Strengthen Your Message With Branding
by Lindsey Weinig
Businesses can greatly increase new and repeat sales by becoming recognizable to their audiences with thoughtful and consistent branding. Take these marketing strategies into consideration when communicating to your audience to strengthen your message and your impact.
What is a Brand?
Your company name, logo, slogan, colors and fonts are the strongest gauge of your brand. Your products, employees, industry, competitors, and affiliations also mold your company brand. All of these represent your company and therefore your brand. While these traits are more manageable, there are five key strategies you should employ to leverage the full power of branding.
1. Perception
Always keep your ideal customer in mind. When creating and molding your brand you have to consider your audience’s feelings, attitudes, preferences and associations made from what you present as your brand. This is the hardest part of branding as it’s not definitive, encompassing, or even unchanging. As long as you keep your customer’s perceptions in mind and address major missteps you’ll have an advantage over a competitor attempting to reach the same audience.
For example if your company is targeting teenagers you probably do not want to use pastel colors and long descriptive sentences on your marketing materials because most teenagers have a shorter attention span. Therefore you’ll want to capture their attention with bright and intriguing colors and to-the-point content.
2. Positioning
Determine how your company is defined in the marketplace. Ask yourself some key questions:
- Who are your competitors?
- What are the assets of your business that the competition does not offer?
- What are the weaknesses of your business?
- What advantages do you offer over your competitors?
- How do you currently communicate your advantages to your audience?
It is essential not try to appeal to everyone. Over generalizing in branding creates familiarity but is often ignored for lack of uniqueness or notability.
For example Dell Computers do not position themselves as the most design-savvy, creative personal computers in the market because Apple® successfully claims that section of the market. Instead, they position themselves as fast, affordable and customizable.
3. Authenticity
Having a recognizable brand is not the only important aspect of branding. You also want your brand to have a positive association in your audience’s mind. Therefore your brand must be authentic. You can’t present yourself as the opposite of what you actually are. Inaccurate branding will repel customers and hurt your business.
For example if your cable provider promises the best customer service in exchange for higher premiums, a negative customer service experience will greatly damage your perception of that company.
4. Consistency
No brand can be communicated without sticking to a plan. It’s very unlikely that your audience will remember the details of your logo, colors, fonts or message if you change them frequently or use different branding on your business cards, website, emails, and social media outlets.
For example Swiftpage emarketing .com, the , Swiftpage emarketing on Twitter, our brochure and all of our email campaigns maintain our consistent logo, colors, fonts, informal language and general theme.
5. Expanse
Maintaining your logo and having it on your website is a start, but you are not truly leveraging the power of branding until you present your brand everywhere. Remember that you represent your brand in what you say, how you say it, your company culture, product development and everything your company does that your audience may encounter.
Start defining your brand with these five strategies in mind, then communicate your brand throughout your company and you will benefit from the power of branding.
Keep your brand consistent with Branded Templates by Bright Peak >
