Building a brand is an exercise in creating awareness, promoting, and establishing your organization or company through various strategies. Your brand is your reputation, and your reputation is how your target group or consumers will remember you.
The common notion out there is that a brand is all about its logos and celebrity endorsements. But it is so much more than that. If you are looking to understand how to create a powerful brand, there are multiple factors that you must take into account.
Building a brand is an exercise in creating awareness, promoting, and establishing your organization or company through various strategies. Building a powerful brand is crucial as it acts like the voice of your company, thus attracting more consumers and building credibility while simultaneously improving employee morale. However, as simple as it may sound, brand building is a step-by-step process that gradually builds over a long period.
The image you build for your brand is going to stick in the minds of your consumers for a long time. Let's first dive into the importance of having a powerful brand image.
Your brand is your reputation, and your reputation is how your target group or consumers will remember you.
Start by analyzing where your brand stands in the market. It is essential to explain to your consumers why your brand came into existence, what it has to offer, and how you are different from the companies already existing in the market. The top four things to keep in mind are as follows:
∙ Brand Voice
∙ Target Audience
∙ Competitors
∙ Communication of Your Value
Your brand voice sets the tone of your company. Your voice speaks about your brand's take on the industry, target group, and the company's mission. Establishing a positive voice is crucial. The tone of your brand is visible in every social media campaign, endorsement, logos, and every other piece of content your company creates. A tone that is positive and down-to-earth should help your brand image vastly.
You must begin with understanding your target group and how they recognize your brand. It is basic consumer behavior to purchase products or services from a brand they are familiar with. It is through carrying out campaigns, improving customer service, and having a USP or unique selling point that you will be able to increase familiarity with your brand.
A brand needs to be unique. This begins with understanding the existing players in the market and what their brand has to offer. There will always be scope to improve. Your brand will be different by enhancing and building on the existing features. It might also help you to research how your competitors have gone about building a brand name for themselves.
Logos and endorsements speak mostly of your product or service. Still, it is also essential for you to communicate your brand's promise to your target audience. Organizations that are able to adhere to their brand promise can establish a connection with their target group in a more compelling manner than those that don't.
According to Hingemarketing.com, "A professional services brand is best understood as your firm's reputation and visibility in the marketplace. The strength of your brand can be measured as Reputation x Visibility."
Brand development can be achieved in three simple steps-
∙ Aligning your business strategies with your brand strategies
∙ Developing brand tools such as a tagline and logo
∙ Strengthen your brand
A brand's reputation can be strengthened by working on a series of brand strategies that can help your consumers relate with you better.
There are several types of brand strategies; some of the prominent ones are listed below
∙ Brand positioning
∙ Increased brand visibility
∙ Give your brand a personality
∙ Reviews
How you position your brand will dictate the first few quarters of your brand's growth. Once you have established that you have something to offer that your competitors do not, you have already gotten your target audience's attention. This is where brand positioning will come into play. You will have to position your brand in a way that you get the attention of consumers outside your target group.
As simple as it may sound, increasing brand visibility is challenging for most companies. Most companies stick to traditional means of increasing visibility. Still, with digital media growing faster than ever, a brand must exploit the boons of the internet age. Along with logos and advertisement campaigns, a brand must explore social media, blogs, podcasts, and more.
A brand needs to have a personality of its own. Why? Brands with a memorable and compelling voice resonate more strongly with consumers. Everything about your brand, including but not limited to advertisements, campaigns, content, and customer service, will dictate your brand's personality. Ensure consistency across all of these mediums to create a voice for your audience.
If the mistake is from your end, you must apologize instead of trying to reason it out or hide it. Every company must have a plan in place in case things start going south. Beyond that, you must ensure that your company has plans not just to prevent damage but also plans to control any damage that has already commenced. A company should always have a PR team who can work on building its reputation in the eyes of its target group in a flawless manner.
Reviews
A brand will need to keep reviewing its work and progress at regular intervals. These reviews are crucial to understanding what other competitor companies are doing to improve themselves and how the market and the target group react to their strategies. This helps the brand fix glitches within the company ecosystem, which is vital for growth. Your brand should also be able to keep up with the trends in society that change in the blink of an eye.
Once you have established your brand, you should continue to innovate on your product or service to support both your customers and employees. Many companies in the market are focused on improving things only for their consumers. Additionally, it is essential for a brand to keep adjusting over timeas the needs of the consumers also tend to change often.
Many companies do not understand that their duties extend beyond designing, manufacturing, and selling a product or service. It is critical for a company to build a customer-centric service model to win over the hearts of their potential customers. Having unorganized customer service is a path you do not want to take. Additionally, adding a system where the company receives customer feedback can help the company understand the gaps in its customer service.
Most importantly, when a customer is satisfied with the service provided by your company, they will help you build a reputation through word of mouth. The most underestimated but one of the most potent means of building a powerful brand.
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning"- Bill Gates.
A brand's customer loyalty is directly proportional to its consistency. Only a company that consistently delivers what they promise is able to attract its customers more than once. Consumers understand when it comes to gradual inflation, but they are not tolerant towards change in the quality of service. In a constantly changing world, it is a challenge for brands to maintain consistency. Planning ahead of time, having a plan for a crisis in place, and keeping a close watch on the global scenarios can be helpful.
∙ SEO Marketing
∙ Content Marketing
∙ Social Media Marketing
In the digital age, a primary aspect of each company’s digital marketing strategy must be SEO marketing. SEO is simply the process of increasing a brand's visibility on the internet. Several thousand users use the search engine for queries each second of the day. Search engine optimization is a beneficial tool in building a powerful brand. The better your SEO, the more attention you get from your potential consumers.
The development and distribution of relevant content across platforms will help you stay connected with your target audience. This includes sharing content on YouTube and OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others. Keep in mind that the content you share will specifically be to plant the seed of curiosity in your target group's mind only, not to sell them your product or service immediately.
Social media will help a brand connect with its consumers on an informal level providing community engagement, sneak peeks of behind the scenes, and more. Social media marketing can be defined as a path to gaining the trust of your audience. This will help create a stronger brand image in your target group's mind.
Consider those who have subscribed to your brand as part of your brand. It is essential to constantly remind them about your brand through a variety of content. A brand can carry out surveys through pop-ups or email if one has subscribed to their brand. These surveys can be used as material for product development or further improvisation and sometimes even understand if the needs of the target are shifting.
Organic marketing is a slow process of drawing the attention of your target audience. Still, it is also a process that will help build credibility over time. Organic Marketing includes unpaid posts about the brand on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Organic marketing, additionally, includes guest posts, blogs, case studies carried out by the company, and more. Since it is not paid, it takes more time to reach many people, but when the word reaches them, it is often through a credible source.
Paid marketing, as the name suggests, is marketing that a brand pays for. This will include endorsements on radio, media houses, and television, along with carrying out massive activation campaigns, handing out goodies to influencers, and more. This marketing method will draw your target audience's attention very fast but in an organic way. When you choose paid marketing as a tool to increase your brand visibility, you will have to measure the success rate through ROIs or Return on Investments. The return on money invested in the advertisement, to be specific, is the critical factor here.
According to blog.hubspot.com, "While organic marketing is more like word of mouth marketing, paid marketing is similar to sales-focused marketing. The goals for the two are very different. One is to attract audiences and increase brand awareness, and the other is to convert audiences to a specific campaign."
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