What Your Data Can Tell You About Your Brand

Many discussions about branding center around things like logo design, style guidelines and creative strategy. But savvy marketers know that strategically-executed brand management is also about identity and experience – or in other words, the perception and the quality of the interaction that your customers have with your business.

When it comes to all aspects of your brand, including those less tangible ones, your marketing data can reveal valuable, actionable, and often surprising brand insights when it’s properly mined and analyzed.

Some Sources for This Data Are:

• E-commerce or shopping cart analytics
• Website analytics and website customer traffic patterns
• Social media analytics (demographics of followers and top-performing posts)
• Best customer profiling

Let’s say that your brand positions itself as an upscale costume jewelry boutique. You believe that your best customer is a woman aged 28-45 shopping for herself or for the occasional gift item. You’re based in Texas, and you seem to do a lot of shipping to the Dallas and Houston areas, so you’re guessing that most of your best customers live in those regions.

Most of your marketing messages center around the quality of your products – their trendiness, uniqueness of design and richness of detail.

Fast forward about six months, after you’ve engaged in some long-term analysis of your historical data. In contrast to the description above, you now have evidence indicating that:

• Your best customer is a woman aged 42-55, who lives in the Dallas and Houston suburbs, as well as in east and central Texas.
• Your next best customer is a man the same age, shopping for gift items for his girlfriend or wife.
• Both of them buy a lot of sale and discount items, and they like to buy 2-3 of these at a time.
• Your e-commerce experience is an especially smooth and problem-free one for your customers.

In addition to the smarter marketing and advertising decisions you’ll be able to make based on the insights your data has revealed, you also now have the option of making some smarter choices about your brand management. For example:

Brand Identity/Brand Audience

Your best customers are mostly buying sale items. If you want to attract an audience of buyers who are less concerned about price and more concerned about style and fashion, you’re going to need to re-develop your marketing and advertising strategies in a manner designed to do a better job capturing that desired target audience’s attention.

But let’s say that you decide it makes more sense to focus on the existing best customers you already have – female fashion seekers looking for a bargain, and male gift buyers. In order to convert more untapped customer prospects who look just like these best customers, you may want to fine-tune your brand identity into one that’s as focused on bargains as it is on fashion.

Brand Messaging/Brand Experience

Now that your data is telling you more about your customers and their motivations, you’ll want to pepper your messaging – the content for your advertising, website pages, and social media – with plenty of points that speak to your customers’ desire for discounts and great gift items.

You may even decide that you want to tout the ease and convenience of your online shopping experience, since your data has helped you realize that it?s an especially positive one for your customers.

Creative

Your graphics and content should include elements that speak to your customers’ motivations (discounts and gift items), as well as their ages and geographic locations.

Based on your data, you may decide that visuals which are too upscale fashion-focused may be off-putting to shoppers looking for bargains, while men may be less interested in product details as they are in details like gift box options and shipping information.

MindEcology loves to help customers with data mining – and with branding. Tell us about your current business challenges.