In today’s blog we are going to go over the top strategies a branding and marketing agency uses to build brand awareness for your company and brand. We’ll spell out the differences of branding and marketing and the process of developing, reviving and implementing your brand and marketing strategy.
This will also delve into the importance of understanding your brand story and what you want customers, partners, and prospects to think and feel about your brand. Furthermore, it will cover a combination of various efforts to proactively brand and market your company through targeted activities, ultimately helping you achieve your overarching goals and objectives.
What is Branding?
The Meaning of Branding:
Branding and the creation of your brand is about how you carefully craft and shape your company’s image in the minds of your target audience, customers, partners, and the general marketplace. Typically, you would achieve this through the creation of brand elements, such as your logo, color palette, and other key visual aspects, along with the written narrative that helps shape your brand identity. Moreover, another important factor is ensuring that these brand elements consistently convey your desired message, allowing people to fully understand and connect with the overall brand experience.
Your Brand (And Brand Awareness) Helps You to Achieve Your Goals and Objectives:
We like to look at our current or desired brand and is it helping you achieve your goals and objectives. We like to start to understand what your bigger picture goals and objectives are for the next 3, 6, 12, 24, 36 months out. We then like to look at how we can use our brand and create brand awareness to help us achieve these specific goals and objectives.
Competitive Landscape:
Another huge factor in working on your brand is understanding how it stacks up in the competitive landscape. Therefore, we need to be able to effectively communicate how and why you are better, highlighting the differences that separate you and make you stand out. For instance, how is your product, service, or technology different and better? Furthermore, how do we communicate your features and benefits, pricing, and technology while effectively packaging these differences?
Strategic Positioning:
A big factor in creating or focusing your brand is understanding where you are positioned in your sector. However, we often see companies being passive and reactive when it comes to managing their brand. In fact, I have seen countless times over the years where a company has allowed its competitors to communicate its positioning, both the positive and negative aspects, which almost always ends up painting the company in the most damaging light possible. Therefore, it’s crucial to take charge of your brand’s perception and positioning. By proactively positioning your brand, its messaging, and its overall look and feel, you can control how you are perceived.
Value Points and Value Proposition:
Another critical factor of your branding efforts is how to package your brand value points and value proposition that appeal to your target market. Building your brand awareness by effectively communicating your branding and marketing differences from your competitors is fundamental to your brand’s success.
Brand Story:
A huge component of your brand awareness is knowing how to effectively package and communicate your brand story. This is where you want to really communicate your differences, your evolution as a company, the things you value as well as your desired customer experience with your company and brand. The key here is to develop a
story that packages these different elements and composes it into a narrative that connects, engages, and builds excitement to find out more about you and what you do.
Messaging Framework:
A large percentage of companies are unsure of how to effectively communicate what they do in a nice and tight manner. This is the reason why we suggest developing a messaging platform that takes the best of your differences, value points and value proposition and puts them into a messaging framework that will be the foundation of your communications and messaging that will be used in your marketing materials, website, social media, etc.
Creative Brand Development
Logo:
Having or developing a strong logo for your company and brand is paramount for building your brand and creating brand awareness for your company. There are several keys to a strong logo/mark, first, making it visually appealing to your target market, it doesn’t have to be literal or a word mark (text), it can be imaginative/creative. Second, don’t try to cram a bunch of detail in the logo so it shows or represents everything you do, in this regard less is definitely more, as they say “keep it simple stupid”.
Third, design it to be clever, eye-catching and grabs peoples attention and forces them to take notice, subtle and sophisticated.
Color Palette:
Use of color is another important element for a brand that is recognizable and connects with your customers and prospects. Utilizing a brand color that is different from your competitors is important and one that represents your brand well. Also, use a color that would make your mark/logo memorable, so probably not using navy blue, but something that is catchy and suits your brand well.
Brand Elements:
Brand elements are things like icons, backgrounds images, infographics, pitch deck templates, these elements help provide the brand support to make your brand standout and create the brand awareness you are looking for.
Imagery/Photography:
Imagery and or photography helps to frame your visual story and compliment your brand logo, brand elements, content and bring them all together to paint a mental image of what your brand is and what it stands for.
Video:
Video can be another powerful component of your brand building efforts, because it can bring it to life in a dynamic format that grabs peoples attention.
Brand Guideline/Architecture:
Once you have developed all the brand elements that are going to help you build your brand and create brand awareness, it’s time to document these elements. This would be to create a brand architecture that frames out the brand elements that build out your brand and make it come alive. This helps your team keep track of all these pieces and keep using them for brand building consistently.
Pitch Decks:
Your pitch deck is another vital element that will help you pitch your idea, sell your products, services or technology or even raise capital or get acquired. You may want to consider using a pitch deck expert to help you create this for maximum effectiveness,
What is Marketing?
Marketing is the process of strategically planning out how best and most efficiently to showcase your brand and build brand awareness as well as the best way to reach your prospects and target customers. Marketing also map’s out what would be the most effective mediums to reach these targets and laying out a budget and timeline for implementation to touch, engage and compel these target customers to action.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):
Great marketing and building of your brand awareness starts with knowing just who you are trying to reach and having developed profiles of what they look like, what would interest them and what may push or compel them to take action.
Content Strategy:
Here are the keys to your content strategy that guides the language that you will use to reach your target audience, and what they will read about your brand and what will connect and compel them.
Story:
As discussed earlier in the blog, having developed a nice tight brand story that is clear, concise and compelling will be the foundation of your brand building efforts.
Authority:
Speak with authority and confidence with a well developed messaging platform that is the foundation of your content.
Entertaining:
Your content needs to keep your customers wanting to find out more about your company and brand.
Compelling:
Make sure your content is on-point, engaging and compelling and keeps moving your customers and targets through your sales funnel.
Integrated Marketing (Mediums):
SEO (Organic):
An integral component of your marketing/digital strategy to build your brand awareness id working on your SEO to build organic traffic. You’ll develop content highlighting key words and key phases to drive free organic traffic.
Social Media:
A great way to build your brand and brand awareness is through social media. Where you are a B2B or consumer brand you can and should use a well targeted campaign to build your brand and brand awareness will go along way to your goals and objectives.
Email Marketing:
Having built your database you’ll want to utilize email marketing and sales funnels to help brand your brand awareness and drive leads and sales opportunities.
Advertising(Paid):
You’ll also probably need to have a paid advertising campaign in both digital/online advertising as well as traditional advertising to drive the volume of traffic to your website, store, etc to help you achieve your desired outcome.
Results Tracking:
Another key element for good marketing and branding is heaving the ability to track your marketing and brand building campaign to optimize effectiveness and results.
What’s the difference between branding and marketing?
As stated above in the blog, branding is the packaging of your company and brand into the most appealing option in the marketplace. Marketing is how you’re going to take that brand to your customers and targets in the most effective and efficient way possible with the best return on investment.
What is more important, branding or marketing?
YES. You have to have both in order to effectively build your brand and connect with your customers and target market. It’s like which do you need in lemon/lime soda, the lemon or lime? Yes, you need both to produce the desired results you want to achieve.
Conclusion
Follow these strategies and you’ll effectively build your brand and brand awareness in order to help you achieve your desired outcomes. You would be advised to work with a leading branding agencies Brand Iron in order to help accelerate the process and maximize your investment in your brand and marketing.
