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Brand value
Brand value is the financial worth of a company. It influences the revenue of certain businesses and markets and corresponds to customers’ awareness of a good.
In this article, we’ll review the importance of brand value, find the difference between brand value and brand equity, and get to know how to measure brand value.
Why is brand value important?
Entrepreneurs are ready to spend millions of dollars on buildingbrand awarenessto make customers recognize their brands and purchase from them. Brand value influences the revenue of certain companies and markets.
If customers appreciate one particular brand and often buy its goods, this company usually obtains a higher ROI. Moreover, if brands within a market have high customer loyalty, this can discourage new companies from entering such a market and increase the existing firms’ market share. To make a decision, new brands gather data and analyze their market to decide whether it’s worth taking this step.
Brands are intangible assets, yet they carry financial value. That’s why knowing brand value is essential when we talk about investments and whether stakeholders should consider them. Companies need to pay attention to brand equity (what consumers think about a certain brand and how they perceive it) to raise their brand value.
Now that you know the importance of brand value, let’s proceed to the next section to compare two essential measures that often evoke confusion.
Brand Value vs. Brand Equity
The two measures we’ll review in detail are crucial for every business, yet they are sometimes misinterpreted. Let’s start with brand value to make everything clear.
Brand value can be defined as a cost of a particular company. Business owners should calculate how much it costs in the market to find this measure. Simply put, it is how much money someone would pay to purchase a particular business.
This metric helps to be aware of the directional changes, namely whether a company is gaining value or losing it. With this information in mind, entrepreneurs can decide to change their strategy or improve their marketing campaigns.
Each company has to raise brand equity to improve brand value. Let’s take Tide, for example. This brand of laundry detergent is more famous than other smaller companies. The money Tide invested into marketing, creating brand awareness, and customer loyalty enables the company to increase revenues significantly.
Brand equity is the value a business obtains from its name and recognition. Brands should provide their customers with products of superior quality that are easy to recognize and memorable to create this value. As a result, although consumers can purchase such products from competitors at a lower cost, theyare ready to pay higher prices. Customers do it because they want to buy goods or services from brands they love, trust, and admire.
Brand equity consists of consumer perception, negative or positive effects, and the resulting value. It influences the sales volume of a certain brand and its profitability.
The difference between these two essential measures is clear, so it’s time to move to the next section to review how to measure brand value.
How to Measure Brand Value
There are different ways to measure brand value, and you just need to choose an approach that makes the most sense for your company’s identity, situation, and goals.
Market-based valuation. Using this method allows you to define the value of your brand based on the market climate. The easiest way is to determine how much similar companies cost on the market. If you want to have a clear picture of your brand value, you can also pay attention to other market measurements (for example, stock performance).
Cost-based valuation. To find a necessary measure, you need to calculate the costs spent on creating and developing your company. You can easily estimate it by adding up all the expenses from the beginning till now. Remember to include yourinvestmentsin marketing, salaries of employees, contracts with brandingagencies, trademarks, and more. As a result, you will know how much money you’ve invested in your business. However, it can’t show your current brand value accurately.
Income-based valuation. This approach focuses on the money your business generates. Pay attention to the financial streams of your brand, such as income, cash flow, cost savings, and future revenues, and evaluate them.
Net promoter score (NPS) valuation. NPS is a measure that shows whether your customers can promote your brand. If you want to calculate your NPS, you need to ask customers whether they will recommend your company to people they know and let them rate it from 0 to 10. This way, you’ll determine how many consumers know, trust, and like your brand.
It’s evident that each of these approaches has pros and cons and that all of them will bring you different results, which is fine due to the intangible nature of brand value. Each of the methods enables you to obtain information that will help you adjust your brand strategy so that your company can prosper.
Brand voice
A brand voice is a way a company conveysits central values, principles,and style of communication with customers. It helps businesses stand out from the competition and establish their presence in the market.
In this article, we'll unveil the importance of brand voice and compare brand voicewith brand tone. We'll also find out how to create a brand voice for your company and explore several excellent examples.
Why is brand voice important?
Brands need to be heard to establish strong relationships withtheirtarget audience. A clear brand voice enables people to get acquainted with a company and understand it better.What's more,an effective brand voice strategy allows businesses to start a dialogue with their consumers.
With the help of brand voice,businesses can demonstrate their main values and goals successfully. A brand voice is necessary for conveying the right brand personalitythat helps customers identify a company and motivates them to perceive it positively. It can guidea brand's target audience throughits culture and qualities. A strong brand voice is a must if a business owner wantstheir brand to be recognizable.
After a company increases its customer engagement, its owners canevaluatethe type of audiencethey engage with. Afterward, this business can deliver more relevant content, determineits suitablecommunication style, and meet customers' needs. Strong relationships with consumers allow brands to improve their organic traffic and deliver the right messages to their target market.
Now that you are aware of the importance of having a brand voice, it's time to make the difference between brand voice and brand tone clearsince these two terms are often confused.
Brand Voice vs. Tone
Although some people use the two terms interchangeably, they suit different situations and purposes. Let'sdiscuss the characteristics of both brand voice and brand tone to be able to differentiate them easily.
A brand voice is a reflection of the values you stand for. They communicate your brand personality. Brand voice defines the way you share your point of view, values, and goals with your customers. It helps businesses stand out andenables customers to recognize a certain company.
A brand tone is a way a brand communicates with its customers. It encompasses the style of communication,certain word choices, and emotional tone. A tone can change depending on the situation. Therefore, you articulate your brand voice using your brand tone.
Now when the difference between the two terms is clear, let's proceed to the next section to find out the steps necessary to develop an exclusive brand voice.
How to Create Your Unique Brand Voice
You need a strong brand voice to promote your product across all marketing channels and stand out. We'll now review the steps that will guide you through the process of developing one for your business.
Developyour mission statement.Your company's personality should convey itsprinciples clearly to communicate your message to customers seamlessly. By reviewing your mission statement, you can ensure that itreflects your fundamental values. Afterward, you can easily choose the rightwords to communicateyour messages clearly.
Revise existing content. If you already have a website and channels that promote your brand, it's time to revise your content. By analyzing your website, blog posts, ads, and social media posts, you have an opportunity toevaluate your brand's consistency. It will help you figure out whether your messaging suits the primary goal of your company. To find out what resonates with your customers the most, you need to look through the content that has the highest level of engagement.
Run a poll. If your brand already has customers, you need to get to know them and the way they see your company. For this purpose, you need to conduct a survey asking your target audience questions that might help create an appropriate brand voice and messaging. Consider using special tools like SoGoSurvey or SurveyMonkey to create a professional survey. Try to gainmore exposure by sharingyour poll on social media and distributing it across the most effective communication channels.
Create a chart. To make a consistent brand personality and brand voice, you need to create a special chart. Think of 3-4 words that represent your company's character and createa chart using them. The chart should include arguments that support the characteristics you chose andreasonsthey should be conveyed to the audience through different marketing efforts.
Develop guidelines to maintain brand consistency. To make sure that your team produces consistent and high-quality content, you need to create strict guidelines you will stick to. This way, your company's departments will be able to comply with your standards and be consistent in different situations. As a result, you'll have a company that moves to success.
It's time to get inspiredby the examples belowand create a unique brand voice.
Inspiring Brand Voice Examples
Brand voice allows businesses to consistently communicate their main ideas and messages. Communication is key to reaching your target audience and increasing your customer base. Let's now consider several great examples of brand voices that won people's hearts.
Tiffany
Tiffany is a bright example of elegance. The brand's team efficiently manages to communicate Tiffany's brand message by using a witty, classic, and elegant brand voice. You can notice that the company is consistent in its voice in social media posts and different advertising campaigns. The brand has a strong presence on social mediadue to its established tone of voice and its team of professionals. As a result, people are ready to pay a high price for Tiffany's high-quality and elegant jewelry.
