Orji-Oko Uzor- Introduction
- What is a brand marketing agency?
- Brand marketing strategy
- Three questions you should answer when putting together your brand marketing strategy
- Three things to avoid when you develop a brand marketing strategy
- The brand marketing agency make your brand more memorable
Introduction
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind each time you hear these words:
- Running shoes
- Or “coffee
It’s likely that you will think of Nike or Adidas for running shoes. And Starbucks for coffee.
Why?
And what prompts one to align a company’s name in relation to an everyday product? Certainly that’s the power of branding. That’s where a brand marketing agency comes in.
When you create a powerful brand, it puts a mark in people’s minds. It’s how you will make people associate a product they need to your company right away. To make your brand memorable do have a profound effect on your company’s success. When it’s a memorable brand you need less advertising spend. It will drive sales on its own and makes it very easy to gain more engagement on social media. You’ll equally get a lot of traffic and conversions.
What is a brand marketing agency?
A brand marketing agency might be many things to many people. They might be your strategist, your creative or your design team. But basically the role of a brand marketing agency is the following:
Brand marketing agency is an agency that is extremely specialised in the services they offer. Their primary goal is to create, develop, maintain and improve brands like yours. Design, communication and creative might equally fall under their overarching banner. But their major focus are on brand strategy through developing or refreshing brands.
Understand your business
A brand marketing agency will support your brand. Through developing an understanding of your business. That will help clarify your goals and objectives. And to communicate this in the perfect way to the target audience. With this information they will create a strategy to grow your brand. Provide you with the perfect toolkit to embed your brand purpose, values, promises. Equally positioning, and identity that will be unique to your company.
So if the above is what you’re looking for then a brand marketing agency is for you. With a one off advert to promote one of your products. They will bring your brand to your target customers.
Responsibility of a brand marketing agency
- Create
- Plan
- Manage
- Measure your branding strategy.
It is them becoming an additional team within your organisation. They need to know and understand everything about your business. The agency have to get under the skin of your organisation. To be able to find out what really makes your business tick. From there they will know your objectives, values, promises. Equally they will how do you communicate with both your target customers and your employees?
They equally need to be knowledgeable about your market and your competitors. Understand what their brands are doing. Are they stronger, do they work, where your brand stand alongside the competition and the market.
It is from these information that they will create a coherent brand strategy. That will be pulled together and a direction of growth will be accomplished.
Brand marketing strategy
Knowing the meaning of brand marketing will help us understand what is brand marketing strategy.
What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is a way you promote your product or service by promoting your brand as well. Importantly, you use it to tell your product’s and service’s story by emphasizing your whole brand.
What’s the difference between branding and marketing?
It’s very crucial you understand the difference between branding and marketing. To be able to use them efficiently together. Marketing is how you are able to build your brand and products awareness. And equally generate much sales. While branding is how you are able to express what your business is all about.
Now see marketing as your own business generating toolkit. And branding as your overay approach to reach your target audience. Branding is an important building block of your marketing strategy. Meaning it will always come first. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Or how big you aim to grow. However, it’s crucial to map out what your business is as a brand. Before you decide to create a marketing plan.
Decide…
Once you must have decided how your brand will look. Then keep it organized in your brand guide. Meaning you have clearly identified your company’s personality. In other words, your brand is defined. You have carefully choosing your illustrations. Including logo, typography and business colors to relate your brand’s values.
The more careful you are with your brand marketing strategy. The greater you will likely thrive when you execute your strategies. To invest in a solid brand marketing strategy. It will certainly make your future marketing campaigns very easy to execute. Because you have built the guidelines to follow and past successes to build on.
Three questions you should answer when putting together your brand marketing strategy
- Who is my target audience?
- What is my brand’s primary goal?
- How does my brand define success?
Understanding the answers to these questions will help define what your objectives will be. How you will talk to your audience and how you’ll equally measure your success. With this, let’s consider the five steps of brand marketing.
Five simple steps of brand marketing
Well, brand marketing is not reserved for industry big boys like Nike, Apple and McDonald’s. Any brand, of any size, can easily pull it off by nailing these five simple steps.
Understand your brand purpose
To fully understand why your brand exist, is important to your brand marketing strategy. Answering these questions you will be able to nail your brand purpose.
- Who is my target audience?
- Why would they trust me?
- How does my brand make them feel?
- What challenge/problem does my brand solve?
- Who are my competitors?
- What is my brand’s background story?
- Why was it even created in the first place?
- If my brand was a person, who would it be and why?
This first step is the moment you start to define how your brand will look and feel.
Research your target market
Try and understand who your customers are by creating customer personas. A customer persona is a detailed picture of your perfect buyer. It will assist you to create an emotional connection with your customers. When you are able to craft your customer persona. Then ask yourself questions like:
- How old is this person?
- Are they really married?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do every day?
- Their educational background?
- What was their most recent shopping and the shop they did it?
- What do they need from my product or service?
A clear picture of your ideal customer persona will lead everything. Starting from your business name to the art design you will choose for your logo.
Define and sell your story
You will be able to sell your brand’s story if you create the right message. The story you are able to craft and sell will connect your brand with your target customers. It will build up loyalty and help with brand recall. Take time to develop an engaging story that has all the elements. Just like your favorite novel or movie: characters, a conflict, a resolution. This story doesn’t have to be dramatic. No, it might be as simple as your grandmom deciding to open a bakery in town 50 years ago. Then pass on the business and their beloved recipe on for generations. You will find ways to make your iconic cakes and pastries with all organic ingredients. That offers the community healthy and delicious baked goods. Always capture your target market’s attention with a superb story. Then allow them to be part of the story by interacting with your brand. Sometimes, your story might be more subtle.
