Brand objectives provide a target for a brand to strive towards and help guide decisions throughout its life cycle. Companies use brand objectives to measure success, assess performance over time, and communicate their goals to stakeholders.
When deciding on their brand objectives, companies should consider their target audience, industry trends, customer needs, competitors’ strategies, and more.
Broadly speaking, there are four main types of brand objectives that companies, as well as Malaysian SMEs, should consider:
Types of Brand Objectives
1. Brand Identity
Establishing brand identity is a common goal amongst companies and should be at the top of any organisation’s list of brand objectives.
A strong, unique brand identity can distinguish your brand from its competition. It has many factors, including creating impressive visuals and messaging and managing customer experiences aligned with the company’s goals.
2. Brand Awareness
Brand awareness objectives involve increasing awareness of the brand and its products or services. These entail social media campaigns, influencer marketing, TV or radio ads, or public relations initiatives.
It also involves maximising visibility through ad campaigns and leveraging social media platforms to extend the reach of branded content.
Higher awareness increases familiarity with the company’s offerings, leading to greater customer trust.
3. Brand Loyalty
Building customer loyalty is one of the ultimate goals of branding. It gives brands an edge over competitors by making sure of repeat business from satisfied customers.
You could offer a superior customer experience, provide incentives for loyal customers, create personalised experiences, and engage customers on social media. Besides, loyalty programs and personalisation tactics foster trust and encourage repeat customer purchases.
These can help retain customers and increase customer satisfaction when done right.
Drinkies Malaysia, for example, achieved its brand loyalty objective with its “Bottoms Up! Forecasting Demand with Party Moments” campaign. In the campaign, the alcohol distributor emphasised personalisation to enrich customer experience on the company’s website and app.
4. Brand Engagement
Engagement objectives are all about keeping customers engaged with the brand.
Driving engagement requires content interactive enough for customers to engage with it meaningfully. Some examples include customer feedback channels, events, real-time marketing, etc.
With real-time marketing opportunities, your brand can react to relevant current events or trending topics on social media.
You must decide on the best objectives for your brand and prioritise them accordingly. Ultimately, any successful brand objectives require a well-thought-out plan.
How to Determine Your Brand Objective
Defining objectives for your brand is a critical step in establishing successful and sustainable business growth.
Generally, companies should take the time to develop SMART objectives — which are objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. It allows the company to track their progress in time and make decisions based on data-driven insights rather than guesswork.
However, there are a few things you should do before you develop your brand objectives:
1. Identify Your Brand’s Target Audience
Identifying your brand’s target audience is important in developing successful, long-term objectives. You must understand your target demographic to create content and campaigns that effectively engage customers.
Start by defining a core demographic — the people most likely to become repeat customers or share your content with their networks.
Take note of their age, gender, location, interests, lifestyle choices, and other characteristics.
Once you’ve identified your core demographic, it’s time to craft messaging that resonates with them.
Creating detailed customer personas can also help understand how different users interact with your brand.
You can gain valuable user behaviour and preferences insights by creating personas based on real data (such as customer surveys). This insight allows you to tailor messages for maximum impact.
This process should involve quantitative data (such as sales figures) and qualitative data (such as customer feedback).
Once you have comprehensive customer or client data, you should make a detailed analysis.
2. Analyse Customer Insights & Data
Analysing customer insights and data is a key step in developing brand objectives.
Understanding current customers’ needs wants, and preferences will allow you to tailor their products and services accordingly and maximise revenue. It entails analysis of customer feedback, surveys, focus groups, sales figures, and other data you have identified in the first step.
Such an analysis helps you gain valuable insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty that can help inform marketing decisions.
Moreover, It’s also important to consider the channels with which your potential customers mostly interact.
For example, a strong presence on social media allows brands to interact more directly with prospective audiences at scale. Moreover, influencer marketing may be particularly effective in reaching millennials and Generation Z consumers that prefer online interaction.
By reviewing and analysing customer data, companies can better understand their target audience’s preferences, purchasing habits, product adoption rates, and more.
For example, Taylor’s University’s campaign to set itself up as a progressive business school is the perfect case study. It created a specific brand objective with its intensive analysis of Gen Z and their social media usage pattern in mind.
Consequently, Taylor’s University achieved its goal, thereby increasing the hype about its new programs and distinguishing itself from other universities.
3. Understand the Competitor Landscape
Understanding the competitive landscape is important to develop brand objectives.
You must first research your competitors to understand their target audience, products, and services. This research allows you to identify opportunities to stand out and determine how to position yourself in the market.
For example, consider what features or benefits your competitors offer that you do not.
Besides, you can also analyse their pricing strategies and determine if any changes need to be made to remain competitive. Consider their message and position your brand with unique messaging to establish your brand identity.
Moreover, it would be best if you also stayed up to date with industry news and trends.
In doing so, your brand will remain relevant, competitive, and sustainable in the long run.
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