Nike
Nike's "Just do it" slogan is probably the most recognizable. You can describe Nike's brand personality as powerful, exciting, inspiring, and spirited. The company manages to encourage athletes to reach their goals with the help of its leading brand voice.
Harley-Davidson
The motor company is famous for its strong and rough brand voice. It communicates its messages by using a confident, rugged, and strong tone of voice. Harley-Davidson speaks to its target audience, rebellious and bold people. With its voice, the brand succeeds in evoking confidence and encourages bold actions.
Congrats, now you know the importance and examples of brand voice, how to establish a killer brand voice, and the difference between a brand voice and brand tone.
Branding
Branding is the process of shapingconsumers’ perception of a brand after they interact with its story, messaging, product design,and culture. It entails associations and feelingscustomers have about specific companies.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance, goals, types, and examples of branding. Then, we’ll figure out how to create a branding strategy.
Why is branding important?
When using the internet, social networks, and messengers, consumers come across dozens of various brand messages every day. Powerful branding helps touch customers’ hearts and entice them to choose products that resonate with their problems, needs, and values. According to Zendesk, 87% of customers care about consistent branding.
Companies should be ready to provide target audiences with unforgettable experiences and bring positive emotions to be recognized and differentiated from hundreds of other businesses. To attract more customers, a brand should trigger emotions that later shape their perception. If a customer prompts good associations, a company can gain a competitive advantage, have benefits over its competitors, and ensure customer retention and acquisitionat a lower cost.
Each brand strives to build a base of loyal customers. That’s why it employs different methods to make people appreciate and recognize this business and purchase from it again and again. Branding encourages entrepreneurs to do everything possible to establish a positive perception.It helps companies appeal to their customers through different platforms and build strong connections.
To stand out from the crowd of new startupsthat appear on digital platforms every day, businesses invest in developing a strong brand that draws customer attention. Besides, with good branding, a company improves its brand recognition. Customers willappreciate and remembera brand that provides an excellent experience and leaves a wonderful impression. Such a brand deserves the trust of buyers.
Now that you know about the importance of branding, let’s move to its goals.
Goals of Branding
It’s essential to understand that you can’t create strong branding without defining your primary goals. As a brand owner, you can strive to:
build brand awareness;
establish an emotional connection with customers;
create a brand that stands out from the competition;
gain customer trust;
drive sales;
improve customer experience;
increase brand engagement;
retain customers;
acquire new clients;
develop customer loyalty.
It’s time to proceed to the main types of branding.
5Types of Branding
You need to choose thetype of brandingbased on your main purpose. The most critical aspect here is to create a long-lasting positive impression on your customers. We’ve prepared five types of branding for you to explore, so let’s get started.
Personal branding
Nowadays, when people have more trust in opinion leaders rather than in businesses, there’s a point in developing personal branding. You can market your occupation as a brand and build trusting relationships with your target audience. Consumers need authenticity, innovative ideas, and exceptional experience, and personal brands can provide them with all that. Consider creating a personal brand related to sports, healthy living, coaching, or education since they are in the greatest demand now.
Let’s take Ziva Meditation as an example. It was founded by Emily Fletcher, a leading expert in meditation. This famous woman managed to develop her brand and help many people with her books. Ziva Meditation allows people all around the world to enroll in courses online and improve the quality of their lives by reducing anxiety, obtaining confidence, improving memory, etc.
Take a look at someof her courses.
Product branding
In a market crowded with similar products, companies should be ready to develop distinctive and unique visuals, packaging, logo, design, appearance, and form to make people recognize their brands. That’s why your brand needs a product with a strong identity to be successful. Use a distinctive color scheme, play with shapes, design, etc. You should also have a great logo, packaging, and messages to establish an emotional connection and make people recognize your product.
The brightest example of product branding is the famous Coca-Cola Company. The main lesson from the brand you can take is to be consistent. You can see consistency in its logo, design, ad spots, commercials, and even bottles of carbonated drinks. In its campaigns, the brand communicates the same message and positive vibes across all available marketing channels.
Retail branding
To make the store look unique and recognizable, entrepreneurs ensure deliberate design choices of their layouts, light fixtures, decor, music, and even types of flooring. It also helps create a living brand experience for each customer who decides to visit a retail store. Hence, if you want to increase your customer retention, provide an excellent and exciting experience for those who visit your physical stores.
Corporate branding
This type of branding refers to design choices and ways to convey a company’s keyvalues. It entails a mission, goal, price point, ideal customer, etc. Corporate branding isn’t only about a website and ads. It also includes the way your company communicates with charities, reacts to certain events, builds company culture, and organizes the recruiting process.
Service branding
Before selling your services, you need to show your knowledge and expertise in the industry. People should trust your company to choose it over competitors. Since service branding is based on your values, be ready to provide them to your visitors. Both online and offline businesses should think of engaging ways to interest customers and bring them unforgettable experiences and value. You can conduct special classes and webinars or create events that demonstrate your service at its best.
Now that you know the types of branding, it’s time to walk you through several steps to create a branding strategy for your business.
How to Create a Branding Strategy
Identify and analyze your target audience
Establish brand positioning
Create a brand identity
Plan your content strategy
Develop a website
Tailor your messaging
Gauge and adjust
To develop a branding strategy, you need to be aware of the necessary steps. Follow these steps to do everything right.
Identify and analyze your target audience. If you want to achieve business growth and good profits, then your ideal customer should be clearly defined. Choose a specific segment of your clients that is interested in your product. Once you identify your main consumers, analyze them to understand their needs and priorities and create a message that resonates with their wants.
Establish brand positioning. It refers toyour brand’s image in the minds of consumers and the way they distinguish your company from others. Write a statement (three to five sentences) that explains the essence of your business. It should outline things your company does, your target audience, and special features that make you different from other brands in yourindustry.
Create a brand identity.If you want to reach more customers, you need a strong brand identity. Develop your brand elements like logo, name, and tagline so that customers can build associations with your company and remember it. Remember, your company’s name shapes the first impression on customers and lets them understand your offer. First of all, use brainstorming to obtain as many great ideas from your team as possible. Secondly, choose clear and easy-to-remember words. Thirdly, create a unique, short, and clever name. To design a logo, you should understand the purpose of your business, know your brand identity, and select colors and style that correlates with your brand name and product.Don’t forget to create a tagline: keep it short and simple, tell a story, and mention your offer.
Plan your content strategy.You need valuable educational materials to attract, nurture, and qualify your leads. That’s why you should be ready to provide your future customers with informative and unique content. It helps improve your reputation, gain visibility, and attain brand awareness.
Develop a website. Nowadays, an online presence is a must since it has a huge impact ona brand’s success. However, some entrepreneurs don’t realize the significant role a website plays. You should have a good site at least so that customers can explore your products or service before purchasing. Creating a high-quality website and managing it properly allows you to improve credibility. You can stand out among competitors by developing a good-looking website that conveys quality information to visitors. Besides, you can also showcase your brand, generate leads, and boost organic traffic.
Tailor your messaging. To communicate your message effectively, do it with the help of your brand personality and a unique tone of voice. You should also understand what message to deliver to your target audience. Besides, you need to know the result you want to achieve after a customer receives your message. Hence, try to do your best to build strong branding.
Gauge and adjust. The last brand development step includes tracking your progress. At this point, you can get to know whether a strategy goes according to the plan. Monitor the website traffic and your key metrics, includingthe number of leads, opportunities for partnership, new customers, and more. They will help you assess the reputation and perception of your brand among customers. As a result, you’ll be able to improve your company and the emotions it evokes in consumers’ minds.
Now let’s walk you through some examples to get inspired.
Examples of Powerful Branding
A company with a strong branding strategy differs from its competitors and succeeds in connecting with its target audience. Let’sreview several examples of powerful branding.
Drift
This sales technology company’s teams pay special attention to in-person interaction since they believe that it is critical for an effective selling process. Besides, they have published a book about the company’s culture and managing style.Its key message is that this brand prioritizes people over efficiency.
