Building Brand Affluence

High growth brands are striving to bite a larger share of the market or possibly expand the market size altogether. These 4 strategies give you the edge to do that.

Hello,

If you’ve been reading my newsletters regularly, today marks a substantial change in them. I’ve moved over the Substack from Convertkit. I saw incredible merits of moving on to Substack after having gained some popularity and traction as well as an audience base. So here’s more on what the new page (with all past archives) looks like: Sak’s Newsletter

If you are in India or remotely related to the country, wish you a very happy Independence Day. And this marks our entry into the high-points of the calendar year. The festivals and holidays are around the corner. Tonnes of them from here on. And you know what that means: more money spent on almost everything.

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Every high growth brand is striving to either gain a higher share of the market or increase the market size altogether by introducing new categories. Both of them need significant muscle power in the form of:

• Ad dollars
• Brand recall

And as you continue to grow, there are several aspects of a business that get neglected or lack the sharpness to give you the edge over your competitors. Today, it is about sharpening your axes for the season ahead. Here’s my list of 4 edge-worthy tools that ‘high growth brands’ must start focussing on:

1. Superior Landing Pages:

And not ‘product pages’.

Like I haven’t spoken about them enough, But here’s more.

The concept of landing pages isn’t as popular as it should be. A landing page basically helps you create a flow that makes a customer want to buy your product. If not for all products, every brand must have individual landing pages for it’s highest selling products (top 3) and highest selling categories or collections.

It’s important to note that landing pages don't always have to be visible on your sitemap. It’s where your customer lands from the ad he’s clicked on. A well curated landing page helps lower your CAC (customer acquisition cost) over a period of time.

Setting up the right analytics within landing pages also helps improvise on your UX and functionality. Here’s more on Landing Pages.

2. Focus on Community Building:

If you haven't really focussed on building a community so far, this would be a good time to do so. I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll say this once again: communities are different from fans or followers. It’s basically ‘opportunities that you create for many to many interactions’ and not really brand to customer interactions.

Communities are a long term game and hence they directly impact your LTV (long term value) from customers. They break the conventional laws of conversion and bring new customers directly to the bottom of the funnel.

Think beyond just give-aways or discounts for your community members. Think of bringing together people who share the same values & interests to come together and have conversations with one another. Get them to give you feedback on your products, campaigns, price-points. The inherent value of building communities far exceeds tangible returns from marketing.

Here’s more on Building Communities.

3. Subscriptions

If you are a brand that can fall into the category of forming a habit, aim for subscriptions. Introduce innovative ways to bundle products and the periodicity of them for customers to subscribe.

Think of all the pain-points your customer faces where your product can simplify their lives. And hit them right there with ads or incentives to try out subscriptions. It's every DTC businesses’ biggest edge over uncertainty. 

Even non-habit forming brands can offer subscriptions with ‘surprise boxes’ every month. In fact subscriptions & brand collaborations are the new way of hooking up with your customers & other brands in one go.

Here’s more on subscriptions.

4. Focus on UX

If you’re an Amazon or Swiggy, you’ve got this one. But if you’re not and you rely on your own logistics / shipping / customer experiences, do not leave this one unresolved:

There’s no bigger loss for a brand to lose a customer to UX.

There’s tonnes of content out there and I’ll be adding no value in emphasising the value of UX. But here’s my list of areas which often get neglected while designing experiences for customers:

1. Product narrative on your website (if you’re still selling products, think about the challenges you solve instead)
2. Complicated site-maps (if your customer cannot navigate from product to purchase seamlessly, it’s probably broken)
3. Too many filters / collections to choose from (the more choices you give your customer, the more you confuse him)
4. Chats (if it’s a bot, unless you are Zomato, you won’t get away without a bad review)
5. Returns / Shipping (one of the major reasons to instill or break trust. If it’s hidden, it doesn't exist)
6. Payments (so much that can go wrong out here and it usually does)
7. Copy comprehensiveness (ideally, stories need to be consistent throughout)

There’s more on UX that you can get out here.

Today was about giving you that edge. There’s so much more lined up in the days to come. My next topic is: The Future of Ecommerce. So stay tuned.

If you’re looking to collaborate on these insights & experiences through my newsletter, hit me up. Or just let me know what would you want me to write about.

Until then, 

With Gratitude,

Sak