Featured article by Jet Saini, owner of DripDigital.com
The internet has evolved into an ideal tool for picking and selecting services and products that most consumers require. Now brands compete against each other to push out fresh content, engage with their customers at a higher rate, and increase their brand awareness. The ongoing change of information between brands and customers is happening every second of every hour of every day.
What’s to remember? Pretty much like in the real world, every interaction you have with your customer is a new experience, and that experience can alter their opinion about your brand, for better or worse. With that in mind, brands are able to generate love and loyalty even in a crisis as many companies have unexpectedly discovered.
In this article, we’re going to talk about brand perception on social media and why it is so important for your brand equity after the pandemic.
Brands Look Beyond Pandemic for Role of Social Media Influencers
Long before the onset of the Coronavirus, social media influencers faced a transforming role in the marketplace. After an early boom period, their role was questioned as to exactly what effect they have on everything from public image to sales. Some studies have explored how the public perceives the social media influencers during and after the pandemic. New research from Fullscreen, studying consumer behaviors and brands with a focus on Millennials and Generation Z, shows that 34% of 18-to 34-year-olds say they now watch more influencer content due to Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, 82% of the same group stated that they have lower tolerance for standard advertising during this crisis.
What does that mean? This could bring more expanded roles for influencers as brands learn to navigate these times, as the quarantine fades, as social distancing prevails and as the public looks out for any supplementary viral hot spots. To put it simply, brands and influencers will need to look to each other as the chart strategy, values, sensitivity, and connections.
What is Brand Equity?
Since the outbreak, most brands are struggling to stay relevant at a time when the best of plans could potentially turn upside down. Creating or maintaining brand equity is no easy job. The extra value a company gets from a product with a recognizable name it’s even more challenging now with the “normalcy”. It’s well known that brand equity is important to businesses but why do you need it? Companies give their products brand equity via messaging and advertising, making them instantly noticeable and memorable, as well as maintaining the consistency and quality by their loyal customer support who rely on and trust the brand.
Now, thanks to social media, more and more businesses learn to restore their brand equity following the pandemic. A strong online presence, notably their social presence, is now an excellent asset that strengthens brand equity, adding value to the buyer and the brand. For those in need of recognition, visibility and reach, a strong social media presence allows them to be seen by a larger audience than brick-and-mortar stores or other sales teams can touch on a daily or weekly basis.
With a larger number of people being able to find and access your brand, awareness of your services or products will be higher than if you were using traditional approaches to increasing brand awareness. Bear in mind that the number of times your brand gets seen is strongly related to brand equity. Having a steady online presence on multiple digital lends itself to better brand recognition.
The stronger your brand recognition, the bigger the change to be the chosen brand by prospective customers. After all, all brand designers hope to develop top-of-mind brands.
Perception Still Matters in the Digital Age
Social media is gaining a lot of popularity as a search engine for services and products. Over the past few months, we have witnessed notorious platforms like Snapchat and Instagram launch new features that allow brands to tag their chosen products and link to e-commerce sites directly. While most consumers are still struggling with numerous restrictions due to Covid-19, it comes as no surprise why they demand better brand positioning in the online medium.
As social media is the gist of marketing, brand positioning is the core of a robust brand strategy. It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing traditional or digital media consumption, brand positioning should always be your key strategy for a superior customer experience delivery.
How to make the most of digital brand positioning?
To be honest, nobody really cares about brands anymore. Today we are backing only the brands which impact our lives directly: whether that is a rumor, a person, or sometimes even a brand.
Brands have fallen into a credibility crisis, and this is clearly a sign of the time. The less creative they are, the more challenging it gets to actually make an impact on the audience. But what can they do? The solution is right before their eyes. Brands must invest in creativity to increase profitability. The digital world booms with imagination, there is no pretext to lack of creativity and there is no pretext for neglecting to ground your brand positioning on data-driven insights.
Today you can easily monitor how customers perceive your brand, and you can even influence that perception via engaging brand experiences. This also allows you to reinforce a more positive perception of your brand and prove your brand equity through qualities that are both tangible and intangible. Measuring your brand equity across social media allows you to better understand how well your brand is doing online – from here it gets easy to see which companies can assess the progress of their brand-building efforts and find guidance for the initiatives involving marketing research.
What’s more, with your brand’s reputation in the hands of an audience with access to social media, building as well as maintaining a better brand positioning online after the pandemic is more important than ever.
About the Author
Jet Saini is the owner of DripDigital.com – a popular Digital Marketing blog that publishes detailed tutorials that focus on helping people to build and run a successful online business. He started his blog in 2018 and since then has helped hundreds of people reach their marketing, blogging, and SEO goals.