Uber
The company knows customers’ needs and can take them to any place they want. Uber’s online app simplifies the problem of finding a car and connects users to their driver in any part of the world.Perhaps every person who uses ride-hailing platforms can recognize Uber from its logo, design, style, excellent user experience, and other essential elements. Global Uber helps people not to get lost or confusedif they don’t know how to get to a certain destination.
Congrats, now you know that to achieve success in your industry and become a leader, you need to shape a positive perception of your brand. Leverage our step-by-step guide to create a great branding strategy and impress your audience.
Brand personality
A brand personality is a set of human traits that belong to a specific brand and can be conveyed through tone of voice and visuals. It helps make customers choose a certain company over its competitors, form an emotional attachment, build solid and long-lasting relationships with clients, and gain customer loyalty and trust.
Why is brand personality important?
When we discuss branding, we don’t necessarily mean name, logo, and tagline. It also includes giving characteristics and properties to the company to create a unique identity that will help people recognize a specific brand and differentiate it from other alternatives on the market.
People buy products and services they like and can relate to. To acquire customers, marketers create a clear sense of a company. An inconsistent brand with generic messages and without any intention or strategy behind those messages can’t gain the love and trust of customers. There are hundreds of brands out there that convey their essence better and dispose people to purchase.
A brand personality is a set of human characteristics your brand has. It empowers your company to build connections with your target audience. Not only people can have traits, values, and beliefs. Brands obtain them too to attract and reach the masses. This is the way you can evoke emotions in consumers and build brand equity. With a strong brand personality, you can easily obtain loyal customers and differ from your competitors.
Besides, a certain personality helps your brand connect with customers emotionally, convey your brand message, and set the tone of your business. Companies communicate their traits over time through their products, quality, and packaging. Brand personality is what you want customers to think about your brand and how they actually perceive it.
Brand personality is essential for any company, so it’s necessary to know about its types as well. Let’s walk you through the five main kinds.
Types of Brand Personalities
Sincerity
Excitement
Competence
Sophistication
Ruggedness
There are five types of brand personalities. We’ll review them all to help you choose a personality for your new business or determine whether your company has a brand personality and its type. Let’s get the ball rolling and start with sincerity.
Sincerity
Brands that position themselves as sincere are loved and trusted by customers because they can be described as straightforward and trustworthy. Such companies strive to tell the facts, give consumers transparency, and use real-life experiences to promote their products and services. Honest, real, cheerful, friendly, and genuine are how we can describe them.
One of the examples of sincere and honest brands is Gymshark, a brand of gym clothing for men and women. Gymshark strives to have genuine customers who love their brand and fitness. To popularize the brand and build long-term relationships with customers, the company asked influencers for help.
Excitement
Companies that have an “excitement” trait provide their audience with an unforgettable experience. They encourage customers to join them and discover something new and unknown. Such brands are good at creating hype around their products or services.
Let’s take Airbnb, for example. Unforgettable trips are guaranteed with this vacation rental company. With the help of this app, people have the opportunity to go on a vacation and stay at a local’s place. In 2014, the brand even changed its logo to visually represent Airbnb’s personality.
Competence
These are the companies consumers choose to be sure that everything will be done well and according to their high standards. They are industry leaders that show the high quality of products and are committed to constant innovations and improvements. Such brands can also be described as intelligent, reliable, and experienced.
Apple is an excellent example of a brand with the traits mentioned above. It’s extremely popular because of the devices it produces. The company invests in social media marketingand an up-to-date site to reach its target audience — modern and cool young people. Apple is a world-known company with a unique and modern personality that offers reliable and high-quality devices.
Sophistication
To this group belong the brands that not everyone can afford. They combine luxury and superiority. They are expensive, elegant, glamorous, and upper-class. Tiffany Co is one of them. With clever marketing and targeting, the company was able to establish itself as a brand with a charming, elegant, and expensive personality.
Ruggedness
Companies in this group emphasize the power and strength of their clients. They focus on the outdoors and nature. These brands canalsobe characterized as masculine, rough, and tough.
Jeep, an automobile brand, is famous for its rugged and unique style. Jeeps are manly and stylish cars. The name of this brand is usually associated with freedom, passion, and adventure. Customers who choose these cars are considered to be resolute people without boundaries who strive for adventure.
It’s wonderful that now you know the difference between the five main types of brand personalities. However, to be in the know, it’s critical to be aware of the steps required to develop a strong brand personality that will conquer customers with different backgrounds, locations, and interests.
How to Create a Strong Brand Personality
Your brand can be happy, exciting, energetic, family-oriented, and mature, and you are the one to define it. People are extremely different in their traits, character, and appearance, just like brands. However, sometimes their goals might be the same. To create a strong brand personality, you should pay attention to our four tips and implement them correctly.
Analyze your competitors. Except for reflecting your brand message, you need to consider brand differentiation to identify your competitive advantagethat will attract newleads. For this purpose, you should analyze the brand personalities of your competitors to know the traits of the brands in your industry. For example, if the majority of your competitors prefer “competence,” it would be great to develop in a different direction and focus, let’s say, on “sincerity.”
Serve your target audience. Remember, the needs and wants of your customers are your top priority. That’s why you need to do everything possible to comply with them. You should know the basic information about your clients: who they are, where they come from, and what their interests are. It allows you to create personalized offers and promote them in your email campaigns. LIKE.TG allows you to reach your customers through professional email newsletters you can create with the help of our drag and drop email editor.
Make a list of adjectives accurately describing your brand. This is a great practice, especially for those who are about to start their business. The exercise will help you get the creative juices flowing. Let your brand have a personality by giving it several traits that describe it best. For example, if you sell stylish clothes for young people, you can present your brand as youthful, energetic, and passionate.
Define the direction of your brand personality. If you have a list of adjectives describing your brand, it will be easier for you to determine in which direction you want to move and develop. Imagine that your brand is a person, and give it characteristics that your customers will appreciate and love.
These four tips will help you a lot when developing a brand personality. Be consistent in your decisions to present a strong and reliable brand to your target audience. It’s time to proceed to the famous brands that belong to different types of personalities and operate in various industries.
10Brand Personality Examples
MM’s
Nike
Harley Davidson
Starbucks
McDonald’s
Dove
Tesla
Victoria’s Secret
Disney
Amazon
The most important for each brand is to do something that people will appreciate. The thing you stand for, your values, vision, and mission. Your company should implement a person-centered approach to reach everyone in your target audience. That’s how well-established brands managed to do it.
MM’s
MM’s is an excellent example of expressive brand personality. You can always see it in the brand’s commercials, ads, and campaigns. The company created fun, comedic, and clever characters to show its brand personality. MM’s uses personification and presents the main characters: Green, Yellow, Red, Blue, and Brown — multi-colored button-shaped chocolates that have different adventures in thebrand’svarious commercials. That’s why we can refer MM’s to as the “excitement” framework.
Nike
Nike, a famous company engaged in selling footwear and sportswear, has been one of the leaders in this industry for decades and is admired by people all around the world. Nike is associated with ruggedness and excitement. Its shoes and apparel are considered durable, outdoorsy, and worth paying more money. Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan encourages customers to action and lets them believe that they can achieve everything they desire.
Harley Davidson
The motor company has a rugged brand identity because of its gritty language and rough tone of voice. The brand addresses its audience, people with a rebellious spirit without any corporate overtones or pleasantries. Harley Davidson attracts people who want to feel free and independent by riding a luxurious motorcycle that features cruising agility perfect for long rides.
Starbucks
This recognizable brand also has its personality, with the help of which Starbucks remains very popular worldwide despite having many competitors that offer products of the same quality. For customers, the brand is associated with a modern coffee shop with a friendly atmosphere where they can relax or even work and drink a cup of good coffee.
The company’s team created a great brand strategy that is outgoing and personable. The brand’s attention to details like customers’ names on Starbucks’ cups of coffee still creates buzz around this company.
