You may have an e-commerce store that is doing well. You’ve created or sourced products that you know your customer want or need. When you look around, you see that celebrities and influencers sell a lot of products , but you don’t see how to apply what they are doing to your brand. If you would like to take your business to the next level and learn how to become an influential brand, this article will show you how you to do that.
The Benefits Of Building An Influential Brand
Everybody prefers buying from experts and working with experts. Would you prefer to buy clothing from an unknown brand or a brand that has a book about fashion trends and interviews about fashion on its website? The influence factor becomes even more important if you are selling to the affluent. This is one of the reasons why experts have to deal with less price resistance and influential brands are able to sell products at higher prices.
Indicators Of Influence
When you visit a website and you see a link to an Instagram account with over 18 million followers (which is how many followers Louis Vuitton has) or a YouTube video channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (Chanel has over 800,000 subscribers), you automatically decide that you are dealing with an influential brand.
All of these things and accomplishments do not happen on their own even for the biggest brands and celebrities. When you don’t see all the work that they are doing, it is easy to think that a few million followers just happened on their own. However, if you read the interviews and autobiographies of some of the most successful people in the fashion business, you will see that their accomplishments involved a lot of hard work.
The truth about all the criteria of being an influential brand, including having followers on social media, being mentioned in newspapers, having pictures of celebrities wearing your brand and others is that you can identify them and deliberately work on creating them.
Decide What Your Brand Stands For
All great brands represent something. It can be a philosophical position, a reason to do business with a brand or a message that a brand communicates. The representation can be bold or subtle. It can also reflect the values or aspirations of the customers and prospects.
For example, a significant percentage of men who buy Allen Edmonds shoes are older and conservative. To them, it is important that the brand makes the shoes in the United States, hires American workers and pays them well. Chanel brand is about style. Louis Vuitton is about luxury.
Getting Started Doesn’t Have To Be Hard
The smaller your niche or market, the easier it is to gain influence. Snapple first became popular because Rush Limbaugh advertised it on his show for free. Getting started doesn’t have to be complex. Think about how you can help your customers and prospects other than selling your products to them. For example, if you are selling shoes, you can write a guide about choosing shoes. You can also create a style guide.
Start a YouTube channel and record videos answering most popular questions about that your customers have. Talk about typical mistakes. Discuss trends that industry insiders know that others don’t know. Ask your loyal customers for feedback and ideas and use them. Track your progress through popular social media management tools.
We live in a culture driven by celebrity and influence. Celebrities and influencers are able to sell more products and services and do so at higher prices compared to their competition. They also have customers that are loyal to them. What and how they do may seem magical, but it is not. There are steps and actions popular brands have taken to become who they are and you can also take action to have your brand gain more credibility, trust and influence.