How to define brand strategy with Relative Insight
A great brand is never an accident, but the product of purposeful decisions made along the way. Brand strategy is something that lies at the heart of any thriving business and ultimately leads to customer loyalty and commercial success.
Communicating a brand’s mission, personality and story to customers across multiple touchpoints can be challenging. However, the advent of big data and analytics is heralding a sea of change in the way marketing and brand strategies are being delivered and measured.
It’s becoming easier and more efficient than ever before to understand your customers, competitors and market trends. In this article, we uncover why brand strategy is important, how text analytics can help you to define brand strategy and how insights discovered through comparison can empower you to deliver breakthrough messaging.
What is brand strategy?
A brand strategy is a long-term plan for communicating your brand’s identity, mission and core values to potential customers, employees and internal stakeholders. It’s used by businesses to cultivate a certain image of their brand and guides the public-facing and internal aspects of a business.
A clear and comprehensive brand strategy sets a company up for long-term success. Ultimately, it defines exactly what your brand identity is and where you fit into the market. Brand strategy forms the foundation of everything you do—from advertising, packaging and product development, to social media and customer service. Brand strategy answers questions such as:
- What does your product or service do?
- What problems does your brand solve?
- Who is your target audience and how do you identify them?
- What are your core business values?
- Who are your competitors?
- How do you communicate authentically with your customers?
- What style or tone of voice will best help your brand meet its objectives?
Why is brand strategy important?
A well-crafted brand strategy can help you differentiate your business from competitors, drive revenue, gain market share and support long-term growth.
Do you want to define a compelling brand strategy? Keep in mind that the best brand strategies are those that reflect a deep understanding of customers, enabling businesses to execute marketing campaigns and growth plans with clarity and precision. They consider customer pain points to inform product innovation and improve the customer experience.
89% of customers are loyal to brands that share their values. Creating a solid brand strategy will ensure you align your brand with a narrative that resonates with customers, helping to build loyalty and gain competitive advantage.
How to define brand strategy with text analytics
Unstructured text data has typically been hard to analyze, with businesses finding it difficult to uncover useful actionable insights. However, with the evolution of text analytics and natural language processing, brands spanning a huge array of industries can finally harness the power of qualitative data to define their brand strategy.
Relative Insight is a text analytics platform that generates unique insights through comparison. The software compares the language used in two or more text data sets, pinpointing the linguistic features (words, phrases, topics, grammar and emotions) that are more prominent in each.
Brands are now choosing comparative text analysis solutions like Relative Insight to define three key elements of their brand strategy:
Customer research: Uncover customer pain points and be reactive
All businesses strive to be customer-centric. A key element of this is conducting robust customer insights research when you define brand strategy. With Relative Insight, you can understand your target audience on a whole other level.
Customer segmentation
Understand how different customer segments feel about your brand or various topics by comparing customer feedback across age groups, genders or geographies. Comparative text analysis enables you to clearly understand the differences in how various demographics speak to deliver more tailored messaging, plan advertising strategies and create stronger connections.
Customer vs brand language
Speaking in a language that resonates with the customer is key. Through text analysis, you can compare your brand tone of voice to that of your customers, to reveal whether you could better align your communications or as a method to define brand strategy and values.
Sentiment analysis
Compare 1-star reviews to 5-star reviews to understand the differences between happy and frustrated customers. Use these insights to inform and define brand strategy, from product development to improving customer service.
Analyze customer data over time
By comparing customer data over time, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, assess the impact of product innovation or evaluate whether changes in your brand strategy have been effective.
Competitor intelligence: Differentiate yourself from competitors
Knowing your competition in business is a key component necessary to define your brand strategy. Comparative text analysis makes it easy to perform robust competitor analysis as it allows you to assess the wider competitive landscape, understand what your competitors are offering and find your competitive advantage.
Comparing brand messaging
Comparing brand messaging uncovers what makes each competitor unique or similar. By analyzing the language that your competitors are using to promote themselves, you can differentiate your brand positioning in the market, as well as uncover marketing opportunities you might otherwise miss.
Comparing brand perception
Analyzing how your competitors communicate is only one-half of the story. Using text analysis, you can understand how you and your competitors are perceived by consumers. This reveals new ways to draw in customers, increase market share and ensure you’re speaking in your target audience’s language.
White space analysis
Using comparison as a means of competitor benchmarking can help you understand where your competitors are missing the mark and highlight customer frustrations that require a solution. This form of white space analysis uncovers new opportunities that could be incorporated into your brand strategy.
Example: What’s the best music streaming app?
Topical trend analysis: Predicting consumer behavior
Turn open-source conversations into business-relevant insights, by analyzing consumer and market trends with text analysis. Investigate text data to uncover trends and patterns and understand how consumers are speaking.
Tracking trends over time
Discover the differences in how consumers are speaking about the same topic over different time periods. Longitudinal analysis reveals customer trends that weren’t aware of, which may be significant to develop brand strategy.
Test your strategies
Have you ever wanted to implement a new service, feature or marketing plan, but you were unsure whether it would be useful for your target consumer? With Relative Insight, you can analyze the conversations around certain initiatives or services. This enables you to make informed decisions on whether to include these ideas in your brand strategy.
Exploratory topic analysis
Analyzing how consumers speak about an array of topics can reveal important insights necessary to develop brand strategy. For instance, looking at the differences in how people talk about related topics, product categories or health issues.
Examples of this include vodka vs whiskey, laptops vs desktops, heart burn vs acid reflux. This analysis can help you develop your products, understand consumer psychology and buyer needs, decide what to invest in and align your communications.
So what?
Whether you’re a new company looking to enter a crowded market, or an established business wanting to overhaul your brand and establish yourself as cult, defining a clear-cut brand strategy is the key to success. With Relative Insight, you can delve deeper into customer research, differentiate your brand from competitors and predict consumer behavior and trends to define brand strategy that triumphs.