Resonance marketing actively seeks to build a relationship with clients and customers that fosters brand awareness, equity, and loyalty. Resonating with a brand is what keeps a service or product at the forefront of someone’s mind. If done correctly it can result in the conversion of a potential customer into a loyal brand advocate. And thereafter that customer is retained as they prefer your services or product above a competitor’s. An emotional connection with your brand also means that an existing customer is less likely to be swayed by price fluctuations or competitor bargains. This makes creating an emotional resonance in advertising an important cornerstone of any marketing team’s strategy.
Traditional Marketing vs Resonance Marketing
Traditional marketing targets audiences using sales pitches that, for example, focus on price point, performance, and Return on Investment (ROI). In contrast, resonance marketing seeks to deliver advertising messages that reflect the intended audience’s values and interests. This is done with the intention of building and sustaining a longer-term, stronger emotional connection between the brand and its audience. With this connection set, brands can continue to deliver value in the form of education, entertainment, and inspiration, building towards brand loyalty, and fueling customer retention.
Understanding Resonance Marketing
Essentially brand resonance determines the extent a customer is prepared to foster and retain a connection with you. Resonance theory assumes that your audience brings with them a baseline of existing information that is intertwined with feelings. Thus, developing the desired emotional branding means working with what your audience (customers) already knows.
3 Foundations of Resonance Marketing
- Brand Awareness makes sure your audience knows who you are and what you do.
- Brand Equity ensures that your customers value your specific products or services.
- Brand Loyalty keeps your customers returning to your service and preferring your products.
Investing in this foundation will lead to longer-lasting customer relationships, which in turn will translate into greater profit and long-term sustainability.
How to Build Brand Resonance
Commonly brand resonance is portrayed using a pyramid designed by Kevin Keller. Its logic is that a strong brand has the right image which is based on positive customer experiences. Through positive experiences, customers assign value to a service or product that results in them supporting and promoting the brand.
The Brand Resonance Pyramid
Each level of the brand resonance pyramid seeks to answer a specific question. In so doing, they work towards the overarching goal of resonating with a customer. This step-by-step guided journey is designed to create customer loyalty through brand resonance. Successful emotional resonance in advertising can be accomplished when each level is in place.
Four Levels of the Brand Resonance Pyramid
1. Customers need to be able to understand the importance (salience) of your brand. This means creating an awareness of your brand’s identity. It is accomplished by answering questions about what your brand is and what it distinctively offers customers.
2. The second layer aims to help customers decide what your brand means to them. This is accomplished by creating positive emotional associations linked to brand performance and brand imagery. For example, meaning can be created by using words such as reliable and cost-effective. When combined with logos, fonts and colors that appeal, brand-associated imagery can be established and strengthened.
3. An audience’s response to a brand is underpinned by their judgement of it and the feelings it evokes. This third layer therefore aims to build on a customer’s perceived and actual experiences of your brand.
4. A branding relationship has two parts. The first is the journey you lead your audience on so that they can discover the who, what and why of your brand. This is how you get to resonance. The second step is continuing to resonate and reaffirm the existing connection with your customers.
Strategies for Creating Resonant Marketing Campaigns
A marketing strategy needs to have a customer-centric message in order to resonate. Specifically, what needs to be answered is: how can your brand improve or enhance my life? While a blanket approach across many platforms will result in customers, a targeted campaign has a better conversion rate and is more cost-effective. Relevancy and reach are important aspects of any resonance marketing campaign.
Relevancy is about reaching the right people at the ideal point in their user journey. To do this, an ideal customer profile is necessary. This should include an understanding of what challenges a targeted customer faces that they are likely to want externally solved, and when those might show up. For the reach of a campaign to be effective, those designing it need to understand the habits of their ideal customer. For example, what digital platforms do they use and are they likely to favor a specific social media platform?
What Happens When a Brand Doesn’t Resonate?
The opposite of brand resonance is dissonance. This is when someone has negative associations with a brand or product. It results in unpleasant feelings when they think of or encounter the brand. Practically, dissonance translates into a decision to not engage further with a service or buy a product. At best it’s an isolated association with a specific product, not a range. The worst-case scenario is excessive negative feedback.
When a brand fails to resonate with customers it’ll often result in negative word-of-mouth and a distrust of the brand. All of which don’t bode well for sales or the brand surviving in a competitive environment.
Measuring the Impact of Resonance Marketing
The impact of a marketing strategy can be measured by focusing on three areas and then collecting the relevant metrics (data).
Three Impact Measuring Questions
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- How has your marketing strategy built brand equity?
- What impact has your marketing strategy had on the business?
- How and what business leads and profits has your marketing strategy generated?
There are numerous ways to answer these questions and KPIs should be designed accordingly. For example:
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- Measuring paid and organic traffic to the brand’s website.
- Assessing brand search terms.
- Tracking the number of queries and relating to conversion rates.
- Gauging the ability of your brand to influence price considerations.
The Future of Resonance Marketing
Brand resonance better ensures that customers return as well as promotes a brand. These two factors mean that resonance marketing is a vital forward-thinking marketing strategy that’s here to stay. It also means that the sooner it’s incorporated into an overall brand strategy the more successful marketing campaigns will be.
For those who want to get brand resonance marketing right from the start, working with an experienced partner is key. SocialQ is an experienced digital agency that delivers an outside experience with an in-house partner mentality and operations to augment your capacity and performance. Our unique partnership approach has been shown to successfully deliver the desired results.
Contact us to discuss how SocialQ can partner with you to design and implement a resonance marketing strategy that achieves.