To effectively market your brand or product, there are several essential questions you need to ask yourself. Questions like ‘Who is your target audience’ and ‘What marketing channels will you use to reach that audience.’ But before marketing your brand, you need to find your brand personality.
What is a Brand Personality
Your brand’s personality defines how your brand addresses the world and how the world perceives your brand. A consistent brand personality is important because it tells your audience who you are and what they can expect from you. Whether your voice is mature and serious or wild and playful, your audience will get to know your brand through its personality, helping you attract the right audience’s attention.
A brand personality is the personification of your brand. When marketing that brand to your audience, it is the voice and personality you give to your brand. While your brand is not a real person, think about who it would be if it were. Maybe it’s an avid outdoor enthusiast who likes to take risks or a sly prankster who infuses every post with humor. Whatever personality you choose, remember that you’ll need to stay consistent with that voice for it to resonate with your audience honestly.
The best way to create a brand personality is by getting organized and creating a brand guide.
A brand guide contains all the elements of your brand’s personality, down to the font you use in your emails and website.
At ELMNTL, our branding experts can assist you in developing your brand strategy. Our marketing team has helped cultivate a successful brand identity for everything from boutique hotels to ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations. We can create a brand guide for your business that covers all the necessary elements of a stellar brand personality.
Branding elements created for the ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations
So, why create a consistent brand personality? There can be many benefits to finding your brand’s persona. One significant advantage is that your audience will know what to expect from your marketing, and when you find the right audience, they’ll be more likely to stick around for more. Furthermore, your audience will be more likely to engage with your marketing if your brand’s personality resonates with them.
Higher engagement means customers are more likely to spend money on your products and services. Studies have shown that when customers are engaged with your brand, they spend between 20 and 40 percent more on average!
Understanding Your Target Audience
When creating a brand personality, not putting the cart before the horse is essential. The first step you need to take when defining your brand personality is to understand your target audience. After all, if you use the wrong personality with your audience, it won’t matter how consistent that personality is because it won’t resonate with the right demographic.
So, how do you find your target audience? The best way to do this is by conducting market research.
Conducting Market Research
Market research can involve anything from analyzing competitors’ followers to looking at data from your current customers. Market research can reveal a host of important data, including income, age, gender, and interests of your target demographic. This can help you craft your brand’s personality to better align with your target audience.
Once you have an idea of your target audience, it’s time to create a buyer persona.
Creating Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a general picture of the person you target with your marketing efforts. For example, you could sell pacifiers. Your buyer persona might be a first-time mother between the ages of 22-38 who makes between $30,000 to $50,000 per year. Perhaps she has a fun, snarky personality and isn’t afraid to laugh when her toddler gets into the diaper cream and does a little redecorating. Once you’ve figured out who she is, your brand personality can mirror hers by injecting a little humor into parenting.
Defining Your Brand Identity
Mission & Values
In addition to having a consistent brand personality, your brand should have a clearly stated mission and values. This is known as your brand identity.
Say your pacifier business aims to create an environmentally friendly product that doesn’t cause damage to babies’ erupting teeth. Your task is to protect those tiny teeth, while your values are putting safety and environmental health first. Thus, your brand’s identity is one of safety and concern, both of which are reflected in your brand’s mission and values. Once you have your mission and values, you can focus on your USP.
Unique Selling Proposition
Your unique selling proposition (USP) sets you apart from your competitors. Why is your product special? For example, your product is different from other pacifiers because of its ergonomic design and the fact that it’s made from recycled materials. This would be your USP. To determine your own USP, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your customer?
- What are your customer’s motivations?
- Why do customers choose your product over your competitors?
Once you have determined your USP, you can focus on defining your brand’s voice and tone.
Brand Voice & Tone
Your brand voice and tone are part of your brand’s identity. It is how you communicate your message to the world. Like your brand identity, your brand voice and tone should be consistent across all marketing channels, including social media, advertising, and other marketing communications.
Whether your tone is serious and professional or informative but witty, make sure all your communications are in this consistent tone of voice. Brand identity can also include the colors and logo you use because these can also convey the feelings you are trying to evoke in your customers.
- The Caregiver
- The Creator
- The Explorer
- The Idealist
- The Jester
- The Lover
- The Magician
- The Realist
- The Revolutionary
- The Ruler
- The Sage
- The Seeker
- The Warrior
Thus, while your voice is your perspective on the world, your archetype is your greater purpose. For a business, think about how you want to be perceived. Is your product a hero product? Is it a caregiver?
Consistency Across Brand Touchpoints
When it comes to your marketing, consistency is vital. This means you should maintain the same brand personality across all channels.
Logo & Visual Identity
Your brand’s logo and visual identity encompass everything from your font to your color palette to your logo.
McDonald’s has an easily recognizable logo, font, and color palette that is recognizable around the world. Using bright, cheerful colors that have been shown to stimulate the appetite, consumers look to McDonald’s for fun, fast service, and affordable prices. Using the same logo, colors, and fonts across all of their marketing channels lets you know it’s McDonald’s without even needing to read the messaging.
