7 Ways To Improve Brand Equity For Your Business
Do you ever think about your business’ brand equity when trying to capture the Gen Z market or thinking up newer and more creative ways to retain your current customer base?
If the idea doesn’t ring any bells, brand equity simply means how your customer understands why you’re unique and superior to your competitors. It sounds a lot like marketing jargon, but it’s important to consider it as it’s a crucial part of building brand awareness.
Before we go into the actions you can take to improve your brand equity, let us first dive deeper into its definition.
What Is Brand Equity?
The foundation of brand equity is your customers’ direct experience with your product or service. Their good experience, repeated over time, gives your brand equity or value. Additionally, it serves as a distinguishing feature in the eyes of your customers, setting you apart from everyone else.
You might not realize it, but creating a solid marketing plan involves brand equity. It’s what fosters loyalty, after all! When your brand is valuable, it encourages customers to refer you to their friends and coworkers.
From big brands to small businesses, everyone desires brand equity. Building it, though, might be a challenge. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible!
How Do I Improve Brand Equity?
To develop and strengthen your brand equity, you must maintain a continuous presence in the marketplace and be consistent in your long-term attempts to gain traction. Remember, it can take several months before you begin noticing any real progress, so you must commit to the process, adopt a success mindset, and focus on your goals.
Below, we’ve listed seven steps you can take to build brand equity and inspire customer loyalty.
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Create Quality Products & Services
Without products or services, there wouldn’t even be a brand! So if you want repeat business and positive word-of-mouth, the best and only way to start is to offer customers high-quality products and services.
Unfortunately, many companies across industries release products merely to appear innovative. Releasing a half-baked product or service that doesn’t meet your customers’ expectations will severely damage your brand equity.
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Clearly Define Your Position
Identifying your position—the one thing your company stands for in the eyes of its customers—is a critical step in building brand equity. Bring together your business’s key leaders to define your brand’s position.
Determine what sets you apart from the competitors and what makes you the superior choice. Unfortunately, although it might seem obvious, most small businesses are too preoccupied with serving clients and processing payroll to do a bit of introspection.
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Understand The Competition
Not only will this help you determine your position, but knowing who your competitors are and the trends within your industry will also help you adapt to market changes.
An effective way to establish brand equity is to focus on a niche and fill a specific need that no one else is currently serving. This exudes both innovative thinking and a thorough awareness of your target audience. In addition, being respected and admired are some of the hallmarks of solid brand equity.
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Share Your Story
Brand equity needs consistency. You must convey to your customers your position within the market engagingly and consistently.
Share your best corporate stories. You can either go for a moment when you went above and beyond to take care of a customer, the founding insight of the company, or the history of a major product breakthrough.
Make it even more interesting by sharing these stories through video or audio!
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Be Consistent With Your Brand Image
Brand equity needs consistency. It’s important that you convey to your customers your position within the market in an engaging and consistent manner.
Other business components are just as crucial as your products and pricing. Every aspect of your organization that interacts with clients and potential customers needs to be refined to guarantee that it is highly targeted. This includes your brand name, straplines for your social media activity, and even as far as the way you represent your brand at events.
Because of this, you must establish your brand image from the very beginning and model your business accordingly. For example, be classy if you work in the high-end segment of your industry. On the other hand, be fun and humorous if the goal of your product or service is to make people smile.
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Track Your Progress and Pay Attention to Your Customers
One crucial thing to remember about brand equity is that it lives in the minds of your customers. That’s why listening to them is not optional.
Make it easy for your customers to provide feedback. This will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, as well as its growth opportunities.
You can also check your search rankings to see if you appear in organic search results. Lastly, make sure to monitor social conversations constantly. Check out what your customers say about your products or services on social media platforms, blogs, forums, and vendor-rating websites.
Once you’ve gathered insights from their feedback, don’t forget to apply them to improve your products or services.
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Come Up With Retention Strategies
Motivating customer loyalty is a crucial aspect of brand equity. You can do this by:
- Offering personalized incentives, such as freebies and discounts, for frequent or recurrent purchases
- Giving bonuses to existing customers when their referrals make purchases
- Creating an affiliate marketing program to enable brand advocates to promote your items while also earning commissions
The Secret To Brand Equity is Consistency
Business success depends greatly on diligence and consistency—the same goes for brand equity. Of course, it will take time to build a valuable brand. But once you’re there, you’ll be able to improve your business’s financial performance, make an impact on your customers’ lives, and inspire loyalty and trust.
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