This is no brainer for anyone running a business that they need to have a marketing plan that helps them to build their brand. In other words, every business needs to do brand marketing.
The world that we are living in is not only competitive but also very digitized. If you are running a business, you need to keep a keen eye on the changing market trends and keep pace with the advertising strategies that your competitors are using to increase their sales.
Doing proper brand marketing or implementing an effective brand marketing strategy produces long-term results for the benefit of your business. But before we get into the discussion or tips that you can use for marketing a brand, let’s define what brand marketing exactly is.
What is Brand Marketing?
A brand marketing strategy is a plan or a way to promote whatever you are offering as part of your business, including any products or services, for the sake of building your brand as a whole.
Doing brand marketing is like telling the story of your business initiative from a perspective that can be easily understood by your ideal customers so that they can resonate with your brand. It can include the story of your business founder (i.e. your story, if you are the founder of your business), the story of each of your product lines, the reason why you are offering a particular service or the inspiration you have received from serving your past clients.
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Brand marketing is very helpful in building up your product positioning. It defines where your products stand and where they are targeted to go. When you learn how to market a brand, by default your focus goes in the direction of figuring out where exactly your products stand in the market.
There are many brand marketing examples that represent product positioning efforts conducted by large companies on a large scale. The more time and money you invest in brand marketing at the earlier phases of your business, the more long-term connections you can build between your brand and your buyer persona.
5 Reasons Why Brand Marketing is Important For Your Business
Let’s talk about the main reasons why brand marketing is so important for your business.
1. It Helps in Building a Brand Image
The most important thing for a brand is the brand image. The greater the image of your brand in the eyes of your potential customers, the higher perceived value they will place on your products. Having a good brand image also helps in maintaining an edge against your competitors. Even if you increase your prices a bit, your customers will not straight away switch to substitutes.
The best part about having a good brand image is that your company will be able to grow at a relatively faster pace. As people see your products as having high value, they will begin to spread the word about them on their own. This will give you the added benefit of getting organic marketing opportunities for your products.
2. It Enables You to Sell at a Good Profit Margin
When the perceived value of your products is high, you will be able to sell them at a high-profit margin. Even if your sales volumes are low, your sales revenue will be maintained at a sustainable level.
A good profit margin gives you the benefit of making cash available to reinvest into your business. This makes brand marketing even more valuable.
3. It Increases Your Sales Volumes
When customers think positively about your brand, they will buy more from you. This in turn will increase your average sales volumes. Brand marketing, therefore, helps a business achieve its biggest objective, which is to increase its sales volume and monthly sales revenue.
Marketing a brand involves aggressive advertising at times. When a business runs ads over a long period of time, it directly or indirectly does have a psychological impact on the audience’s mindset. Many people buy a product just to test it after they view its ad so many times. Hence, a brand marketing strategy is always fruitful in terms of increasing sales one way or the other.
4. It Builds Loyalty and Gets You a Strong Customer Base
Being able to retain old and existing customers is a lot more beneficial and cost-effective for a business than having to get more and more new customers. The higher a brand’s customer lifetime value, the easier it is for the brand to maintain a strong customer base.
The focus of brand marketing is mainly to keep the existing customers satisfied and to build a good impression on all the target customers. A company with a strong customer base can easily penetrate new markets.
5. It Opens Up Opportunities For Business Expansion
Brand marketing helps a business open up to expansion opportunities. If you want to make product line extensions, don’t forget to work on your brand marketing strategy first.
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6 Tips to do Effective Brand Marketing
Here are 6 ways to implement a brand marketing strategy for your business.
1. Do Proper Market and Competitor Research
The first thing to do before you even prepare a brand marketing strategy is to do proper research about your niche market. Coming up with any kind of strategy without conducting thorough research is like inviting yourself to failure.
The research that you need to do before you do your brand marketing includes competitor analysis. You need to know the strategies that your competitors are using, in order to be able to counter them if required. You also need to be familiar with the changing trends in the industry you operate in. Oftentimes, businesses that are not up to date regarding the changing tastes and demands of consumers in their respective industries have to face sudden losses and downturns in their sales revenue.
A good way to conduct all the required research in an organized way is to do a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis helps you to identify both the positive and negative factors about your business’s internal as well as external environment.
2. Build a Solid Online Presence
In today’s world, a business without an online presence is almost as if it doesn’t exist. Having a solid presence of your brand over the internet should be a part and parcel of your brand marketing. This, first and foremost, includes building a website for your brand, which can be a very simple thing to do if you choose to use a low-cost, feature-rich, and easy-to-use website building platform. One such platform is Strikingly.
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Once you sign up for your free account on Strikingly, you will be redirected to the template selection page, where you can choose the most suitable web design for yourself.
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Here you can choose any ready-to-use template and start keying in your website content into it.
Part of building an online presence for your brand also includes creating social media pages where you can regularly post your brand updates. The best thing is to build your presence on social media sites as well as on a website and then integrate both with each other.
3. Use Contemporary Means of Marketing
Instead of focusing on outdated means of marketing, a good way to go about your brand marketing is to use contemporary and popular marketing methods, which mainly include digital marketing techniques.
This also includes creating a subscription form on your website, where anyone can sign up to receive newsletters or sales offers from you via email.
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4. Engage with Your Customers Regularly
For your brand marketing strategy to bring any results, you need to engage your customers on a regular basis. Build venues for your customers to be able to contact you. Build an online community where your customers can contribute their ideas and opinions about your brand. If you have an online brand community, your customers will be able to interact with each other as well, and that’s very useful for maintaining your brand image.
Your customers can also engage with your brand via social media sites. Make sure your social media pages are open for people to post comments on your posts, and also to contact you privately by using a direct messaging feature. This will really boost up your brand marketing efforts.
5. Have Variety in Your Sales Offers
Your sales offers need to have variety in order to make your brand marketing useful. Come up with different kinds of offers from time to time. Sometimes, you can use cross-merchandising, while at other times, you can simply offer a discount on a particular product category.
If you don’t offer variety, no matter how good your brand marketing strategy is, it is going to start feeling monotonous and boring to your customers. This can be risky as some of your customers might reduce or stop buying from you.
6. Provide Good Customer Service
Providing good customer service is the key to keeping your customers happy. The service that you provide at all stages of a customer’s buying process plays a crucial role in determining whether or not the customer will make a second purchase, and how they will speak about your brand with others. This in turn makes it so important to include in your brand marketing tactics.
Now that you know how to market a brand, how about starting with building a beautiful brand website for your business? Create an account on Strikingly and try out our latest tools and features to build a landing page or website for promoting your brand and services. We are here to serve you in any way we can!
