You’ve picked your brand color, you had your logo designed together with your visual materials. So now, what’s next?
Many marketers find it challenging to develop a successful branding because of the current multichannel and social-media-driven consumers. There is no sure formula as to how you can cover all these channels but there are very specific steps on how you can successfully integrate your brand across all aspects of your business.
The Basics of Branding
Branding is about telling your audience what you promise to them. It gives them an idea about what to expect from your brand and how you differ from your competitors. Branding also allows you to create a positive impression. This means they are more likely to trust and choose you in your industry.
More than anything, branding also refers to anything that would allow your target customers to instantly recognize your business. It can includes your logo, color schemes, fonts, slogans, and everything else conveying your company message.
Any business is bound to fail with poor branding, even if you have the best products and customer service. It is essential to focus on building a strong brand that can propel your company to success.
Effective Brand Strategy
As one of the most essential aspects of the business, having an effective brand strategy is going to be your edge in a highly competitive market. Even a simple brand design can create quite a stir if done effectively.
What and where you advertise matters. The distribution channels you choose are also an important part of how you communicate verbally and visually.
Aside from traditional marketing campaigns, like print advertising and direct marketing, there’s ever-increasing methods for introducing your brand. There’s email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and web-based advertising, among many others. Just like in the traditional methods, a brand strategy that works for a certain company does not automatically make it effective for your brand. Not even when you launch all of these methods for every campaign. Instead, what’s needed is an integrated marketing campaign in order to maximize viewership.
What Is Integrated Marketing?
Integrated marketing is a strategic approach to target a specific audience. This is achieved by incorporating all aspects of communications and interactive experiences towards them. It includes but is not limited to paid media, earned media, and owned media. The goal is to deliver a consistent message in a unified and seamless way. Achieving this would lead the consumers on their path to purchase your products and services, which is the ultimate goal of marketing.
Because many marketing channels have been introduced, it gets more difficult every day to have the best campaigns for each channel. The best way to tackle this is to find out how you can transform your marketing strategy to win the favor of your customers.
How to Grow Your Brand Through Integration
The brand you create should not be wasted. You have to put it out there and integrate it into everything about your business. You need to develop branding that is strong and lasting so that customers can remember it even without actually viewing the marketing materials. Achieving this will help grow your brand and subsequently increase customer conversion rates.
Here are some crucial tips to let you integrate your brand into all aspects of your business:
1. Identify Branding Focus
Concentrating on your marketing efforts is not enough in attracting customers. You must first establish how you want to shape your brand. Revise your existing strategies and check your assets. Then use both of these to create a comprehensive plan of action. Research what the customers’ needs are, so you will have something specific to work on, instead of second-guessing or trying to do everything.
It helps to build your vision by touching the major elements of the corporate ecosystem, such as your finances, product development, and customer touchpoints. Focusing on these will ensure that your branding is aligned properly and is on the road to success.
2. Perform Extensive Customer Research
Your brand should appeal to your target customers. You will only know what your customers like if you extensively research them. Create buyer personas to help you understand how your customer thinks and the brands they’re currently using. It should also give you some insight into their goals, challenges, and other crucial information. This will help you mold a better campaign that suits them perfectly.
3. Create Branded Content
Having branded content helps increase brand awareness. It can also generate leads and nurture them to convert into paying customers. There are various types of branded content that you can make for both online and offline campaigns. Some of these are social media headlines, blogs, ads, videos, and landing pages.
You can also try submitting content to other websites and social media groups. One great way to encourage awareness without being too blatant is by providing useful, value-adding information that might not be exactly about your brand but is directly related to it.
4. Choose Marketing Channels
Once you have identified your priorities for your branding, it is time to analyse where you should invest your efforts and resources. Identify which channels your target customers use. Not everyone uses Facebook and there are a lot of people who don't have an Instagram account. This means that it will be foolish to have all of your marketing campaigns on a single channel if you are unsure where your audiences are.
Aside from choosing a channel, you also need to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Instagram advertising, for example, has limitations when it comes to video lengths. You have to make sure that any video material will fit on the platform's specifications so that the audience can fully appreciate it.
