Understanding The Importance Of Brand Soul In Digital Engagement And How To Leverage It

One of the biggest challenges facing any business is losing the image of a corporate entity and creating an image of a brand that’s more personable and engaging. This is called having a brand soul. Without a brand soul, your audience will have trouble connecting with your brand on a personal level.

The following are 9 ways that digital engagement can help you to develop your brand soul:

1. Own your cultural landscape

Instead of considering yourself as a supplier of products or services, begin looking at yourself as part of the cultural landscape. You should believe that your product or service is adding something to the culture and you should treat your marketing efforts in this manner. You can leverage this idea through digital engagement by emphasizing the cultural components of your audience through social media. For example, posting pictures of your products being used in daily activities.

2. Stand for a social cause

Trying to stay neutral is an attempt to appeal to everyone, and that never works. Don’t be afraid to stand up for social causes that are important to your company. Doing so shows your audience that you stand for more than just profit. Take Nike as a recent example. While their social cause involved some controversy, they have taken a stand and it has certainly made them seem much less like a company that only cares about profits. The social cause they’ve stood up for may have lost them a few customers, but it’s greatly strengthened brand loyalty as a result as well.

3. Curate content

Digital engagement isn’t just about posting content that you’ve created. While your content may be relevant, it can seem a little like you’re just fishing for likes or shares. It’s important that you curate some of your content as well, meaning that you post links to relevant content on other websites. Doing so not only helps provide your audience with high-quality content, it shows them that you care about being helpful and it’s not all just about you. This, in turn, helps build trust in your brand.

4. Encourage Conversation Through Feedback

Encouraging feedback from your audience is a great way to learn about your audience, thereby giving you the chance to more effectively tailor your content to their needs. By encouraging feedback and responding positively (no matter how negative the feedback might be) you show your audience that what they think is important to you, thereby making them more willing to reach out and engage with your brand.

5. Reinvent service and support

Be proactive when it comes to customer service and support. In addition to providing a phone number, email, and social media channel through which your audience can contact you, consider adding a chatbot that can answer questions in real time or send customers questionnaires asking about the quality of the products or services they bought.

6. Guide your customers’ journeys

Make use of all of your customer data so that you can create content for every step of the buyer’s journey, no matter where they are, be it on your website, on mobile, or on one of your social channels. Use automation to trigger the best content, offers, or messages at the right time for each platform you’re on.

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

7. Personalize your marketing

Use the information you gather from your audience to personalize your marketing. This allows you to deliver content that’s more relevant to each individual reader, thereby allowing you to build stronger relationships with your leads.

8. Provide an immersive experience

One of the traps a lot of brands fall into is creating a non-memorable experience in which visitors read their content and move. Create content using a story format to make it more memorable. Don’t hesitate to use visual content as well, such as graphics, videos, and even gifs. This helps to create more of an immersive experience for the reader.

9. Be truthful

Always verify your facts, especially if you are using statistics. In the age of fake news, the last thing you want is to be labeled as dishonest due to inaccuracies in your content creation.

Digital engagement is an important part of establishing your brand soul and showing your audience that you are much more than just another lifeless corporate entity. These are just a few digital engagement strategies you should consider implementing to help build your brand soul.