Brand Positioning During the Pandemic: 5 Steps to Building a Strong Brand Identity

While most businesses have a razor-sharp focus on search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media management, they commonly sideline the importance of building a strong brand identity.

No matter how great your sales are, not investing in nurturing your brand identity could backfire in the long run. Once you stop trying to retain customers, you have to invest even more marketing budget to acquire new ones or win old ones back.

As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, working on your brand identity has become more important than ever. At a time of heightened chaos, uncertainty, and flux, people are increasingly looking to connect with empathetic brands that offer more than just products/services.

If you’re unsure about how to get started, we’ve assembled a few ways to help you build a strong brand identity during the ongoing pandemic.

1. Humanize Your Brand

Within the span of several months, millions of people lost their jobs, access to healthcare, and other socioeconomic necessities. And it didn’t stop there. From racial inequity to countless other political injustices, the world has been craving care, support, and empathy.

Humanize your brand by actively showing your support and creating thoughtful, engaging, and empathetic content. Adopt a charity that’s helping people who are unemployed or struggling to buy groceries. Showing that you care—and taking measures to help affected communities—will go a long way in strengthening your brand identity.

2. Use Social Media to Develop and Strengthen Your Brand Identity

Social media is one of the most powerful tools for not just strengthening brand identity but also developing it.

While you can use the content on your website to build your brand voice, social media can help you amplify it as part of your long-term strategy.

Engage with your followers by posting enriching content, leaving uplifting comments, and posting interactive polls. These strategies will crystalize your brand identity and help customers build memorable relationships with your brand.

3. Be Responsive

Responsiveness is the golden rule of building a stellar brand identity. Monitor your social media pages, blog pages, and website’s contact page to ensure you respond to each query, complaint, and feedback in a timely manner. Brands with a high response rate are generally deemed more reliable and trustworthy.

As the two key elements of a brand identity, reliability and trustworthiness will help you dominate your respective industry.

Depending on your brand personality, your responses may be a tad more formal or informal, but should always be courteous and respectful. If you run a clothing store, you’ll probably opt for a casual tone. However, if you offer legal services, formal—albeit unmistakably polite—responses are much more appropriate and fitting to the authority and expertise that you provide.

4. Ensure Transparency Across the Board

When people interact with your brand, they should immediately be able to find answers to important questions they may have. If they sense that you’re hiding essential information or not being forthright, they’ll develop a negative perception of your brand.

For instance, hiding or unscrupulously rephrasing information to mislead customers can be detrimental to your brand identity; this may include claiming that your products are organic when, in fact, maybe some of the ingredients are but the entire product is not.

Ensure transparency across the board to strengthen your brand identity and increase customer retention. At a time when people are more mistrustful, more skeptical, and more fearful than ever due to the pandemic, infusing your brand identity with integrity and straightforwardness reinforces your authenticity and will work in your favor.

5. Don’t Let Complacency Take Over

Oftentimes, businesses go the extra mile to establish a winning brand identity only to abandon the strategy within just a few months. If you’re taking active measures to build your brand identity but give up halfway through, you’ll have to work twice as hard to build up your momentum later on.

People have a short attention span. If you fail to support and execute your brand identity by posting content and engaging with customers on social media as well as in public, they’ll forget about you and possibly turn to your competitors.

Don’t be complacent. Establish and strengthen your brand identity with consistent activity to keep it top of mind. This is especially important during the ongoing pandemic.

Are you struggling to build or rebuild your brand identity? We can help.

As a full-service marketing firm, we specialize in helping clients establish a winning brand identity and dominate their respective industries. At OAK Interactive, we steer clear of the regular one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, we create custom strategies for each client to build a solid foundation that helps them execute long term.

From delving into the unique value your business delivers to customers to developing a cohesive brand message that resonates with your audience, we check all the boxes.

Click here to find out more about our winning brand identity development and rebuilding services. For more information, call us at (832) 321-3196.

Our services also include social media management, reputation management, local search marketing, website design, content creation, video production, and more.