In an increasingly complex business environment, the challenge for each and every company is how to deliver consistent, connected and meaningful brand experiences for its clients. What on earth is a ‘brand experience’ I hear you cry? Well, it’s a term that’s relatively new, so you’re forgiven if you’ve never come across it before.

Put simply, brand experience is how your brand lives across all of the touchpoints that your clients interact with. It’s like an ecosystem that exists around your brand and can encompass anything from your brochure, website, innovation, communications, events, customer service and social media.

So how does brand experience differ from client experience or client journey? With client experience, we’re talking about matching expectations on the hygiene factors. So it might be how fast your web pages load, if you deliver your services on time or respond to a customer enquiry promptly.

Brand experience is all-encompassing. It’s how people feel about a brand – the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from buying a brilliant product, or from having a great interaction with a customer service representative. It’s the memorable hero moment along a client’s journey. Get it right and it can have a significant impact on spending, recommendations and inevitably, loyalty.

There’s evidence to back this up too. Companies with a strong brand experience command 79% higher purchase intent and an average of 45 more Net Promoter Score points than those who offer a lesser experience. In fact, a MESH Experience study revealed that positive brand experience has around three times the impact on brand consideration compared with a neutral experience. Given all of that, to ignore brand experience and its ability to propel your brand to the top would be a huge mistake.

Here at Uniquity, we’re fascinated by any tech that can help us improve the overall brand experience for our clients – or anything that makes our business more efficient. Take a look at some of our favourite tools below and see if they can work wonders for you too.

ActiveCampaign

If you want to create great brand experiences, ActiveCampaign gives you all the email marketing, marketing automation and CRM tools you need. It also has a great function for managing leads. And there’s more to come. After raising another $100 million, it’s all set to build on its ability to automate, personalise, segment and overall improve the full brand experience. We’re increasingly using marketing automation to take the hard work out of managing new leads, onboarding and communicating with existing clients. Human interaction is of course still key but there are elements of the process where technology can make huge improvements.

Issuu

Issuu is the tool you need to send digital brochures in a standalone online reader, or to help you embed them in websites and emails. It takes your PDFs, images and text, then transforms them using its own templates and your design. It’s the perfect way to achieve a native experience on desktop, mobile web, app, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and all other social media. Brilliant for sending documents or to use for presenting in meetings.

Buffer

This is our social media scheduling tool of choice – it’s simple to use and has an effective sign-off process. And by having some of your social posts scheduled, you can focus your attention on the in-the-moment, more personal posts around your team, clients and events.

Calendly

We find this a brilliant tool for scheduling meetings and linking them effortlessly with your diary. It means your clients can book meetings at their own convenience and you’re updated instantly.

Zoom

With this simple-to-use video conferencing tool, you can meet your clients at any time and in any place. It’s brilliant for international calls too.

Otter

We’re just testing this one. It creates a meeting transcript in note form, saving you lots of time and allowing you to get your actions recorded more quickly. And that means more time to focus on what’s really important – your clients.

Soapbox

You can use this to deliver personalised videos to clients for updates and tutorials. With Soapbox, all you need to create a great video is a Chrome extension, a webcam, and something to say! Hit record and then edit to share your webcam, your screen, or a split-screen view.

Technology really does have the power to transform your business and we’re big fans. But before embracing any new tech we have one golden rule – we always start by making sure the original process is working well first. And Bill Gates agrees:

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

If you’re keen to improve the brand experience for your clients, a good place to start is with a mapping exercise. Best done as a team, this can give you a really clear view of where you can make a difference.