Standing apart from competitors, engaging with potential new customers and building loyalty with existing clients is a primary goal of building brand equity. Central to this is defining and differentiating your brand in ways that are meaningful and motivational to your audience of clients and potential customers.
This may sound easy, but usually it is not. If you have a food or beverage product with a special flavor/recipe that’s a great advantage. Or if you have a technology product with a unique set of applications that’s even better. Maybe your brand is a service for which you are the only provider, well that’s ideal.
However, for many business brands there is no clear cut, easy to define, point of difference. For example, if your company is a provider of homeowners’ insurance how do you differentiate the intangible benefit of “Protection Against Disaster?” Some companies do it with price, which might be a good way to drum up new business, but hard to engender loyalty when another company can always offer a lower price in just 15 seconds.
The answer may be found among your current clients. Dig into the data and you may find similarities in geographic locations, lifestyle, age, income or other demographic measures. Thus, it may not be how you communicate the primary benefit of “Protection Against Disaster,” but to whom you communicate it. Targeting your message at an audience profile that aligns with that of your current client base may yield better results than redesigning your logo or buying a Super Bowl ad. Share on X
If you don’t have enough audience data to define your current customer base then you can use targeted digital advertising as a means to discover more information about them. This approach conveniently allows you to also cross-sell additional insurance products; jewelry and valuables insurance, home office liability coverage, etc. Digital ads can be served to people who visit your website and online app or even to followers on your social platforms. The reports for these ad campaigns will include insights into the people already interacting with your brand such as: age, income bracket, geographical location, job titles and even similar brands these individuals follow etc. Digital ads can also offer incentives to fill out surveys that provide deeper insight into customer lifestyles.
Once you have the information to build a more complete audience profile you will be able to target potential new customers that fit a similar profile. All things being equal, reaching potential customers that are most alike with your current customers, may yield a greater likelihood of product purchase.
This approach is not just for insurance companies but can work for any business looking to stand out from their competitors. For instance when our team does media buys for high-performance computing companies we start with a discussion about what problem their technology solves for their clients. To start evaluating who your messaging has been reaching please reach out.
Written by Ira Lieberman || Brand Solutionist