5. Consider Multi-Channel Marketing
It is not rare to see your target consumers using multiple online channels. In this case, you will need multi-channel marketing campaigns. This is important, because you might lose a considerable number of audiences if you are not going to cover all channels.
Social media, email marketing, and display ads are the usual online marketing platforms that are readily available. You have to create company profiles and learn how communications work for each platform. It is essential to note, however, that these platforms differ significantly from each other. You need to research each platform so that you can effectively build your brand digitally.
6. Consistency
A consistent visual identity is a sure way to build brand awareness. It is not enough to create a killer brand design. You have to be certain that it will be carried over to all marketing materials, from the logo through to every bit of promotional effort, such as social media posts and ad banners. The goal here is to have every person who sees your ad create an immediate visual connection to your company.
7. Cohesion
Another thing that you must absolutely consider is creating a sense of cohesion in all of your brand designs. Aside from establishing brand colors and fonts, you also have to check the styling. Everything should have the same look and feel. They need to appear that they are coming from the same company. This should be true regardless of the channels that you use.
8. Create Clear and Adaptable Designs
One of the techniques that you can use, especially when you are limited on your branding resources, is adapting and repurposing your designs.You can use several tools to help you create stunning visual assets in many variations. As for content, you should have something that is clear and concise so that you can use it to fill all types of content, such as blog posts, newsletters, and other informational nuggets.
9. Develop a Style Guide
One way to ensure that you maintain consistency and cohesion in your brand design is by having a written style guide. It should contain everything about the designs that you use for your brand. This can be distributed to both existing and new employees to help them align with your brand strategies. Some example details to include are color palette, logo, slogans, font styles and sizes, animation styles, and call to action.
10. Use Brand Design on Physical Products
After establishing your design, it is important to use it on business cards, packaging, and promotional items. You have to display these identifiable brand elements at the forefront, so anyone can instantly see them.
11. Research Your Competition
It can be difficult to create a marketing strategy without knowing enough about your competitors. It is less about copying what they do and more about how you can improve where they are failing. You can take this opportunity to give to the audience what they cannot and do so with so much flair in order to stand out.
12. Be True to Your Brand
It can be difficult to create a marketing strategy without knowing enough about your competitors. It is less about copying what they do and more about how you can improve where they are failing. You can take this opportunity to give to the audience what they cannot and do so with so much flair in order to stand out.
13. Track Your Campaigns
Aside from designing, most marketing tools have built-in tracking features to let you see how your campaigns are doing. Knowing the proper analytics should guide you to fully understand conversions and results. Everything is fast-paced these days, so you need to see what’s happening early on. You can then improve and take advantage of your campaign’s peaks.
14. Improve Site Visibility
A common reason that branding campaigns fail is a lack of market traction. The main cause is that customers cannot find your brand. Aside from enhancing your marketing material, you have to also improve site visibility in top search engines.
Focus on search engine optimization methods so that you can bring in more visitors to your website and on other platforms. Improving your ranking for relevant queries could give you favorable results if you are counting visitors. Basic SEO includes increasing site speed and using keywords in your content. Doing these will boost your site traffic and will definitely rake in more organic traffic.
Conclusion
Do not lose hope if your brand is currently suffering from a poor marketing effort. Branding is a long and tedious process that needs plenty of time, effort, and resource. Success doesn’t happen overnight and the probability of failing is mostly high, especially for those who are not aware of proper branding methodologies. There’s a lot you can do to build and strengthen your brand and create a good reputation in the industry that you are in.
Many marketers feel proud of their marketing campaigns, especially when it gets on top of the trending lists. However, in order to really achieve success, you must make a lasting impression and make the customers experience your brand at all times. It shouldn’t be a one-time experience that gets forgotten as soon as they leave the site, or when a new incredible campaign arrives.
You must be able to remind the customers about your brand across all channels. They have to understand your brand’s core values more than just admiring how creative your campaigns are. Hopefully, these practical tips will ensure building a strong and loyal customer base that is vital to the success of your brand.
.jpg)
