Working on your brand is an ongoing challenge because you need to ensure that your business goes the distance. Branding is one of those things that’s meant to humanize your business, but you need to remember some of the key strategies that will help you achieve your vision. There can be a mismatch between promoting your business and actually delivering what it promises. This is why we need to undertake a far more holistic approach to branding. Here are some key methods to bear in mind.
Establishing a Strong Brand Identity
This is always priority number one when it comes to promotion. It’s vital that you clearly articulate your brand’s mission, purpose, and values that it represents. From these foundational elements, you can then determine your brand’s distinct personality traits, tone, and personality style. But those bare basic approaches need to be aligned with your target audience’s needs and preferences, but more importantly, this should be authentic.
Promotion is not about pulling the wool over people’s eyes anymore, because we’re all desensitized to advertising. 100 years ago, an advertisement was a rare thing and now it’s become part of the background noise of our existence. This is why emotional connections and resonating with your target audience are so important.
Identifying these components that set yourself apart from your competitors and ensuring that your messaging and visual elements are consistent across everything, whether it’s your social media, website, or products, can establish a strong, distinctive, and memorable brand identity. Even medicine packages can benefit from pharmaceutical packaging services that create something strong and memorable that’s going to drive long-term business growth, but it all starts with that strong brand identity.
Distribution and Accessibility
As consumers, we should never have to seek out the products that speak to us; they should instantly fall into our lap. Ensuring that your products or services are widely available and easily accessible across various distribution channels will guarantee you get to the right person. A mix of distribution channels from retail partnerships, e-commerce, and a combination of online and offline outlets will help to enhance your accessibility.
Accessibility is far easier than ever because of online tools, but you also need to remember that there are a number of hurdles that can still cause issues here, especially if you are operating an e-commerce store. You need to map out the accessibility and coverage of your brand’s digital and physical presence, and tools such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can help to identify high-potential areas and understand the geographical distribution of your brand’s touchpoints.
You should also implement services and features that make it easier for customers to engage with your brand. There are many ways to do this, and countless organizations utilize the omnichannel experience, where you deliver a service through a handful of key areas, such as a specific social media platform, website, email, etc. The key is to not use every channel so as to spread yourself thin, but to identify which ones your target market truly uses. It’s not always social media that’s the number one platform, and in fact, in terms of promoting your business, email marketing is still considered the most effective. But this is where data and analytics can work in your favor so you can track the performance and effectiveness of your distribution and accessibility efforts so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your opportunities.
Brand Exposure and Awareness
Mastering brand exposure is partly to do with your identity that stems from your brand’s purpose, values, personality, and USP (unique selling proposition). If you do not understand your brand’s identity, you need to go back to the drawing board, and once you’ve ensured your identity is authentic and distinct while resonating with your target audience, you can then identify a comprehensive brand exposure strategy with the most effective communication channels and tactics.
There’s a number of tools here that you can leverage from digital marketing, of course, as well as traditional advertising and public relations. The last two can help you cut through the noise of incessant online marketing because this instantly sets you apart. The most effective communication channels are the ones your audience is using, and we’ve already mentioned the importance of consistency which is particularly important when you are working with outsourced agencies because you should really think hard about what your tone of voice is, especially when you are working on content creation.
Exposing your brand via different platforms means there’s a lot more to keep track of and therefore ensuring your messaging and your visual elements stay the same across every touchpoint will reinforce your brand recognition. This is where you start to amplify your brand’s reach by implementing initiatives and campaigns that increase recognition amongst your target audience. There are social media marketing and influencer partnerships, of course, but for the smaller businesses who are still finding their feet, tools like search engine optimization can make short work of creating content that gets to the right people.
It’s also essential to remember that there is more than one way to skin a cat to ensure your business goes the distance. Brand exposure and awareness are also about partnering up with the right people, so event sponsorships or working with another business that complements your services (and yours theirs) and event sponsorships can go a long way to amplify your brand’s reach. It’s important to remember that building strong brand awareness is about the long game, and requires a significant and sustained investment and effort.
Fostering Brand Loyalty
We need our customers to be advocates for us, and this is where brand loyalty can be an amazing marketing tactic because it’s not about finding new people but about making the most of what we’ve got. Typically, businesses make the mistake of thinking that new customers are key, but if you involve your customers in your brand’s evolution by listening to their needs and preferences, you are going to foster a sense of community where your customers become advocates for your brand.
Brand loyalty is partly about engaging with our customers on social media and listening to their needs and preferences, but we also need to get their feedback in other ways like questionnaires and online polls. When we facilitate discussions and provide opportunities for advocates to influence our brand, we are going to exceed customer expectations, but also make our brand feel like a trusted partner rather than just a transactional relationship.
The concept of the transaction between customer and business needs to be broken down, and rather than thinking that we give to our customers for nothing in return, we can empower them to build our business’s trust and credibility. Personalizing the customer experience goes way beyond humanizing your brand, but is about ensuring that all your customer interactions are more than just individual components that add up to this almighty promotion machine. The customer is the most important person in our business, and therefore we must treat them accordingly.
Adapting and Innovating
If you want to ensure your business goes the distance, we’ve talked a lot about various promotional tactics. However, we need to remember that we are on a treadmill that will not let up. We need to identify the next logical steps but also see what challenges are afoot. We should develop a system where we can continuously track changes, not just in our customer preferences, but in the competitor landscape and the industry in general.
This ability to monitor market trends needs to be a part of your marketing efforts, but we also need to recognize that, to achieve this, we foster a culture of innovation within a business and this is about empowering our teams to take calculated risks to experiment and implement solutions that will potentially innovate.
Many employees can feel like a fixed point in time, where they just do the work that’s expected of them but if you want them to innovate, you have to encourage this mindset within your organization. This also means you need to embrace agility and flexibility and ensure your brand identity processes and strategies are actually flexible enough to adapt to changes within the market.
When you can respond to either competitive threats or new customer demands, having an already flexible approach means that you won’t have to rethink your entire operation. When we become bound by only a handful of methods, this is our own doing because we’ve not baked in a culture of improvement or continuous learning so we can stay ahead of the curve.
If you want your business to go the distance, you need to give it the time, effort, and energy it deserves. The biggest problem so many businesses have in terms of their branding is that they are stuck in one gear. They listen to their customers and they figure out who their target market is, but they seldom pivot. To ensure that your business will endure, you’ve got to learn that branding is not just a marketing tactic, but it’s a way for you to conduct a psychological assessment of your organization in terms of the products, the customers, the people who work within, and use this information to give yourself the best possible opportunities to thrive, now and forever.