McDonald’s
It’s pretty challenging to create a strong brand personality for a fast-food chain in a highly competitive environment with very similar offers. However, this brand managed to do it very professionally. McDonald’s is a company that now stands out since it’s convenient, clean, and family-friendly fast food. This is because of the Happy Meal on their menu and the playground for children. Besides, it’s often described as cheerful, up-to-date, and friendly.
Dove
This personal care brand appeals to different types of women. It has an elegant and straightforward personality and encourages one to see the beauty of every woman. Dove communicates the essence of true inner beauty. Moreover, the brand has released a new campaign that emphasizes that we shouldn’t believe in unrealistic beauty ideals but rather care about individual beauty.
Tesla
Tesla combines such traits as excitement and sophistication. Driving a Tesla allows customers to express their attitude towards the environment. By buying an electric car, a person can encourage others to do so. It empowers people to change the world and obtain unforgettable experiences.
Victoria’s Secret
Perhaps each person has heard about Victoria’s Secret fashion shows at least once. The largest lingerie retailer in the US has a mighty, sexy, bold, and empowering personality popular among young audiences.
Disney
Disney has been creating happiness through unforgettable experiences. The brand focuses on customers and their feedback. Disney is a family-oriented company that succeeded in winning people’s hearts worldwide with the help of its movies. This is because it’s friendly, fun, and suits people of all ages.
Amazon
Amazon, a company known worldwide for e-commerce and cloud computing, is considered to be one of the brands that customers trust the most. This is due to the sincerity Amazon tries to communicate to its clients. The company proves its sincerest intentions by providing exceptional product accessibility, industry-changing shipping, and return policies. Since the brand is customer-oriented, it tells clients what to expect when using Amazon.
To put it simply, establishing a strong brand personality allows you to help prospectsdecide whether your company suits them perfectly. Moreover, it’s critical when you have a lot of competitors and need to stand out. It will help you build strong relationships with your clients and obtain their trust and loyalty.
Brand mark
A brand mark is a symbol, element, art design, or visual image that helps immediately recognize a certain company. It is essential for developing and maintaining a brand's image.
Why is a brand mark important?
Brand identity isn't just about some visual assets. It's about conveying your company's idea, the thing your brand stands for. Brand colors, fonts, and even logos are just tools that help you communicate your message and reach out to your target audience.
We live in a world where visual content plays a significant role in our everyday life. According to Poll Everywhere, 65% of people are visual learners. Thus, it's hard to ignore the fact that we absorb the information we see better.
Many factors influence the success of a specific brand, one of which is imagery. It's worth noting that using images can help you convey your message and emotions quickly. Keeping this fact in mind, companies worldwide use brand marks to identify their brands visually.
Now you know why companies spend a lot of time and strength on creating an excellent brand mark. It's time to see the difference between a brand mark and a logo because these two concepts aresometimesconfused.
Brand Mark vs. Logo
A brand mark is a supportive element that helps customers identify a brand at once. When people see the brand mark, it should remind them of the unique characteristics of your company. It's all about emotional connection, something that will draw prospects to your brand and boost their engagement. While a logo is a combination of forms and other elements, a brand mark is an image.
Let's take LIKE.TG, for example. This marketing automation platform enables you to send automated email and SMS campaigns, create chatbots and web push notifications. Below you can see the difference between LIKE.TG's logo and brand mark.
A logois a symbol made up of text and images used to identify a brand. It's created permanently and can sometimesundergo slight modifications. A logo shows what a brand does and values. It can be presented in the form of an abstract or figurative design or stylized brand name if this company has a high level of brand awareness.
It's worth mentioning that a logo is an integral part of a brand identity. An easily recognizable logo is a valuable asset for any company. That's why it's usually trademarked for intellectual property protection.
Logos of Dunkin' Donuts, Samsung, Burger King, BMW can be recognized worldwide. They aim to visually identify the company and draw a person's attention to the brand. We've prepared some tips to help you create an effective brand mark.
How to Create an Effective Brand Mark
Choose a brand mark that represents you the best
Make it easy to understand
Create a brand mark that is easy to memorize
Ensure that it conveys your identity
Be consistent
Think timeless
Creating an effective brand mark requires creativity, deliberate decisions, and attention to detail. Sometimes, it can be difficult for marketing teams to improve a brand mark to make the image meaningful, recognizable, and easy to understand.
Companies that seek to update or change their brand mark should follow several steps to do it correctly.
Choose a brand mark that represents you the best. Refining your entire company down into one image can be challenging. However, if you use all the benefits of graphic design correctly, it can work wonders. An appropriate image can quickly change the way customers perceive your brand.
Make it easy to understand. Customers who will encounter your brand come from different backgrounds and age groups. That's why your brand mark should be easy to recognize and perceive. Your clients shouldn't struggle to figure out the message you were trying to communicate. Keep in mind that nowadays people are overwhelmed with the excessive amount of companies and their marketing efforts. It's crucial to convey your brand idea fast to get the customers' attention and increase brand engagement.
Create a brand mark that is easy to memorize. One of the goals of creating a powerful mark is to make customers remember your company and choose you over the competitors' alternatives. Developing a suitable and straightforward design ensures that you convey your brand's message clearly and effectively. As a result, customers will easily memorize your company.
Ensure that it conveys your identity.In the long run, it's advisable to select an image that represents your brand's purpose and mission rather than an image that showcases your goods. You can't exclude the fact that your priorities and your main product might change, or you would like to expand to other types of products in the near future.
Be consistent. Anything can inspire you to create a great brand mark, from the brand name to depicting what the company does. Let's take John Deere, for example. The brand name inspired the team to create a deer-shaped icon. When you decide on the brand mark, you should ensure that your team uses it consistently when communicating with leads and customers.
Think timeless. As you know, some things can go out of style quickly. The word "timeless" is used here not to tell about something old or stodgy, it's rather about creating a brand mark that is classic and will never be old-fashioned. For this purpose, avoid using trendy fonts or today's influential design trends. Search for ways to create a brand mark that will be fresh even in 10 years.
Following these several steps enables you to create a brand mark that will stand out and attract customers. Now let's proceed to some examples of brand marks that have succeeded.
3 Examples of Brand Marks
Amazon
Nike
Kohler
There are many examples of outstanding brand marks, and we've prepared the ones you would recognize.
Amazon
Amazon is an American company that enables customers worldwide to shop for different electronics, books, home decor, and more online. Moreover, it's a great example of a company that has an appropriate brand mark. Previously, a brand had a logo in the form of an icon which you can see below. However, the Amazon team decided to update its brand mark to make it more appealing. The mark was developed by keeping their customers' preferences and interests in mind.
Nike
This multinational company founded in 1964 is famous for manufacturing high-quality footwear, clothes, equipment, and more. To connect with the brand's customers emotionally, the company designed a brand mark that is easy to recognize and memorize.
Kohler
Kohler is famous for manufacturing plumbing products, but it also produces furniture, cabinetry, tile, engines, and generators. This company has long used abstract artwork to present "The Bold Look of Kohler." It's a great example of how some brands use intricate designs and stylistic features as a part of brand development.
To reach more customers, your brand should communicate with them on an emotional level. Making your company more appealing is a primary purpose of a brand mark. Anything can attract people to your brand, starting from colors, images, and words to graphics. You just need to create a brand mark that represents you best and makes people recognize your brand among others.
Brand reputation
Brand reputation is the brand perception shaped in the minds of consumers, partners, and investors about a specific brand. A company with a strong positive reputation gains customer trust and encourages word-of-mouth promotion.
In this article, we’ll unveil why brand reputation is important and 5 ways to build it. We’ll also provide you with a guide on how to measure your brand reputation.
Why is brand reputation important?
Although you might not notice it, brand reputation influences every aspect of your business, including success, profitability, and brand advocacy. These are the basic things you need to take care of. We’ll uncover the most important business fundamentals so that you consider watching your reputation.
