How Brands Communicate with Consumers

This post was most recently updated on August 7, 2023

Effectively communicating with your audience is important for your brand reputation. Whether a fortune 500 business or company of one, how you connect with your consumers is extremely important to your success.

7 Tips on How Brands Communicate with Consumers 

To communicate your brand effectively, you must have a few key factors before you begin. What makes brand communication successful isn’t just telling people about your products and services. Effective brand communication involves knowing exactly who your target audience is, how you’re different and better than your competition, and what your core values stand for. 

Consumers want to feel valued and appreciated. Here are a few ways to make lasting connections with your target audience that benefit you, your brand, and the ones you connect with. 

1. Create Your Brand Message 

Defining your brand message is much easier said than done. The message of your brand is a statement that embodies who you are, what you offer, and how you connect with your customers. 

Look at your brand messaging from an entrepreneurial standpoint. If you only had 60 seconds to convince the person you’re stuck in the elevator with to invest in your company, odds are you’d use your brand message to connect with them. 

2. Defining Your Brand

Your brand message is much more than knowing what problem you’re solving for your customers. You want to focus on the emotion your brand conveys, and how you’ll connect that on a deeper level to your consumers. 

For example, the Dove product brand message is based upon simplicity and empowerment in raw beauty. Dove products are based on simple ingredients and packaging. This reassures the consumers that real beauty is embodied by simplicity, allowing the beauty of the consumer to shine through in the end.

3. Choosing The Right Tone of Voice 

According to recent studies on consumer value, it’s become clear that what you say isn’t always as important as how you say it. The tone of voice used to communicate a brand has proven to be just as effective as the content being shared. 

People want to feel like they’re talking to another person, not a robot. Using natural language and thoughtful emotion throughout writing and images can convey a tone of voice that hits your audience’s heartstrings. Utilizing that sentiment and feeling can establish a lasting connection and memory for your audience. 

According to a recent customer experience index study done by Forrester,  76% indicate they’ll keep their business with the brand, 80% say they will spend more with the brand, and 87% will recommend the brand to friends and family members. That statistic is a key factor in determining how you should connect with your audience. The study shows that certain brands utilize human-like connections and that connection increases their audience’s loyalty to that brand due to that reason alone.

4. Find Your Target Audience with Brand Awareness

Once you know your brand message, your next step is to find your target audience. There are several varying principles in understanding who you want to attract to your brand: 

• Age
• Gender 
• Location
• Ethnicity 
• Hobbies 
• Earnings

Knowing the details of your brand is essential to understanding who you think could benefit from what you offer. 

For example, Tesla wouldn’t market to children, and a pizza shop in Chicago wouldn’t market to customers in California. You want your target audience to be direct enough to ensure profit from their margin. 

5. Establishing Your Content Strategy 

Once you know what you stand for and who your audience is, you can start to develop how you will get the message across. 

Creating content that is in line that connects your brand to your audience relies on attention to the personal experiences of your consumers. Pay attention to what type of people you’re marketing to, and put yourself in their shoes. How would you want to be spoken to? What message would you want to hear? 

6. Choosing The Best Platform for Your Business

Picking the right avenue of attraction is important. A beautiful and well-functioning website, in combination with effective use of social media engagement, is a surefire way to effectively communicate your brand with consumers. 

Customer loyalty and trust are only given when a brand can communicate its brand across all platforms.

Always make sure your branding represents your company or business, with the use of similar graphics, writing styles and text, images, videos, URLs, and usernames across all communication channels. 

7. Utilizing Social Media as a Form of Digital Advertising

Using social media platforms are a fantastic way to connect with your audience and communicate your brand. Social communication channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and more are designed to engage a brand with an audience. 

By utilizing your brand message and choosing an appropriate target audience, you can streamline your content marketing directly to consumers that make the most sense. You can also utilize analytics and statistics to see how your efforts impact consumer communication based on engagement. 

When social media is used correctly, it can also be used as a form of customer service by emphasizing the customer experience. By responding to comments, mentions, likes, tweets, etc., you can establish a lasting connection with your audience on a deeper, more personal level. 

How Brands Communicate with Consumers During a Crisis

During a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, brands have been forced to completely reimagine how they communicate with their audience and continue to network, even when their doors are closed to the public.  

How Social Media Can Help Business During a Crisis 

Social media can be a brand’s best friend or worst enemy during a crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic. Social media engagement creates an open door of communication between a brand and its audience, even when they can’t be seen face-to-face.

Utilizing a social media strategy to keep your audience informed and engaged allows a business to stay connected with the people that matter the most – their customers! 

By understanding the do’s and don’ts of social media, brands and businesses can better understand what to say, when to say it, and where. 

Crisis Communication in Response to Protests 

The fist key to crisis management is creating a crisis communication plan to help respond to crises like the George Floyd protests is crucial for all businesses during times of crisis. Businesses need to develop a Crisis Communication Plan for responding to protests due to the sensitive nature of the subject.

Offering a response to the public in real time can be extremely important in how the information is delivered. Having a communications strategy is key to ensure care, consideration, and knowledge of the subject matter are communicated to the public and crucial to offering a professional response that will help your business and not hurt it.

When to Hire a Brand Reputation Professional 

Creating these forms of content will help build relevancy for your brand as you establish a permanent online presence that is positive and geared toward the audience you are trying to reach. 

To learn more about how to build and promote your brand with social media the professionals at Reputation911 offer business reputation management services.