Dare I say it, but without brand personality, your brand is a headless chicken that's running around in circles. Adding a layer of personality on top of all the values your brand represents, helps you to connect with your audience better.
Brand personality is the delivery vehicle for your marketing communications.
Brand personality is the delivery vehicle for your marketing communications. Nowhere is this more relevant than on social media where a seemingly endless number of businesses are busy promoting themselves. The cacophony on social media is such that without personality your brand may not get the attention it deserves.
Developing the right brand personality lays the foundation for forging a tight relationship with potential customers. Certain ‘social’ dynamics of social media are the same as they are in the real world. Users want to interact with others including brands which are as close to themselves as possible. This forms the bedrock of the brand’s social media engagement. Brands needs to give enough reasons for their audience to engage with them. Needless to say, the chosen social network, tone of communication and speed of response should be spot on. Here are some pointers for getting things right:
Ensure that you have a kick-ass response team
Generic responses are alright when customers have queries or concerns, but hopefully not all your fans follow you because they are routinely bugged by your service or product. Social media users are an expressive lot who want others to know things they appreciate and want. For dealing with such desirable instances, you need to set a tone that is right for your brand.
Do you need to engage with college freshers? Well, your brand’s personality in that case should be fun and you need to be in on everything that completes their pool of cool. Your response team should be aware of all the shows, personalities, characters and events that might have shaped their journey from school to college. Not only that, the team’s response should match the vocabulary of the target group. All this goes a long way in blending-in with the audience and establish your brand as being truly social.
Right set of social media tools
Your response team needs access to the right set of tools to discover conversations that matter, engage with the audience and divide various tasks within the team. If your brand is expecting to spark a lot of conversations through campaigns or contests then you need to be able to discover all of them and initiate appropriate action. This is something that cannot be done manually.
Also, you may want to discover conversations that contain keywords that represent the ethos of your brand. Keywords like “free-spirit” and “lone-ranger” may matter for 2-wheeler brands like Harley Davidson and Indian Motorcycle. Listening and monitoring tools can be used to build and propagate brand personality.
TAT (Turn-Around-Time)
The above mentioned points are enablers for building personality. However, these will work only if you have done your homework right. Don’t leave any stone upturned to decide how you want to represent your brand to connect with your audience. Once you’ve zeroed down on your brand’s personality, the team, tool and benchmarked TAT will ensure that it trickles down without fail.