8 Retail & Online Brand Growth Strategies

A successful, consistent brand is immediately recognized—even loved—by consumers, but many variables drive the success of your brand strategy. Even in a strong economy with significant market growth, strengthening an existing brand is challenging. However, continuously nurturing your brand growth strategies is critical to your company’s long-term success. Even if your sales are increasing, growing your brand is worthwhile as long as you can do so with a profit. 

Here are eight ways to encourage consistent revenue growth through online and retail for a more successful omnichannel brand strategy:

Make Your Brand Unique and Memorable

Creating a memorable, unique brand is about more than just a great logo, website, or packaging. It must include a consistent brand voice and a positive reputation or perception—brand positioning—that will keep your customers loyal, returning to buy your product repeatedly. Whether you use powerful influencers like G Fuel, repackaging like Duracell, or customer testimonials, making your brand unique and meaningful over time is vital for success. 

Your innovative brand development strategy must have a functional or emotional component to drive customer loyalty. Without a meaningful difference, a brand strategy will capture market share against its competitors and become nothing more than a price comparison rather than true brand loyalty. 

A brand like Lululemon, for example, draws returning customers because of its yoga and athletic products’ innovative functionality and high-quality fabrics. Customers loyal to Lululemon keep coming back without even bothering to compare their prices with their competitors. Lululemon’s principal business growth strategy is to create meaningful and unique differences with its brand, resulting in a solid customer base visually representing the brand to a potential customer.

Emphasize Your Brand’s Meaningful Difference

Once you’ve established your meaningful difference, emphasize it in all marketing channels of your branding strategy. Whether in the store, on a search engine, or on your website, emphasize what makes your brand distinct. 

Ensure your message is evident to your customers and reiterate it at every opportunity to drive consumer desire and get them to anticipate your products or services. Use strong SEO tactics and social media promotions to emphasize your brand’s unique and meaningful difference. Make sure you’re consistent with your brand voice.

Make Choosing Your Brand Easy

With all the online competition, ensure your products or services are easy to find. Make sure you’ve researched every opportunity you can to sell your product to establish meaningful market penetration where consumers take notice.

Whether you create an automated subscription or list your products on Amazon, make sure your products or services are easy for your customers to choose. In this integrated CPG economy, easy-to-find means taking an omnichannel approach. 

In your direct-to-consumer channel, make the shopping experience as seamless as possible, fixing any issues or glitches with your website or customer experience. 

• Ensure your web pages load quickly so you can keep potential conversions. 
• Make the purchase or use of your product easier for shoppers, whether they can log in as a guest, save credit card information, or sync with an Apple product.
• Have your customer service team ready to establish brand trust with an existing or new customer.
• Review your Google Analytics to understand better how your shoppers experience your website.

Tip: The internal growth of your DTC channel is essential for customer engagement and your ability to offer future retail promotions. Designate a team member or hire an agency to ensure that data collection and organization remain top priorities.

Make Sure Your Product Justifies Its Price Point

Review your pricing strategy and ensure you’re confident in your price point. If your customers are price-comparison shoppers, you can point out through your branding or marketing strategy that there’s more to your product than price, such as:

• Higher quality ingredients or formulations.
• Better product warranties or guarantees.
• Free installation or virtual support. 
• Faster delivery or white glove setup. 

Create a consistent set of advantages distinguishing your product or service from your competitors and develop your strategy to communicate the bigger picture. Remember, it takes five to seven brand impressions before a customer remembers a brand. Explain your added value to ensure that a higher price is not an issue for your customers. Consider Apple, for example. Because their branding strategy is meaningful and unique—known for their sleek designs and technological innovation—they don’t have to justify their prices. That’s because consumers expect to pay for the Apple brand.

Get As Much Exposure As You Can

As much as capital permits, create exposure to your target audience through all the media channels you can to get as much visibility for your brand as possible. You can use:

• Social media
• SEO content marketing strategy
• Local sponsorships
• Google ads
• Hulu ads
• And other growth marketing strategies

But make sure you’re altering your creative for each channel by being consistent with your meaningful and unique difference. You want to get as much exposure out of the market as you can without straying from your brand’s unique message. 

While we cannot always measure the impact of brand awareness, use metrics to find a balance between generating new conversions and spending ad revenue, then continue to evaluate your data. Alter your creative efforts for each channel, depending on what’s working.

Listen to Your Customers’ Needs When They Change

Pay attention to customers’ needs when they change, and watch your data to see what’s not working (or what’s broken) so you can add real value to your brand. Create innovative ways to bring new opportunities to your customers when their needs change. Don’t oversaturate your brand with meaningless variants and line extensions if that’s not what customers want. 

Create easy ways to get customer feedback. Remember to stay consistent with your meaningful and unique differences and ensure all your marketing reflects these.

Tip: Before revamping an existing product, test the market to determine if your product, packaging, and design resonate with existing consumers. At SmashBrand, we remove subjectivity from the entire design process and let the data do the talking. 

Maximize Existing Customer Retention

You want to keep your existing customers happy, so ensure their experience is superb. Whether online or in-store, fix bugs or issues that slow down or diminish a positive customer experience. If you nurture loyal customers, you’ll develop harder-to-beat brand equity and have more potential consumers to reach across all marketing efforts. 

Whether improving your return and exchange policies, making your shopping cart more seamless, or update your automated subscriptions. It’s important to keep changing with your current customers’ needs to keep them coming back. Create loyal customer incentives and innovate ways to appreciate repeat customers. 

Use Search and Shopping Tools to Increase Profits

According to Nigel Hollis in Branding Strategy Insider, three-fourths of brand growth comes from consumers predisposed to choose a specific brand. When purchasing in-store or online, you want to take advantage of that predisposition by delivering point-of-purchase (POP) marketing to potential customers. But Hollis reminds us to use price promotion strategically to drive sales and not rely on it for volume.

Employ POP marketing to support your product line in searches and e-commerce experiences so you can simultaneously optimize your profits and target your audience. Whether using search engine optimization, pop-up ads, packaging, digital coupons, or Pay-Per-Click campaigns, find effective ways to get your customers’ attention to trigger brand desire. 

Tip: Create specific Google Analytics codes on each website page to measure the impact of your digitally native ads. 

Let Us Help You Grow Your Brand

If you want to grow your brand or improve your branding strategy, SmashBrand is here to help. From brand development to packaging design, we guarantee product performance. Our proprietary testing process streamlines your product development, allowing you to create a new product, successfully navigate a brand refresh, or enter a new market. 

Book a time to discuss your project and learn how we can help you execute a market penetration strategy to grow your brand.