First of all, the reputation of your company has an impact on credibility and trust. If your brand has a good reputation and many people recommend it, more prospects will trust you and strive to purchase from you. A positive reputation indicates that your business is credible and trustworthy, so customers won’t have to worry about the quality, price, delivery, refund policy, etc.
Secondly, your existing consumers will become loyal to your brand. If your current customers purchase your items again and again, they can experience superior quality, low prices, empathetic customer support agents, and other benefits of your brand. When they realize there’s no one better, they become loyal. Brand reputation influences consumer decisions on whether to stay with a brand or find a substitute. If the reputation is good, they stay.
Satisfied consumers can serve you as free word-of-mouth promoters of your brand. They recommend your company to friends and family online and offline by uncovering your products’ advantages. These people will help you obtain new clients, increase sales, and improve your brand image. However, people won’t advocate and choose a business with a negative reputation.
The reputation of your company is closely connected to sales and revenues. Your sales and profitability will improve if you have a good brand reputation.
Now that you know the benefits of having a positive brand reputation, it’s time to figure out the ways to establish it. In the next section, we’ll uncover the most effective techniques.
5 Ways to Build Your Brand Reputation
A proper strategy enables you to reap the benefits mentioned in the previous section. We’ll cover the most effective methods that will help you establish or improve your brand reputation.
Establish a strong brand identity. If you are starting to create a brand, you should consider brand identity. Developing a powerful reputation lets you make sure you know and understand your company values, mission, and principles and helps you decide how to act in different business situations. When building a brand identity, you need to establish a clear language, design the main branding elements like logo, colors, and imagery, and develop a brand voice.
Ensure your brand is present on multiple online platforms. Since the popularity of social media is constantly increasing, you should establish an online presence. It’s necessary to meet the needs of consumers who prefer social media platforms for shopping. Besides providing convenience to your prospects, you can promote your brand using various social media techniques. Consider creating reels, updating consumers about upcoming promos and releases, and responding to users’ mentions. This way, you’ll establish a positive image, impress customers, and show them that you care.
Ask consumers for feedback. Users who want to be satisfied with a purchase visit review websites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google My Business. They can explore your brand's social media and mentions, reviews, and comments. If you want to shape a positive first impression, it’s essential to ask consumers to leave reviews, comments, and sentiments. This way, you’ll be able to provide potential customers with the necessary answers and establish trust in your brand. Make sure to provide your existing customers with seamless customer service, high-quality products, and after-sales service to satisfy them. Remember, every negative review damages your brand reputation. Consider leaving some space for your clients to write reviews. After receiving positive testimonials, you can share them on your website. You can send surveys to figure out what consumers like and dislike about your company. This information will help you identify your pain points and eliminate them.
Pay attention to customers’ responses. Listen to your customers because they are your main focus. By analyzing their comments, you can ensure a better product and service. If you plan to launch your product, consider providing testers to potential customers and asking them for their opinion. It’s a perfect way of finding out issues. If you’ve already launched your product, you can ask customers for feedback after they try it. The information you receive is precious for your reputation, usefulness, and credibility. You can use many marketing tools to keep your hand on the pulse and find out what users think about your company. You can use Google Alerts, social media listening, and reputation management tools.
Provide the best customer experience. Poor customer experience directly impacts your brand reputation. Unsatisfied consumers are more likely to write negative reviews, comments, and mentions. Afterward, your prospects can find the reviews and have a negative first impression. Keep in mind that people consider buying from companies with high ratings in crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. Bad reviews reduce your rating and worsen your reputation. That’s why always find space for improvement. Use feedback and satisfaction surveys to collect consumers’ responses about your product and brand in general. After receiving the answers, analyze them. Divide reviews into three groups: positive, negative, and neutral. Afterward, see how many responses you have in each column. See all the reviews to identify the problems people face most often. Strive to remove these problems from your product to improve customer satisfaction.
Now that you know the strategies, let’s proceed to the next section to unveil how to measure brand reputation. After exploring this section, you’ll be able to assess it and decide what steps to take next.
How to measure brand reputation?
Once you do all the steps to establish your brand reputation, you should choose the key metrics to assess it. We’ll uncover the most important indicators for you to consider.
Pay attention to the share of voice. After you launch your brand to a wide audience, you need to find out how much buzz you’ve succeeded to generate. Share of voice refers to the brand awareness of your company compared to competitors on social media. This metric gives you a clear understanding of your position among competitors. If your brand reputation is lower than theirs, you can decide to make some strategic decisions. These steps will help you improve the situation. Moreover, you’ll be able to track information about your rivals and see your progress.
Analyze sentiments. Sentiment analysis is used to determine whether the information received is positive, negative, or neutral. Track and assess impressions on social media, review websites, and other platforms. You need to identify the character of the majority of reviews and comments. Consider dividing all responses into three groups: positive, negative, and neutral. Afterward, see which of them prevails. If there are many positive reviews, then your brand reputation is great. However, having negative reviews damages your reputation. Take action to eliminate problems.
Measure your reach. This metric indicates the number of people you have reached with your key message. The measure is crucial for your brand awareness since it shows how big your target audience is. With its help, you can find out whether the content you create and communicate to your audience reaches them. This way, you can evaluate the effectiveness and relevance of your articles, social media posts, advertising campaigns, etc.
Explore mentions from industry influencers. When you see that opinion leaders in your niche leave positive comments about your product, it indicates that they appreciate your work. You can use these reviews on your website and social media to show that you are a credible company. This way, you’ll be able to establish a positive image of your brand and expand your reach. You can also ask these people to promote your product through their accounts to reach more qualified leads. Opinion leaders add value to your brand, show that your business is trustworthy and credible, and demonstrate the benefits of your product.
Congrats, now you know what brand reputation is and why it’s essential. Make use of our strategies to establish a positive brand reputation effectively.
Brand mapping
Brand mapping is a questionnaire that encompasses a list of attributes, a list of brands, and questions for customers. It helps companies evaluate how good they are in terms of innovations, trustworthiness, and pricing compared to competitors and figure out how clients and prospects perceive their businesses and products.
In this article, we’ll explore the importance of brand mapping and the steps necessary to map your brand.
Why is brand mapping important?
Brand mapping is a source of valuable information for marketers. By creating a visual display of data, you can gain customer insights that will help you with the further marketing strategy. First of all, you can reveal how potential and current customers perceive your brand. Secondly, you can unveil what consumers think or feel about your competitors. With brand mapping, you can identify your main rivals and understand their competitive advantage. Besides, you can visually outline your strengths and weaknesses. Once you map your brand, you can improve your position in those fields in which you are superior to your competitors and improve those in which there are shortcomings.
If you have average results, you can revise your marketing strategy and message. Do research to find out what makes consumers satisfied or unsatisfied with your business. After you do it, you’ll understand which areas to improve and how to make your company stand out. For example, if prospective customers assume that your company is less reliable than competitors, find out the reason. Analyze these rivals to figure out what they do to earn people’s trust. Once you eliminate the problem, consumers will have a different perception.
With a brand map, you’ll have a clear picture of your company, know your competitors, and how customers perceive them. As a result, you’ll have an opportunity to change a strategy to reach customers and hook their attention, earn trust, or become an industry leader. You’ll also get some valuable data about your brand positioning.
Now that you know the importance, it’s time to unveil how to map your brand.
How to map your brand?
There are several mandatory steps you should perform to do the brand mapping. You can develop a brand map as a part of bigger research or create it separately. We’ve prepared a list of to-dos to achieve the necessary results.
Write a list of rivals. You should identify the number and names of competitors you want to analyze in line with your brand. Choose around 5-8 competitors to have a comprehensive analysis and customer insights into your brand and rivals.
Prepare a list of attributes for companies. Choose for which areas of your business you need customer insights. After, select attributes that will help consumers answer your questions. 8-10 attributes would be perfect.
