Future-driven Brand Engagement: How Narrative Enforcement is Revamping Business Value

Our guest author says PR is a great tool to reinforce the idea behind how a brand meets the customer's pain points.

Customer centricity lies at the heart of any business today owing to the massive rise of competition and the competitive strategies that follow to grab a chunk of any market. There lies umpteen opportunities for any business to take the lion's share in the long run if they hold onto the power of customer centricity. Narrative building, which oftentimes deploys PR departments to carve 'stories that matter' for the stakeholders of a company, has emerged extensively as a tool for reinforcing the idea behind how a brand meets the customer pain points and delivers the 'need of the hour' in the most proficient manner.

As per Forbes, “the value of PR can be hard to describe. However, no matter our status, one thing that PR has always owned is the ‘story’. Regardless of the flavour of marketing, the story matters. Always has, and always will". As the number of opinions and opinion leaders rise, there is a need to increase the focus on fundamental parameters for effective brand building and establishing strong brand resonance.

Below are some of the most vital aspects of building long-term business value, broken down in order of importance-

• Smoothening Customer Touchpoints:

In today's day and age, strengthening all aspects of customer reach and engagement is not enough. It has become imperative to improve all customer touchpoints, from the website/app navigation experience to the resolution of queries and post-purchase services, the entire user experience should be seamless to ensure preferential treatment from customers. Not only this, in the league of the plethora of businesses refining their service delivery, sometimes it might not be enough to do everything right. Reinforcing the narrative of customer satisfaction being the top priority of your business is key to staying ahead of the curve.

To facilitate this, businesses are increasingly making use of native advertising or digital PR for boosting the reach and positive narrative of their brand. Digital PR is one of the most robust ways of ensuring long-term brand building for any brand while exposing a business to its target population, positively. It makes use of powerful platforms, preferably from the news media industry to back the voice of your business.

As per a report, the glaring data points towards the fact that ramping up ease and a smooth experience at every little customer touchpoint can go a long way in harnessing the probability of what loyal customers can bring to your business.

The end goal should be customer loyalty and reaching the ambit of brand differentiation that will bring opportunities for the brand to charge a premium and relish undue importance by default.

But how do brands get closer to the moon in hyper-competitive industries today?

Other potent measures that are supplementing the aspects of brand building entail the following-

• Powerful and first-mover innovation

Innovation, innovation and innovation. Beaten to death but one of the most integral aspects of ensuring that customers don't lose interest in your brand. Why does Apple come up with its own new version every single year to beat the last best version? This is done to perpetually stay in news and create a buzz about the brand. When customers attach a brand with a sense of excitement, every new product release is set to be a hit.

• Robust sentiment analysis

Sometimes, a business might be averse to what people are actually talking about their brand. It might not be because of negligence but because there simply are too many voices and business teams trying to put the best foot forward. Or sometimes, your business might be inching towards destruction but you wouldn't have felt the fire already! In such cases, sentiment analysis, which covers the ambit of deciphering what tone people are associating your brand with while making use of intelligent software that catches keywords to give you an analysis might come really handy.

A single bad review can sometimes be the reason for decreased sales in a particular region that you couldn't address, negative comments are amplified more than positive comments today, hence sentiment analysis of texts, voice messages, comments made on social media and transcripts of customer conversations with your grievance departments are quintessential in understanding where you might need to tune the chords.

The co-authors Md. Gulrez Alam and Md. Badshah Ansari are also the co-founders of a Kolkata based PR agency called Teamology Softech and Media Services Pvt. Ltd.