McDonald’s visual branding is identifiable without even seeing their name
Website Design & User Experience
Your website matters more than you may realize. It should include a bold, easy-to-find call to action (CTA), easily navigable menus, and your logo and visual identity. It should also provide an excellent user experience (UX).
User experience includes everything mentioned above, as well as accessibility to all. This includes persons with disabilities such as visual impairments who may need special software to interact with your site. Your site’s UX should allow everyone to enjoy without impediment.
Social Media Presence
Social media presence is a must in today’s day and age. With over 8 billion people worldwide, it is estimated that 4.9 billion people use social media. Thus, if you’re not on social media, you’re missing out on potential followers and customers.
But it’s not enough to be on social media. You also need to post frequently and use your brand personality and voice in your posts. This means that if you take a snarky tone, you should use it in most all of your posts.
Wendy’s is an excellent example of a consistent brand personality. They often get a little risque with their Twitter posts, sometimes picking playful battles with other fast-food establishments. Their social media fans stay tuned in to see what the brand comes up with next and always know what tone and voice to expect from them.
Play the full clip https://t.co/poYzfY4eVl
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) April 12, 2023
Wendy’s brand personality is known for starting “beef” with other brands on social media
Advertising & Marketing Campaigns
Like social media, your advertising and marketing campaigns should be consistent with your personality. Always use your branding, including fonts, logos, colors, and your brand voice. ELMNTL client, Bank of Hope, uses a serious but informative tone and a signature palette of specific shades of green that let customers know they can rely on Bank of Hope for valuable information and brand consistency.
Engaging With Your Audience
The first step to engaging with your audience is to create relatable content. With Bank of Hope, their content is informative but still understandable to the average consumer. Their posts often break down financial terms, summarize timely and valuable financial articles, and explain their banking products and services in more significant (yet easier to understand) detail.
Bank of Hope’s social media posts provide informative and understandable financial information
Using Storytelling Techniques
Once upon a time (see what I did there), storytelling was a way to communicate history, values, and imagination. Today, nothing has changed, and that includes marketing. Your brand’s story is an integral part of your brand personality.
How did you decide to solve the pain point you are solving? Returning to the pacifier example, maybe you noticed your child’s teeth growing crooked and wanted to spare other parents from facing the same problem. Using storytelling to convey and continue that story with your marketing strategy helps keep your brand personality consistent and invites your audience to come along for the ride.
Furthermore, telling a story with your social media posts, emails, and on your website captivates your customer’s attention. This will increase engagement, conversions, and even sales.
Incorporating User Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content, or UGC, is photos, videos, and testimonials from current customers. User-generated content shows real people using your product or service and helps to show other potential customers that the product or service works. Choose UGC that matches your brand’s personality.
For example, say your social media account shares romantic imagery and unique wedding decor ideas like ELMNTL client Flowerfield Celebrations. If you see that one of your customers has shared a photo of your product, service, or venue on social media or they have directly emailed suitable photos to you, share those photos with your audience (and remember to credit the photographer).
According to Search Logistics, 79% of consumers trust UGC content when purchasing, so don’t discount this medium when developing your social media strategy.
Flowerfield Celebrations shares beautiful UGC photos from guests’ events at the venue
Building A Community Through Social Media
It takes a village, as they say, and when it comes to social media, building a solid community of loyal followers is today’s digital version of that village. When you build a community, your users can help each other with product recommendations and real-life testimonials and even answer questions from other community members. Users will be able to rely on the community and will continue to engage with you through that community. An example would be creating a Facebook group for fans of your product or even the comment section of your social media posts.
Monitoring & Adapting
Once you have developed your brand personality and have put it into practice, you’ll want to monitor your progress and see if that personality resonates with your audience.
The first way to do this is by tracking your brand sentiment through brand sentiment analysis.
Brand sentiment is how your customers feel about your product or service. Brand sentiment analysis can be done by reading reviews, compiling survey answers, and watching social media to see how customers perceive your brand. However, this can be a tedious and time-consuming endeavor, so leaving this type of research to your marketing team can save you time while delivering more accurate results.
Once you know how the public perceives your brand, you can use that information to make necessary adjustments. Whether you need to change your brand’s personality or correct an issue with your product or service itself can all be determined by brand sentiment analysis.
Brand sentiment analysis goes hand in hand with customer feedback. Remember, don’t get defensive about bad feedback. Use it as motivation to make your service or product better. For example, if you run a restaurant and a customer leaves a bad review stating that service was slow, reach out to that customer on the same forum and apologize. This will show other customers you care and encourage them to patronize your business. Then, put your money where your mouth is, and attempt to correct the problem by addressing it with your staff so it doesn’t happen again. This will maintain your brand personality’s consistency by showcasing your dedication to customer service.
In Conclusion
Remember, developing a consistent brand personality is imperative when promoting your business. Consumers want to know who you are and what you stand for, and the best way to show them is to be consistent with your brand by maintaining the same brand voice, colors, logos, and overall personality.
Now that you know the importance of a consistent brand personality, it’s time for action. Don’t get overwhelmed by the details. The branding experts at ELMNTL are here to help. Whether you already have some elements of your brand personality in place or you’re just beginning to build that brand, we can help. Reach out to ELMNTL today for more information.