Get ready with the right questions. To get essential insights into consumer behavior, you should relate your questions to attributes. For instance, if you have a “reliable” attribute, you can ask respondents to assess the reliability level of each brand, including yours. Your customers should evaluate companies on the list by using a 100 point scale.
Make sure you have at least 200 responses. To have a clear picture of your company compared to competitors, you need to have a minimum of 200 answers from clients. Ideally, you need to collect 1,000 responses. This way, you’ll have a list of associations related to your business.
Process information. Once you gather all answers, you need to analyze the data you have. You can find out how positively customers perceive your brand, whether they think it’s reliable, trustworthy, quality, affordable, etc. Use information about your competitors to make some innovations and improvements to make people feel happier with your company.
Brand mapping will come in handy when you don’t know what you are doing right and wrong. It’ll serve you as a source of valuable information about your customers.
Brand marketing
Brand marketing is a particular approach to creating a brand name and design, establishing clear creative communications, and performing marketing activities that will differentiate your productfrom others.
Brand marketingcollaborates with many branches of advertisement. Brand marketing aims to create a product that will hook the audience and lead the current market.
Brand marketing and direct response marketing are two different approaches to marketing. Watch the video to find out the differences and ways to combine them.
Why is brand marketing is essential?
This type of marketing is all about developing brand awareness and recognition, trustworthiness, product visibility, market reach, and the overall reputation of your brand. It is a way to promote your product uniquely and recognizably to highlight your brand, it's a particular value for customers and show what sets you apart from others. As a result, products or services that you offer your customers will have a higher value.
Brand marketing pursues a long-term goal of building a continually growing base of loyal customers through communicating your brand's identity and values. Therefore, an effective brand marketing strategy can help you stand out from the crowd and take your business to the next level, skyrocket sales, and attract new customers.
Brand Marketing Objectives
Brand awareness
Brand loyalty
Brand advocate
Brand equity
Brand engagement
Brand identity and image
Building a brand is a challenging and crucial step in your business's success. Brand marketing objectives are the main goals of any brand, such as creating a particular image in the market or increasing revenue. Let’s cover the most common brand marketing objectives that companies usually pursue while designing their brand strategy.
Brand awareness. Raising awareness is the main task to make customers recognize and recall your product or service through diverse advertising activities.
Brand loyalty. It’s essential to make customers not just recognize and choose your brand but to stick withit. The primary task is to convince customers they have to opt for your brand by displaying product value and uniqueness.
Brand advocate. Increase the number of customers who will recommend your product or service to other people.
Brand equity. Authoritative and firmly established brands are believed to be more successful since people prefer a well-known company to a less recognizable brand.
Brand engagement. It’s better to work towards increased engagement from your active users. The more users that interact with your brand (visit your website, review products, or make orders), the higher are your chances are to build a recognizable brand.
Brand identity and image. People need torecognize your brand through visual elements such as symbols, logos, colors, packaging, etc.
As you can see, these objectives are crucial for the success of your product.
Brand Marketing Strategies
Brand-namerecognition
Individual branding
Attitude branding
“No brand” strategy
Brand extension
Private label
Crowdsourcing
A brand marketing strategy is the general approach you choose to promote your brand and make it visible and well-known. If a brand strategy is well-defined and executed, you will be able to achieve tangible results. There are plenty of brand marketing strategies based on the target audience, budget, marketing campaigns, but we will cover the most common ones below.
Brand-namerecognition. People recognize a company by its brand name, logo, slogan as well as colors. Great examples are Apple, Coca Cola, or Starbucks that use the weight of their brand name to drive sales and attract customers.
Individual branding. This strategy is used when a large company has subsidiary products, which function independently under their name. For example, Mars, Inc. produces Snickers, Twix, Bounty, MMs.
Attitude branding. This is a great strategy to consider. Companies like Nike implement attitude branding by bringing a personality andshow their particular style.
“No brand” strategy. This minimalist approach can bringexcellent results for your brand. The design of a logo and product itself is generic but straightforward and creative at the same time. A good example is the Japanese company, “Muji,” which translates to “No label” in English.
Brand extension. This particular strategy is used when a well-established company decides tocreate new products or services. The latest products or services will still carry the primary brand identity. For example, Fender had produced guitars and then extended its brand with the production of earbuds.
Private label. This strategy is widely used among supermarkets. For example, Walmart sells products at a more reasonable price to beat competition from larger, well-known brands.
Crowdsourcing. In this case, it’s up to the public to support your brand's creation. For example, supporters are actively involved increating the name of yourbrand. This approach allows you to carefully follow your customer’s preferences and drive their interest in a product.
Each of these marketing strategies can promote your brand and makeyour products successful.
How to Develop an Effective Brand Marketing Strategy
Establish your company vision
Identify the target audience
Stay consistent
Draw real emotions
Brand strategy is a crucial part ofyour overall marketing plan as it helps to establish sustainable relationships with customers and make them choose your brand.
If you want to establish a well-running business and create an effective brand strategy, there are a few things to consider.
Before you define your brand, you have to answer several questions that will help you make the right decision:
What is the primary mission of your product?
What are the main features that set you apart?
Who are your customers?
What do they already think of your product?
What are the main things you want customers to associate with your brand?
Now that you have answered these questions,you should have a better idea of how to design your brand strategy.
Here are the main tips that will make your brand strategy highly effective.
Establish your company vision.Create a list of features or characteristics that you want your brand to be known for. Come up with a strategy that will communicate these characteristics to your customers through various marketing channels.
Identify the target audience. Brand marketing will be successful only if you determine your target audience correctly. Identify your audience, not just by their underlying demographics. Dig deeper, consider details, and try to define their psychographics as well.
Stay consistent.You must come up with a recognizable name, logo, colors, and communication style with your customers. Consistency is the key to creating and maintaining reliable brand recognition.
Draw real emotions. It’s obligatory to establish an emotional connection with your customers. Provide the best service possible, care about your customers' satisfaction, and create marketing campaigns that will evoke emotions. Creating an emotional response is vital for your success and to establish brand loyalty.
How to Improve Your Brand Marketing with LIKE.TG
Nowadays, there are a lot of tools and services that facilitate all marketing activities, including brand marketing. The main reason to do this is to advance all the processes, make them more productive and cost-efficient. Here LIKE.TG proves useful.
With this service, you will be able to establish effective communication with customers, let them stay up to date with the latest news, and promote loyalty through compelling email campaigns and messages in social media.
Creating adaptive email campaigns has never been more comfortable with LIKE.TG. Tell your customers about the forthcoming seasonal sale or announce a new feature launch. Drag and drop editor allows creating an email easily and fast. Make customized eye-catching email designs, send it to your target audience, and track your performance through analytics.
Moreover, LIKE.TG allows marketers to create a chatbot forFacebook Messengerand Telegram app that you should try out. With this outstanding feature, you will be able to provide automated customer support that will imitate live communication with company representatives. Your customers will be satisfied with instant responses to their queries.
Brand Marketing Example
We have mentioned some brands and their general brand marketing strategies. The most prominent example, Nike, was established 55 years ago. Now Nike is known all over the world, and the company brings more than $35 billion in yearly revenue. Customers continue to choose Nike, despite having many other options, because of their superior brand marketing.
Nike's logo is known everywhere and is instantly recognizable. Nike creates high-quality sportswear and shoes and knows how to make customers want to buy their products through effective brand marketing.
Nike’s brand strategy was defined long ago. Their website, customer support, marketing activities are top-notch. In their brand marketing campaigns, they often involve a particular personality to speak to customers’ emotions. Nike's personality is open about failures, struggles, and the ways they overcome all the hurdles related to sports. Through various kinds of visual marketing such as promo videos, banners, ads, Nike drives sales.
This approach is hugely motivating for people, evokes sheer emotion, and spurs customers to cope with challenges while choosing their brand. This what you need to strive for. Consistent, motivational, and emotional content that makes people believe and trust a manufacturer and stay with their brand for years.