Get to know your competitors
Just like you got to know your own customers. It’s equally relevant to know your competitors. Research about them. Determine how you will different from them. Then try your weight on this difference in your marketing messaging. For instance, if your competitor is already known for being the cheapest. Put your focus on why quality is more important than price in your message.
Create brand guidelines
Once you have understood your brand and audience. Think about how you will connect them in your marketing. Creative brand guidelines are where you cover your logo, colors, fonts, tone of voice and more. It will certainly help any designers and marketers you work with tell your brand’s story. And deliver your message in the best possible way. As well as to ensure brand consistency.
Three things to avoid when you develop a brand marketing strategy
When you develop a brand marketing strategy. Make sure you avoid these:
Skipping checking out your competitors
Imagine you create a brand marketing strategy and roll out your messaging in the kind of marketing materials. Only to understand that your competitor has already done a very similar thing. This happens regularly, and the best and only way to avoid it. To carefully research what everyone else in your industry is doing before you started.
Having inconsistent creative
To have various creative execution each time you go to market. With a separate piece of communication might seem fun. But in real sense it’s actually confusing your customers and damaging your brand. For instance, you own a burger chain. You wouldn’t like to push a celebrity endorsement video at the same time with an animated ad about your ingredients. It would get customers confused as they will try to recognize your brand. And it would equy be more expensive to produce. The same thing goes for voice consistency across platforms. Whether you talk to your customers on social media. Through a print ad or a video, you must make sure your voice always sounds like your brand. Remember, even when you have seen your communications and messaging hundreds of times. Your customers hasn’t! Consistent creative is a powerful key to creating a strong brand marketing strategy.
Lacking a long term vision
Without brand mission and goals. Your brand marketing strategy will lack focus and will lack direction. It’s very important to know what you need to achieve in the long term. Instead of just having short term goals. An instance of a long term goal may be to expand internationally. Bringing your new products to market or create a large social media presence.
Cover everything in your brand guide. Even branding needs, you don’t yet have. Good brand marketing is key to your successful business. Remember, when you try to create a movement like Apple. Tell a story like Nike and then have a great brand recognition like McDonalds. Because the more you invest in your brand marketing, the more successful your business becomes.
A brand marketing agency will make your brand more memorable
Build a membership site for an online community
A brand marketing agency will build a membership site to host your online brand community. Creating this community will enable greater interaction between your business and customers. A membership site do create a chance for meaningful interaction. It’s a place where your customers will ask questions and get answers to their problems and challenges. A brand community will create a digital identity for your customers and your brand.
Use giveaway contests
This is one of the fastest and effective means to create an impression on your audience. And a brand marketing agency will make use of it for your brand. To create a giveaway contest is a very affordable marketing plan. However, your only investments are the giveaway prize itself and your contest creation tool. The only thing you need to do. To make a giveaway contest is by adding a plugin to your WordPress site. There are more than 50,000 plugins avaliable you can use to build your site. Research has it that giveaways trigger positive emotions such as as anticipation and excitement in people. By giving away a prize it’s important to your target customers. Equally you need to engage with the right group of people. To be able to show your work when you choose to give the winner access to your product.
Leverage content
Some ways you will use to make your content speak for your brand:
Use interactive content
Your brand image will shine through with content. You will leverage content in every possible ways that had an impact on customers. Create important posts and include your content with personality. With your good quality content the users will know you offer real value.
With interactive content your customers will be a part of the conversation. Always post polls, quizzes, assessments and other content to be able to get responses from users. This will keep them engaged on social media and your website.
Share user-generated content
It is possible that there are content about your brand available for free online. This will come in the form of user reviews, ratings, testimonials and other social media posts. You will use such user generated content and share it on your website and social media. You will also tap into free content that people will find authentic. You’ll equally build social proof.
Create a blog
To create a blog and always post content is an important online marketing activity. You will go beyond marketing communication in a blog. And create related but more casual information for your customers. A blog drives a lot traffic, supports SEO and makes your own brand memorable.
Content matters
Use content in various ways to make your brand memorable. Add pictures and videos together with written material. Be sure to make use of good grammar and punctuation. Together with good simple sentence structures. It will make your business appear trustworthy
Engage with users on social media
Social media is a powerful platform that will make your brand memorable. You need to create business pages on all relevant social media platforms. There you will share content such as articles, images and videos. You will make use of a social media management tool to post to multiple places at once.
Let’s consider some other things you will do to be able to stand out on social media:
Use casual language
Try as much as possible to avoid business speak and formal language. Add humor to your posts, but always keep it clean and fun. Because injecting humor into your content. It will give your business a personality that will be more relatable to people.
Create a persona
To create a persona for your business will assist to keep your communication consistent. Decide your brand tone and voice. Will it be carefree or more serious? To develop a persona will help you be able to draft content. That will be appealing and consistent.
Design with care
Your brand image need to consist of colors, typography, logo and your online persona. All these is what a brand marketing agency will for your brand. These are some design elements. That will help to convey your business’s values to your audience.
Color palette
Through defining a color palette for your brand, they will create a consistent brand image for your audience.
Typography
When you choose a set of fonts for your brand. Check if they are easy to read on various devices and will work well on printed content too. It’s equally important to choose fonts that will be common and available on any device.
Logo
There is no hard and fast rule about what your logo needs to look like. Like with the other design elements. Your brand values, tone and approach will guide on how your logo will look. It’s very important to do this with a professional who specializes in design. They will help you shape your brand’s image while they use best practices. This will save you a lot of time and money, as you won’t be doing it again later.