How can you create a unique brand experience across all touchpoints?

When first working with clients to build or refresh their brand, we always start with the hot lava core of their brand. Sometimes called Brand Architecture, Brand Compass, or the Brand's North Star, identifying what makes a brand's innermost thoughts and ideals is essential for building a long-lasting brand that everyone within the brand can get behind.

Apart from theory, some very helpful tools to help you define your brand identity are: 1. Customer surveys, because they help you understand their perceptions and expectations of your brand 2. Competitor analysis, because studying your competitors will definitely help you identify gaps in the market and differentiate your brand

You don't have to create intricate journey maps to make progress. I like to begin with Eugene Schwarz's five stages of customer awareness: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. It's a good springboard to go deeper into the customer's needs at each touchpoint.

Once you have clearly mapped the customer journey try answering these questions: - How do customers feel at various points along their journey? - Are there moments of frustration, delight, or confusion? And last but not least, are there any emerging touchpoints we should consider?

Customers can start their buyer's journey from an email on their phones, and finish it on your website on their laptops. This means that every touchpoint *needs* to be cohesive. You can achieve this by: ?? Starting with a strong brand identity. Do a brand audit to ensure that it's cohesive. ?? Creating a brand style guide. A brand style guide outlines your brand identity and how it should be applied across all of your marketing materials and communications. ?? Personalizing customer interactions at all touch points. That would include personal emails, website chatbots and using singular language in all marketing content. And that it. Its pretty simple to create a unique experience across all touch points but it's not often done.

Through data, you'll find that each platform serves a slightly different purpose and audience. You need to tailor your message and delivery to your audiences' expectations for how they want to consume within that media. At the same time, your message must always be authentic and emanate from the heart of your business.

We think about brand experience in three ways: a) is the brand behaving consistently across their experience in ways that fulfills their strategy? b) is that behavior pushing through barriers the brand is up against? c) is it creating belonging among the people who the brand is for? Depending on the answer to A, you may have found areas of opportunity and change in your experience. Act on them. If question B is a no, then your brand isn't resonating, or isn't bringing people into the experience at all. Get brave. Stand for something. Stand out. If question C is a no, you may be driving revenue or awareness, but not creating traction with the people you're for. Make sure you know who those people are and build for them.