It’s Time To Brand – Branding Guidelines: Connect With Your Audience!

It’s Time To Brand (ITTB) is Amazing At Home’s very own branding mastermind course that has helped Amazon sellers scale their eCommerce business with step-by-step lessons on building their brand on and off Amazon. This is a 12-week course where you need only spend 1 hour a week to master effective branding strategies like the back of your hand. You’ll also get a chance to listen to AAH’s CEO and Amazon branding guru Amy Wees as she shares trade secrets in brand-building in the most simple, understandable, and engaging way. Watch the video below for a short recap of an important topic discussed in ITTB – Connecting With Your Audience:

 

What Could You Learn from Amy Wees?

In this recap of “Build The Connection” from the ITTB mastermind course – Amy talks about the value of creating a deep connection with your audience and why it could be the reason your customer would choose you over your competitor. Watch Amy’s short video and learn:

• Why connecting with your audience is the most challenging area of branding
• The importance of narrowing down your audience to the most specific niche or sub-niche
• Why competing with BIG brands is not worth it
• Why advertising to a wide audience is a waste of money

Do You Truly Understand Your Customer?

If you think you do – we have a question for you: why should they choose your brand over a multitude of competitors?

Justifying why we choose one brand over the other sometimes ends up being futile. Sometimes two products of different brands have the same exact features, deliver the same benefits, and are at the same price point – but out of the two, there is one that just feels like it’s the better choice. Why do you choose Nike over Adidas – or vice versa? It’s not because one brand is better than the other – but it’s because, in one way or another, that brand you chose was able to build a better connection with you.

Think about it. Whenever we face a dilemma – we always seek help or advice from people who have gone through the same thing. If you are a young mother struggling with child-rearing issues – you approach a fellow mom to ask for her guidance. Maybe you’d join social media groups where thousands of moms like you share their thoughts, fears, and wildest dreams about their children. Maybe you’d follow one mom influencer who totally gets what you’re going through. And don’t you feel that instant connection with that mom influencer – even though you’ve never even met her in person before?

So – the first step in building a connection is to truly understand your customer. It’s not just about research. We’d like to call it a deep dive into their psyche – immersing yourself in their journey. You don’t actually need to be a mom to understand the struggles of being a mother. You don’t need to be a mom to know what tone of voice, images, keywords, and colors resonate with a mother. What you need to do is learn to empathize with your customer’s struggles as if they are your own – talk to them in their own language, be part of the conversation and make them feel that you are one of them, and that they are heard.

Find that connection – build, nurture, and strengthen it over time. Once you’ve established that connection – it will come to a point where you won’t need to actively look for your audience. Your connection will always bring them back to you.

 

Transcript

Amy Wees: Today we’re going to be talking about connecting with your audience. I think that this is the hardest part for a lot of us because when we get started with our brands, we kind of have a lot to do. There’s a lot, right, we talked about the vicious cycle of a private label brand last time, and we talked about how you get busy with other things, you get busy building your brand, you get busy launching new products. The last thing on your mind is usually connecting with an audience off of Amazon, or how to bring traffic to your Shopify website, talking about building the connection. Last week, we talked about how to find your audience like “Who are they?” And, “why does that matter?” How do we look at our existing insights of our audience. And then this week, we’re going to talk about building the connection with that audience now that we know who they are.

So you have to realize that every customer before they engage with your brand, or make a purchase, whether that’s on Amazon, or your website – every single customer goes through a journey. And when you start to discover that and pay attention to the journey that you go through before you decide to buy something, this will help you understand the customer journey all that much better, it will help you find better products to sell for your brand. It will help you connect more with customers. When you get into that market research step of going through that same journey that a customer takes. It’s so insightful. So that’s the thing before the purchase, they had questions they had unmet needs, how can we get to them when they’re asking those questions? And how can we create content that’s going to engage with their questions and answer their questions and allow them to be part of the conversation?

“My neck is so sore, my neck, oh, man, I need an easy solution. I wonder if I need that.” That’s what I was wondering. And that’s what convinced me to click on their website. And then I saw all this stuff. And I was like, Oh, well, that seems really expensive. And I don’t know if I can trust these 133 reviews. And, huh, I think you should just buy it on Amazon, right? I can trust Amazon. So I still had a need, right? Even though I didn’t trust their website, they piqued my interest with this video, I still went through the rest of the research process because I wanted to try this. So that’s why I chose Amazon, I’ll buy it from a website that I trust one person that’s going to be interested in what we have to offer. Because we can’t compete with Nike, we don’t have their kind of audience. We might be able to one day.

They’ve built this whole thing around like we’re men, and this is our coffee. So you know, you can sell saturated products. As long as you target the marketing towards a sub niche of people. I’m in the kitchen organization niche, there’s so much that I can do on Pinterest, you have my my funnel that I drew up here of we’re building the top of the funnel with our brand voice. We’re starting with our brand voice, our headline our message, then we’re going to pick our platform, and we’re going to add a list of topics. And then we’re going to target a specific niche of people. What are people looking for? What are they asking questions about how to bake bread, you know, are baking bread exothermic or endothermic? Okay, cool. There’s some great content ideas here. We’re going to build our marketing schedules.

So I’m going to show you how this is done. List your day, your topic and theme for that day. And you can list to alternating themes, no theme at all week, which is on Monday, we are going to update your branding. We’re going to learn now how to make sure that your branding matches. Right. Have you ever gone like expectation versus reality, right? Like you, you you’ve been marketed to and you’re like, “Oh, this is so great.” And then you get the product and the branding is really terrible or just comes in a really crappy box or you’re just whatever it is right? And you’re just like what is this? We need to make sure that our branding and our community branding actually matches with what our customers are expecting.