How to Successfully Market Your Brand to High-End Consumers

1. Target by income

In digital marketing, make sure you’re targeting consumers that can actually afford your brand. Some of the tactics you can use include accessing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data that can point you towards an appropriate customer base as well as utilizing various limiting parameters available in Google Console. You can also implement negative keywords to weed out the people searching for “cheap,” “discount,” “generic,” or “affordable” products.

2. Personalized service

Whether it’s web content personalization or making someone feel like they matter in person, customized service can go a long way to convincing consumers that you’re the brand for them. Reaching out regularly to inform them of special deals and events that no other customer can use or attend makes people feel like you care about them and keeps them coming back for more. Maintaining a sense of exclusivity makes your brand a special club that everyone is striving to get into.

3. Don’t pander to customers

While you do want to provide impeccable customer service, the customer isn’t king in the luxury marketing sphere. Does this sound like heresy to you? Well, there’s a tried and tested strategy behind this idea of avoiding becoming too customer-oriented. Luxury brands are selling excitement, surprise, and emotion. When you become liked by everybody, you can no longer set the standard for tomorrow and bring something truly new, untested, and fascinating to the table.

You’re trapped in pandering to your customer base — their needs and wants rule the decisions you make and the direction the company goes.

4. Brand familiarity outside of your base

Even though the company marketing team isn’t pandering to the consumer, there should still be a rising tide of recognition — even outside of your dedicated customer base. Luxury products create their own value based on how many people can’t afford what they have to offer. There should be many more people familiar with the company brand than can afford to buy it. A brand’s awareness must be more than popularity; it must be prestigious.

You want consumers who could never buy your products to strive for the pleasure of one day owning a product you made. You want to become the gold standard for all other companies that are similar to yours.

Dave King of B.I.G. Enterprises believes that elevating the quality of your work builds a certain reputation in and out of your industry. He adds:

5. Create an identity

Many luxury brands fall into the trap of thinking about their companies as compared to others. They worry about rankings, positioning, and unique selling propositions that are better than their competitors. This is something you should avoid when managing the marketing of a luxury brand. Your brand is built on a completely unique identity — not on comparisons to other brands.

A luxury company gives a bold statement that tells consumers — “this is what I am.” Brand identity provides a company with originality, timelessness, and most importantly, authenticity. Your identity shouldn’t be negotiable or comparative. Instead, it should be all-encompassing and consuming. A company and its consumers should be faithful to the identity of a brand and nothing else.

6. Avoid celebrities and influencers

Many professionals and executives are surprised by this marketing suggestion, as using celebrities and influencers is a time-tested way to bring a business to the forefront of people’s minds. The problem with using celebrities is that they’re meant to target new customers who want a specific product because a celebrity has it. These are the people flipping through glossy page magazines who may not even be able to afford your products. Forget them, and focus on using celebrities to reaffirm the quality of the brand for existing customers.

Because luxury brands avoid comparison and their impact on the status quo should be timeless, you want celebrities to follow in your footsteps. These famous people are staying at the same hotel our company used for its retreat last year, or they’re caught using your product in their everyday lives without showcasing its use on the cover of a magazine. You’re providing two angles for existing customers — that your product is both an excellent choice for ordinary people as well as an ordinary product for extraordinary people. Melding these two dichotomous statements is the goal for every luxury brand.

The luxury strategy

Rewiring your perspective to consider these tactics for marketing to high-end consumers can completely change the strategy you thought was right. Explore other options when you include these tips in your long-term marketing plans.