Original story from Advertising Week 360

Consumers are being barraged with advertising and branding messages online, which means businesses must rise above the noise to etch themselves in the minds of consumers to be top-of-mind at the time of consumption or get lost with the crowd. Businesses can execute two strategies to be top-of-mind: high-powered messaging or frequent messaging.

In this article, we will focus on high-powered messaging, although frequent messaging is rather straight forward as businesses engage in frequent, cross-channel advertising to catch the consumer near or at the point of consumption. High-powered experiences, on the other hand, are largely defined by the emotional impact felt by the consumer at the time of the experience, since the strength of memory, and therefore the strength of the attachment to a brand, is explicitly defined by the strength of the emotion felt in the instance of the experience. For an experience to be high-powered, it must be relevant and emotional.

So, how does a business make a digital experience high-powered?

1. Make it relevant. Businesses need to organize their websites based on the problems and demands of their customers, along with the proposed solutions, rather than along meaningless product categories or business departments. Consumers have reached a business because they feel a need or frustration; talk to those frustrations to catalyze the emotions behind them.
2. Add customer stories. Add customer testimonials and cases to your advertisements, websites, and landing pages as much as possible, focusing on short videos that talk to specific issues. You are more likely to connect to a lead if they can empathize with one of your videos.
3. Resolve customer issues quickly and completely. A company’s best chance to create an emotional impact is to resolve a customer’s issue to great satisfaction. Customers already start with an emotion, a negative one, which means the memory is already charged. They are annoyed or frustrated by an issue, and usually do not have great expectations since most companies fail to get this right. By resolving the issue to great satisfaction, you are embedding two emotions into the experience, the original frustration and the eventual satisfaction, and their contrast makes the experience stand out.

The third point is especially important online since most companies force a customer to switch channels if the contact originates online, to the customer’s frustration, forcing them to call in. Businesses should always meet the customer at the point of origination; face-to-face if they visit physically, via the phone if they call in, and virtually if on the website. Chat boxes are helpful in this regard, but we have witnessed the best results when businesses use cross-interactive platforms such as CrozTop to communicate with the customer, which allows instant bonding and resolution via video calling and media sharing.

To become top-of-mind, a brand must deliver high-powered experiences to audiences or messages frequently. Mastering high-powered experiences online are rarely done well, conveying an explicit advantage to those companies that do.

About the author:

Jason Junge is an MIT/Kellogg-educated Business Strategy expert in high-tech that has worked with companies ranging from new startups to Microsoft, to craft and execute successful growth strategies. He is currently CEO of PointerTop, an innovative Remote Sales and Service Software company based in Tempe, AZ.