Did you know your brand is a promise to your customers?

How?

Your brand shows what customers can expect from your products. It reflects your vision and voice. So, after finding a market for your product, instead of wasting time, build on the momentum and connect with customers who want your products. 

You must send the word across to grow your audience and ensure your brand positively impacts the marketplace.

The impact your brand has on customers does not depend upon the physical value of your products, it depends upon how customers perceive your brand and determine the value your brand and products have in the marketplace. 

That’s why for 70% of marketers, building brand awareness is their top goal for social media. 

Maximizing your brand’s impact is essential regardless of whether you’re a kitchen table startup or an established headphone company. Try these fresh approaches to improve your brand’s impact. 

7 Ways to maximize your brand’s impact on the marketplace

Use these seven ways to maximize your brand’s impact:

1. Track brand health metrics

Tracking your brand health is developing a complete picture of what the brand is all about, allowing marketers to make smart and profitable business decisions.

Most companies focus on tracking brand health as their sales figure may convey a story, but it doesn’t convey the entire story. 

Your sales figure may be high due to your marketing efforts, but it fails to capture your customers’ sentiments.  

High sales figure doesn’t guarantee being popular on social media. For these reasons, marketers focus on tracking their brand health as it provides a complete picture of your brand with its ups and downs. 

Some important brand health metrics to track are:

• Social reach
• Total brand equity
• Brand loyalty
• Brand awareness
• Returning visitors
• Employee engagement
• Brand uplift
• Prompted brand recall
• Purchase intent
• Net promoter score (NPS)

2. Have your own webstore

While it’s worth selling on online marketplaces like Etsy, Myntra, Amazon, and eBay, never hesitate to have your webstore. 

Why?

When you sell on those marketplaces, your brand doesn’t get recognition, as the marketplaces take away the credit. Apart from charging a fee for selling your products, it becomes challenging to acquire relevant customer data. 

Again, your product may not easily stand out in crowded marketplaces or gain the required traction. 

Even more, competitors may target your visitors and listing and even place their advertisements on pages displaying your products. When customers buy from multiple marketplaces, they may not know whether your brand exists. 

Having an online store gives you the option to:

• Maintain complete control of your brand
• No restrictions on when to sell, what to sell, and how to sell
• Becomes easier to retarget existing customers and convert them into loyal members
• No marketplace fees

3. Combine your website and marketplace channels

A polished purchasing strategy is essential for creating an impact on the marketplace. 

A hybrid approach where you keep selling directly to customers (D2C) via your website and listing on marketplaces is a great way to encourage customers to purchase. 

Include a ‘Buy Now’ button on your website, and when the customer clicks, they get directed to the marketplaces selling that particular product. This strategy is beneficial for companies who lack the finances required to create a webstore.

Combing your website and marketplace channels serves three benefits:

• Cuts down on friction, ensuring customers effortlessly make a purchase
• Obtains valuable data and insights about the number of customers visiting your website
• Minimizes competitive distractions

Providing such a hybrid experience is the key to success as it enables customers to purchase from a marketplace of their choice. 

Giving your customers what they require helps your business thrive, attracts traffic to your website, and creates a positive rapport between the customer and brand, which is invaluable.

For instance, notice how Tado uses the ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Where to Buy’ buttons on their website redirecting customers to different marketplaces where their product is easily available.

4. Create value beyond your product

A key aspect of improving a brand’s impact is creating value above your product. Think out of the box to inform, entertain and educate your customers.

Share your knowledge through blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Apart from this, focus on creating customer-centric content on marketplaces.

Ensure this isn’t about making sales directly. Including a sales pitch in every piece of information you share may turn off customers who expect informational content. Instead, ensure some of your content focuses on relationship-building and brand awareness practices, creating more opportunities for audiences to know your brand. 

The more they know your brand, the higher are the chances of purchasing. For instance, Whole Foods, a grocery and food delivery app, has an exciting community blog. 

Apart from helping customers order food and grocery online, the company provides mouth-watering recipes along with photos and tips to keep your kids healthy and provide a spotlight on new and local vendors.

What’s more interesting is that the company takes educational content to another level by putting posters explaining various things, such as the importance of sustainable seafood. 

5. Keep the metaverse in mind

With the tech world going gaga over the metaverse, marketplaces will likely embrace it sooner or later. 

When creating your marketing and sales strategy for marketplaces, keep the metaverse in mind, as it’s likely to dominate the boring and flat product pages. 

Imagine the experience of your customers who wear Virtual Reality (VR) headsets and walk through your virtual store rather than manually browsing through the flat and boring product pages. 

Preparing in advance helps a brand contextualize its product’s performance, quality, and value. 

Keep a hawk eye on this technology, as it’s likely to come sooner than expected. 

The clock is ticking, and it’s probably the right time to prepare yourself for new technologies coming your way.

6. Leverage the power of customer experience and testimonials

When was the last time you purchased a product because an advertisement prompted you?

It’s tough to recall, right? You may purchase a gas cooktop or an air fryer because you saw a family member using it at their house party. 

The same holds for your customers. Rather than relying on advertisements and promotional campaigns you run, recommendations and testimonials from existing customers excite them. 

Everything boils down to social proof. 

Today, customers hesitate to rely on a company’s self-proclamation advertisements. More than 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. 

Experience-sharing by people who have previously used your products drives customers to make a purchase. Typically, customers prefer products with a rating between 4-4.5. High ratings show your product’s quality and usefulness. 

Typically, when a customer has to choose between a product with a 3-star rating and a product with a 4.5-star rating, they’re likely to prefer the latter. That’s the impact of star ratings and customer testimonials.

7. Discover trends

Another way to maximize your brand’s impact is by searching for best-seller products. Focus on searching through hot topics and trends on social media and search engines to know what your customers will likely search on the marketplaces.

Here are a few ways of discovering trends:

• Use keyword trends: Use Google Trends or different paid keyword tools to identify products with an upward trend. This trend might vary depending on the market direction, customer interest, and annual growth rate. 

• Follow trends from social media: Besides searching for trends on Google, discover trending hashtags on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Keeping an eye on these trends helps you see content and advertisements gaining customers’ attention.

• Find customers’ pain points: Often, when you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you know their pain points. Think from your customer’s perspectives and develop solutions for unsaid customer problems. For instance, the idea of having a storage basket between the driver and the passenger seat came up when the founder was driving children from school every day and had nowhere to put their carry-on bags. Such innovations separate you from other brands, and you become your customer’s favorite.

Maximizing your brand’s impact

There’s no secret recipe to make your marketplace popular overnight. Building a strong presence on these marketplaces takes time as you have a lot of competition trying to snatch your customers.

Maximizing your brand’s impact is an investment as it takes time and resources to become a brand customer associate for a particular expertise. 

Consistently ensuring your company is available at the top of the marketplaces and being in places where your audience readily purchases shows your expertise and authority.

It’s your responsibility as a marketer to communicate the brand’s value to mindful customers who search for a brand they want to be a part of and become loyal customers.

Author’s bio

Priya Jain has been copywriting professionally for over eight years. She has attained an engineering degree and an MBA. She teaches math, spends her time running behind her toddler, and tries new recipes when she isn’t writing. You can find her on LinkedIn.