The importance of brand marketing for your business's success is undeniable. It’s recommended to take care of it in the early stages of product development to build a brand that will be recognized by customers forever. By implementing these tips, you will be one step closer to creating an effective, sustainable, and memorable brand image. Raise brand awareness, boost loyalty, and be ready to harvest success.
Brand recognition
Brand recognition is a concept that defines a customer’s ability to identify a particular company based on its visual assets like logo, slogan, packaging, style, or colors. With brand recognition, a brand can obtain higher customer loyalty, advertising effectiveness, lower price sensitivity, and more word-of-mouth.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance and benefits of brand recognition and explore howit differs from brand awareness. We’ll also uncover seven strategies to increase your brand recognition and ways to measure it.
Why is brand recognition important?
If you aim to keep your brand in consumers’ minds, improving your brand recognition is crucial. Marketers of different companies often come up with various visual and audio clues to make customers recall their brands. They create the world’s most recognizable packaging like Tiffany and Co., famous symbols like McDonald’s Golden Arches, and memorable slogans like Nike’s “Just Do It.”
If a brand’s value has a direct connection with consumers, it shows that a company is moving in the right direction. For example, when consumers think of soda, the first brand that emerges in their minds is Coca-Cola. When customers remember a brand, it means that they are more likely to buy its product. As a result, a company obtains a significant sales volume and a bigger market share.
Both startupsand big corporations are ready to do all it takes to develop a brand recall since it brings the following benefits:
increased customer trust;
reduced price sensitivity;
improved brand equity;
better user experience;
higher sales volume;
increased revenue;
bigger market share;
more conversions;
expanded customer base;
active word-of-mouth promotion.
Now that you know the pros, let’s jump into the next section to discuss how brand recognition differs from brand awareness.
Brand Recognition vs. Brand Awareness
Brand recognition refers to a brand’s visual and audio clues, such as logos, slogans, styles, colors, etc. These visual assets help people identify a certain company. For example, when people think of foam clogs to wear to a picnic, they instantly recall Crocs because of its logo, name font, unique design, quality, and bright shoe colors.
Brand awareness refers to the person’s knowledge that a certain company exists. If people are aware of the brand, it means they know that a company offers some products or services. For example, if people didn’t know about the existence of Samsung, they wouldn’t recognize its visual assets and wouldn’t buy its smartphones, laptops, TVs, tablets, etc. Check out our article to find out more about brand awareness.
The difference is that a person learns about the existence of a company first. After it happens, brand recognition appears. It shows that a customer can already identify a brand from its logo, colors, slogan, etc. Hence, the two terms are interconnected and represent two different stages of one process.
Now when you are acquainted with the basics, let’s walk you through some strategies to improve your brand recognition.
7Strategies to Increase Brand Recognition
Consider guest blogging
Improve your ranking
Think of running paid ads on social media
Implement influencer marketing
Conduct giveaways
Create podcasts
Leverage native advertising
There are many great ways to improve brand recognition, but we’ll unpack the most effective ones. They can help you connect with yourtarget audience, win customer trust, enhancebrand recognition, and make your company prosper.
Consider guest blogging
Creating a blog is a must-have for a company if you want to show your knowledge and expertise and prove that your brand is an industry leader. Providing users with informative and interesting blog posts allows you to improve your rankings. Ultimately, more and more people will be not only aware of your brand but also identify your visual elements.
If you want to reach a wider audience, try to foster guest blogging. Writing for other websites related to your industry enables you to boost traffic, increase domain authority, build customer trust, and attain new readers. By visiting your website, new users can get to know your company and recognize it in the future.
Improve your ranking
SEO is the best way to show the quality and usefulness of your website to users. Consequently, you can rank higher and be available to a wider audience of Internet users. By reviewing your SEO strategy and improving it, you have an excellent opportunity to advance user experience, win new customers, and establish your credibility and brand awareness.
Remember to produce evergreen contentso that both visitors and Google can appreciate your articles. You should also make sure that you post only unique and quality content. Try to publish and update relevant posts frequently, share infographics and informative videos, create quality links, and use alt tags.
Let’s search for an evergreen article.Below you can seea post that was published in 2011, but it is still relevant and has a high ranking on Google.
Think of running paid ads on social media
Now when the number of social media users amounts to 4.33 billion, using paid ads on social media channels is a wonderful idea. Especially when advertising through social media proves to enhance brand recognition. Besides, running paid advertising allows you to obtain more loyal customers, make more conversions, reduce marketing costs, and also obtain a higher ranking on Google. You can run your ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other popular platforms.
Let’s take Isla Ida, a company that sells sustainable bracelets, for example. The brand’s sponsored ad on Instagram introduces its bracelets made from shells, black tourmaline, pink quartz, etc. It makes viewers recognize the brand and order its products to support our environment. Conscious buyers will definitely appreciate the idea and remember Isla Ida.
Implement influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is extremely popular because of the positive results it brings to businesses. Brand awareness and recognition, trust, authority, credibility, andlead generation are only a few benefits it brings. With opinion leaders, big corporations and startups manage to connect with a wider audience, boost conversions, increase their following, and build long-term partnerships.
For example, Dua Lipa, a famous singer and opinion leader, promotes Puma, a world-known footwear manufacturer. For sure, the influencer’s audience will identify Puma’s renowned logo and unique design of sneakers. The photo and mentions encourage people to buy its products because of Dua Lipa’s recommendation.
Conduct giveaways
To increase the digital footprint of your brand, consider creating giveaways. By promoting such contests on your social media channels, you’ll be able to attract prospectsand increase your brand recognition. Digital platforms are a perfect choice if you strive to promote your product through giveaways, create buzz around your company, and attain new followers. Select an appropriate prize, think of your rules and conditions, and set the time frames to conduct effective contests.
For example, let’s take a giveaway on Mother’s Day from Olukai, a brand that creates sandals, shoes, and slippers. By becoming word-of-mouth promoters, new followers will be able to remember and recall Olukai’s visual elements and footwear.
Create podcasts
There’s no need to talk merely about your product. Say, you have a marketing company, so you can start with a podcast about product promotion. Find the areas you know best to share your knowledge and experience in your podcasts. By doing this, you’ll reach your audience, build trusting relationships, communicate your expertise, share some stories, give valuable advice, unveil some life hacks, or teach something. Remember, the more value you bring to your audience, the more they will appreciate, recognize, and recommend your brand.
Let’s take ACCA, for example. The company has a series of podcasts that contain helpful information for people who are interested in accounting.
Leverage native advertising
If you aim to effectively enhance your brand recognition, consider leveragingnative advertising. It implies ads that suit the form and function of a website where they are placed. By employing this type of advertising, you can improve awareness, increase click-through rate, and encourage more people to purchase.
Take a look at Fast Company’s website. You can see one of their native advertisements below. The ad is from CareerFoundry, a German company that teaches people how to become UI designers.
It’s time to find out the ways to measure how well customers can recognize your company.
How to Measure Brand Recognition
If you want to measure how well customers can identify your brand, there are two easy ways to do it, and we’ll show you how. By analyzing your audience and conducting surveys, you’ll know how well your brand is performing.
Unprompted brand recall. In this situation, you have to measure the number of people who think about your company without initial prompting. The main goal is to determine the proportion of customers who recall your brand when they think about a certain product category. Firstly, ask your consumers what brand comes to their mind when they hear about a certain product category. Secondly, calculate the number of people who can think of your company, and divide it by the total number of survey participants. Thirdly, multiply the number by 100, and obtain your metric.
Prompted brand recall. This approach implies showing your respondents some materials about your company to see ifthey can recall your brand. You need to create a list of brands (including yours) that offer products in the same category and ask customers to choose companies they are familiar with. The metric will show you how many people have heard of your and your competitors’ products.
In a nutshell, the concept is an essential part of each company’s growth. It sets the direction for the number of sales and profit and defines the market share a business can win. Hence, if you want to improve your company’s performance, follow our tips and strategies above.
