Brand relevance is the degree to which consumers find your business’ product or services relevant to their needs. In many cases, company owners and marketing leaders are acutely aware of their business’ relevance. Yet, that knowledge alone doesn’t always mean a company is adequately communicating its strengths to customers.
Only a few decades ago, customers judged brand relevance by products and prices. However, the advent of social media and a desire for deeper connection has transformed the customer-brand relationship, adding new dimensions to a previously straightforward process of selling and buying. A Sprout Social study revealed that 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them, and almost half expect brands to bring people together toward a common goal. Shoppers also seek to buy from ethical brands—over 70% of consumers expect the brands they interact with to be positive contributors to society and 48% expect them to raise the moral standard for others.
So, how can brand managers keep up in a world where technology is evolving consumer expectations almost daily? If you’re not depending on your public relations (PR) team to maintain brand relevance, studies show that you should be. Read on to learn the five top ways effective PR teams help businesses maintain brand relevance.
Develop a Strategic Communications Plan
With a clear understanding of who your target audience is and what their expectations are, you can develop a strategic communication plan to build trust around your company and the products or services you sell. Brand trust is customers’ confidence in your brand’s ability to deliver on what it promises. Without it, you can’t build customer loyalty.
Even one pitfall could jeopardize your standing. Research shows that 63% of customers will leave a brand they were previously loyal to after a single negative experience. Avoiding detrimental mistakes that lead to lost business starts with an aligned marketing team and is fully delivered when those expectations are met with corresponding products and services. To deliver what you promise, it’s essential to administer a consistent message across all departments. A strategic communications plan outlines end-to-end communications practices to strengthen messages across all departments.
Monitor Trends
To maintain brand relevance, your business must evolve with your customers. Trends may come and go, but they significantly impact consumer behavior and innovative changes that drive new products and services within industries. Monitoring trends that are important to your target audience will influence how you update your website, communicate across social media platforms, and design new products or services. There are three main trend types relevant to public relations.
- Trending Topics: These are the trends your target audience is talking about. Can your brand add value to the conversation?
- Industry Trends: These are the innovations disrupting your industry. Do you have relevant products and services that will continue to meet your customers’ needs?
- Digital Trends: These are the trends consumers expect to see when they connect with you online. Are your website or application graphics and user interface outdated?
Collaborate with Marketing
PR and marketing aren’t the same thing. Yet, as social media and other digital platforms infiltrate both functions, the lines between the two are becoming blurred. In a big-picture sense, marketing is about driving sales of products and services, while PR is about creating and maintaining a favorable image of the brand as a whole.
Modern marketing comes with responsibilities related to public communications, like responding to reviews and communicating on social media. Meanwhile, PR dips a toe into marketing responsibilities with every press release and branding message. When PR and marketing overlap and present a unified message, the resulting consistent branding messages set a strong foundation for consumer trust.
Plan for a Crisis
We are living in the information age where modern consumers have breaking news at their fingertips and instant communication is just one click away. Data breaches, poor decisions, and insensitive comments can instantly become headlines that make your customers doubt your brand. Fake news and misinformation have run rampant in the past several years,, but your customers may not hang around long enough to learn the truth if you don’t have a crisis management plan in place.
Public relations isn’t all about putting out fires, but handling crises when they do arise is a vital part of the role. Waiting to react until all hell breaks loose is the equivalent of expecting to put out a forest fire with a child’s squirt gun. Even with a plan and a professional team, handling a crisis in real time is an immense challenge. Without a plan, you’ll likely alienate customers and lose business. A brand’s ability to successfully manage a crisis can be the difference between salvaging its reputation and damaging it beyond repair. A crisis communications plan prepares brands and stakeholders to navigate any crisis confidently and allows you to communicate clearly and empathetically. As a result, your customers can focus on your recovery instead of your fall.
There’s no magic formula to keep a brand relevant in any industry. Brand relevance comes from hard work and an ongoing conversation with your target audience. As consumers continue to evaluate what is truly important in life, an emotional connection with trustworthy brands will likely be more valuable than ever. With the added pressure to please a cautious generation, PR is instrumental in keeping your business relevant. A unified message that resonates with the continually changing expectations of your target audience can impact your following, and your bottom line, more than you realize.
