As a digital marketer, your goal is to get more and more customers. Whether you operate in the B2B segment or in the B2C, customers are your lifeline. No customers, no business.

Retaining customers is your next priority after acquiring them, and that’s possible when you make sure they are getting a seamless brand experience - something that your competitors may not be offering.

Brand experience

In 2016, 'brand experience' defines a brand. A brand cannot remain clueless about what experience it offers to its audiences. Every brand needs to see itself from the eyes of its customers to understand where it stands, in regard to providing a satisfying brand experience.

In this article, I’ll discuss how brands can offer their audiences engaging experiences so they keep coming back and want for more.

Work on the UI

A UI is not one element but an assortment of many elements. It can be broken down to the layout, the characters on it, the illumination effect, the font, the navigation items and many other items. The UI of a site determines the nature of consumer experience and resulting brand engagement.

UI design is no longer confined to desktop experience. The migration to handheld devices from desktop devices has made it necessary to optimize the UI for a better conversion rate through handheld friendly experience.

Two essential components that render an optimized mobile UI are fluidic patterns instead of rectangular patterns (which has become tiresome) and an optimal and uniform gap between a corner and the viewport.

Bring emotion

Human beings are not only rational beings, they are emotional beings too. Surprisingly, logic doesn’t appeal to us as much as emotion does. Scrolling through your news feed will easily prove that. Logical people being singled out as nerds is another proof of this.

Digital marketers can bring emotion into their brand campaigns to increase their performance. The recognition of empathy marketing has made it rather easy for them. Empathy marketing proves audiences are receptive to emotional appeals made by brands. Facebook may launch an empathy button soon.

Empathy is not the only emotion that helps brands. Fun, humor, hope, aspiration, etc are positive emotions that tug at the heart of the audiences. Making a campaign funny and humorous paint the brand in positive light. Use videos, infographics and other content formats to fill customers with positive emotion and create brand loyalty among them.

Big data analytics

Scientists say everything finally reduces to patterns. The songs that delight us, the picturesque landscapes that catch our attention, the beautiful faces that we hope to see around us are all patterns. Brand engagement materials are not exception to this rule.

To understand audience behavior and the nature of engagement, marketers have no other way than to rely on patterns. Big data analytics can lend them a hand. Digging into data can fetch marketing insights. By definition, big data analytics is all about findings patterns in large data sets.

There are correlations that marketers are not aware of, market trends that are not yet unearthed, preferences among customers that they haven’t noticed yet. Big data analytics gives them access to all these, so next time they can deliver an even better brand experience to their audiences.

Comprehensiveness counts

A campaign is like a complex machine. Unless the individual parts of a machine are perfectly in tune with each other, the machine cannot function. The same applies to designing a brand experience. Each aspect of the campaign should be equally appealing to audiences, so audiences can spot the harmony.

Imagine you have a restaurant, which serves mouthwatering food, and everyone in the town knows this. Very good. But your staff act disinterested with assisting their customers. People tend to notice the negatives and are more apt to be vocal about them over the positives. The news of the waiter treating customers poorly will spread like wildfire and ultimately hurt your branding.

To make a campaign comprehensive, a brand needs to pay attention to each single area related to it. The marketing, the product promotion, the product itself, the product experience, the delivery and the post-purchase assistance (if required), all areas contribute to forming a brand experience. If you are a digital marketer, don’t prioritize any individual area but all areas related to branding.

Customer feedback

The best way to know the brand experience is feedback you receive from customers. If the feedback is positive, customers are happy with your service and a positive brand experience is in the making. Negative feedback, on the other hand, implies a poor brand experience.

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