Applying Your Brand Across The Entire Customer Journey: A Handy Step-By-Step Guide

“Branding is the subtotal of all the experiences your customers have with your business.”

If you’ve read my blog posts before, you’ve probably heard this quote by Brian Eisenberg. In fact, it was featured in one of the first blog posts I ever wrote about branding. So there’s your first clue that it’s a pretty powerful statement! 

The key in that quote is “ALL the experiences”. Branding isn’t just about your website, your Instagram or your logo - it’s about ALL of the experiences that someone has with your business and how they come together to create your brand’s reputation. It’s the whole process and every experience along the way. 

The experience that someone has with your brand can majorly influence the reputation that you have in their mind - it’s up to you to make sure those experiences are as positive as possible! We’ve probably all had experiences with brands where the littlest things made even just one part of it absolutely amazing - that’s what we want to do throughout the whole experience. 

To do that, I’m giving you a handy step-by-step guide to applying your brand across your entire customer journey, so that every interaction is on-brand, intentional, and leaves people feeling amazing and bursting to tell their friends all about it! 

Step 1. Know how you want your brand to look

Make sure you have clear guidelines on what your brand should look like. Should it look really fun and bright? Are there certain brand colours, patterns or fonts that you should be using?

You’ll be able to determine this using your brand strategy. For example, you’ll know that you want it to look a certain way because you want your audience to feel a certain way or because you want to attract a certain kind of person - all of those things are going to feed into those decisions. 

To find out more about how to develop these elements of your brand strategy, click here to check out the other topics on my blog.

Step 2. Know how you want your brand to feel

Next, you need to decide how you want your brand to feel and how you want your audience to feel when they interact with it. 

There are so many different feelings and vibes your brand can have - you might want it to feel really bubbly, fun, light-hearted and cheeky, or you might want it to feel really serious, professional and direct.

Then think about how you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand. Again, there are so many different options here depending on how you want your brand to feel - you could make them feel super excited or you might want them to feel really secure and safe with your brand. 

Step 3. List your brand’s touchpoints

Once you know how you want your brand to look and feel, list every touchpoint that a client or customer has with your brand throughout their customer journey right now. 

Let’s say you’re an artist. Your customer journey could be that they: 

• Find you at a market stall
• Pick up a business card
• Follow you on Instagram
• Click through to your website
• Go to your online store, find something they want to buy and check out
• Receive delivery updates until the product arrives
• Experience the packaging and product itself once it arrives
• Receive follow-up emails offering discounts or loyalty opportunities
  

If you’re a service provider, this might look different. Your customer could: 

• Hear about you from a friend
• Check out your website
• Email you to talk about working with you
• Book a discovery call with you
• Receive a quote from you for them to accept
  

Whatever it is that you do, go through your whole process, think about every moment that your clients or customers interact with your brand, and list every single step along the way. It might seem like something you don’t have to do, but it’s super important! 

Step 4. Streamline your process

Now that you’ve listed out your customer journey, think about whether you can cut out any of those steps.

You may realise that it takes someone 5 steps before they can book in with you but it should only take 1-2. Alternatively, you may actually realise that you want to have a longer process so that you can vet your clients before working with them. 

Whether you cut out steps, automate them or outsource them, think about how you can make the entire process easier, more streamlined, more accessible and more approachable for both you and your clients. 

Step 5. Make your process look and feel on-brand

Once you have your clearer, streamlined customer journey, you’re going to look at every single step along the way and ask yourself two questions. 

How can I make this look on-brand? 

Let’s say someone has just purchased something from you and they’re getting a confirmation email. How can you make this email look on-brand? 

You might need to update your email template so that it has your logo at the top and is using your brand colours for the buttons. You want it to be recognisable as your brand in their inbox. Make it feel aligned with the website they’ve just come from and what they’ll receive in the mail. 

Go through your customer journey and think about the consistency of how your brand looks across all those experiences. 

How can I make this feel on-brand? 

Earlier in this process, you decided how you wanted people to feel when they interact with your brand. Now, you can incorporate this into the steps of your customer journey. 

If you want your brand to make people feel celebrated, then the email might have confetti and really exciting copywriting to make them feel hyped, celebrated and excited to receive whatever it is that you’re selling. 

Work out how you’re going to make each experience and touchpoint feel really aligned with your brand voice and the personality of your brand. 

Ask yourself these two questions about every single touchpoint and brainstorm the ways that you can make them look and feel more on-brand. 

Step 6. Implement those things

The final step is that you’re going to go and do those things. 

You may find that there are parts of your process that you need to cut or change to improve your client experience. You might decide to outsource or automate some parts to make things easier for you and your clients, or to help your process look and feel more on-brand. 

No matter what you choose that works for you, you can use this step-by-step guide to help you apply your brand across your entire customer journey and to give your customers an incredible experience!

Remember - it’s not just about individual experiences, it’s about the sum total of ALL your experiences. Make sure that every experience that someone has with your brand is on-brand, intentional and amazing, and they’ll have the best time and keep coming back for more. 

Good luck and I can’t wait to see how you level up your whole brand experience by doing this!