done properly, your brand should pick up a loyal base of customers even in these trying times.