Brand preference
Brand preference is a marketing metric that reflects the strength of a brand in the market. This indicator shows whether consumers prefer a particular brand over other brands from the same category.
Watch this video to find out about the three main components that drive brand preference, learn how to measure the success of your strategy, and how to become a preferred brand.
Why is it important to build brand preference?
Simply put, brand preference measures the level of consumer dedication to your company. If your clients don't consider any other brands to save money or break new ground, you've managed to build brand preference.
There are some other ways to measure this metric. For example, your store has run out of the top-selling product that your clients adore. Check whether they will look for the similar one among your competitors or wait until it's back in stock. Another option is to monitor your customers' reaction to a price increase. If it doesn't influence your sales volume, it means that clients believe your product is worth its price.
The formula is simple: the higher your brand preference, the higher your total sales. You know that your clients appreciate you if they don't leave you because of higher prices or temporarily unavailable items. You can achieve this with well-thought-out marketing campaigns, high-quality products, and excellent customer service. Brand preferenceis also crucial since it reveals your loyal clients and brand advocates.
Factors Influencing Brand Preference
Building brand preference is one of the goals each business tries to achieve because it goes hand in hand with brand marketing concepts. Brand marketing is a holistic approach that entails reaching several objectives to build long-lasting relationships and emotional connections with clients, resulting in high revenue.
Essential aspects that contribute significantly to building your brand preferences include brand awareness, advocacy, loyalty, equity, engagement, identity, and image. It may seem like a lot, but, again, this is a long-term game. As soon as you consider these factors while developing your brand marketing strategy, customers will have more reasons to choose your company.
High-level personalization, deep segmentation, and predicting customers' intentions based on their activities and engagement will eliminate the possibility of your clients' turning to your competitors. A thorough analysis of your clients' needs and preferences will provide you with the data necessary to create highly relevant and killer offers.
Now, let's take a look at practical tips that will help you build brand preference.
6 Tips to Build Brand Preference
Highlight your benefits
Create customer profiles
Analyze your customer behavior
Increase customer engagement
Support your client at each stage of their buyer journey
Build customer loyalty
In the previous section, we've mentioned the factors that influence the process of building your brand preference. Here we'll share the tips to master some skills to increase the number of repeat buyers.
Highlight your benefits. You should understand what makes your company stand out among competitors. Remember that clients don't usually look for brands or products — they look for solutions to their problems. Therefore, you need to define your unique value propositionand talk about the benefits you offer. To make this scheme work, you should research your clients' needs and preferences to grab some insights and seethe whole picture.If you genuinely believe in the uniqueness and value of your product, so will your customers.
Create customer profiles.They should include personal data about your customers that will help you understand them better. A customer profile usually consists of user gender, age, location, job, income level, and other important information. You can collect this data via subscription forms, CRM systems, surveys and polls, analytics tools, andemail campaigns. You can tell the users that this data will help you craft the most relevant offers and improve customer service.
Analyze your customer behavior. User behavior on your site and social media accounts can tell much about their preferences and shopping habits. If users add items to their shopping cart without buying, reconsider the design of your checkout because it may take too long to order. If customers contact your support team with the same questions every day, they probably fail to find the answers on your site. Consider paying particular attention to your site navigation, resources available, and FAQ section. If clients never return to you to purchase again, they may question your product quality. Contact them and ask for their feedback for you to improve your services.
Increase customer engagement.People love brands that engage with their audience on socials which is the key to building a powerful emotional connection. Consider creating polls and surveys to discover your followers' opinions about your products or services and sharing some behind-the-scenes via Instagram Stories. You can also tell your brand story via a Facebook post or encourage customers to share their feedback with your hashtag to collect UGC. At least, you can just ask your audience which kind of content they prefer. They will appreciate this move.
Support your clients at each stage of their buyer journey. Your leads won't buy your products immediately if they have difficulties with your service. Don't panic; it happens. Your task is to be one step ahead and predict these issues. Determine at which stage you lose leads, analyze the obstacles, and be proactive. A well-thought content marketing strategy will help your leads eliminate possible problems. Offer them how-tos, checklists, reminders, video guides, and demos to realize how things work. Let your sales manager or customer retention team consult clients individually to understand them better.
Build customer loyalty. Loyal customers shop regularly, spend more on purchases than first-time buyers, and are a great source of word-of-mouth for your brand. They will definitely share their positive experience with friends and colleagues and, as a result, bring in new customers. To attract more devoted clients, you can hire more customer care agents, create a loyalty program, offer VIP tiers, collect customer feedback, optimize your efforts accordingly, send triggered emails, and segment your audience. Your efforts will pay off with high revenue and a strong brand reputation.
Now you know why building your brand preference is a must for each brand. Keep in mind the tips and make use of LIKE.TG marketing services to communicate with your audience effectively across almost every channel.
Brand strategy
A brand strategy is a company’s strategic plan that includes specific goals and helps marketers shape a certain image in customers’ minds. It allows a brand to generate more conversions, increase its value, and dominate the market.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of a brand strategy, its key components, and examples. We’ll also make the difference between a brand and marketing strategy clear and figure out how to build a brand strategy.
Why is a brand strategy important?
Every business owner who strives to grow a successful company needs to develop a strong brand strategy. With its help, businesses identify long-term goals and the type of company they manage. After setting key targets, entrepreneurs move towards their achievement and track their progress. A comprehensive brand strategy keeps them updated on whether they move in the right direction.
A brand is about intangible assets of a company that make it competitive in the market and worthy for customers. If you create an excellent strategy, you’ll generate customer loyalty, increase sales, and establish a good reputation and position within the market. People have positive emotions and thoughts associated with a specific company, generating purchasing decisions. As a result, brand equity increases.
You can reap many benefits after implementing a thoroughly developed brand strategy. It enables you to convey the core values of your company to the target audience. Establishing customer loyalty, trust, and credibility requires you to provide seamless experiences. So when you see some drawbacks, you’ll eliminate them.
A well-developed plan is a must for any company seeking to reach its goals efficiently. With its help, you’ll get away from ideas that can hurt your brand and its reputation. You’ll focus only on successful initiatives that bring profit to your business.
Now that you clearly understand brand strategy’s importance, let’s compare brand and marketing strategy to prevent any confusion.
Brand Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
Although these two terms are related, they are still different. We’ll review the description of each in detail to avoid confusion about brand and marketing strategy.
A brand strategy is a term that embraces a company’s reputation, products, and services it offers. The strategic plan includes the brand’s value, market position, purpose, vision, and ideal customer. These points are necessary for the company’s teams to work in one direction and make the right decisions. Besides vision and purpose, a brand strategy entails a brand’s long-term goals. To achieve success, the company’s team gets a good market position, provides customers with value, creates a consistent message, and develops initiatives.
A marketing strategy is a roadmap that outlines a company’s methods to convey the key message to the target audience. The essential components of a marketing strategy include digital marketing, content strategy, advertising, PR, and more. The strategy can change based on the information a company’s team receives. Customer data, budget, and trends can influence the plan and change its tactics.
Now that you know the difference, let’s walk you through the main components of a brand strategy so that you can clearly understand its fundamentals.
6 Key Components of a Brand Strategy
A comprehensive brand strategy consists of 6 key components. It’s time to review them to guide you through the strategy development for your business. Let’s dive in.
Consistency. Companies stick to consistency to align every step with their brand message and strategy. If a business is consistent with its message across different platforms, it gains brand recognition and drives customer loyalty. Every action a company takes must be harmonious and well-planned. Be consistent in your brand voice, tone, colors, and content you communicate.
Purpose. The most fundamental thing behind your business is your brand purpose. You should know the reasons why you’re in this business. Once you find it, you should convey it to your team and customers. Earning money isn’t the only target of your company. There should be a greater cause. After identifying a clear purpose, you’ll receive higher ROI, have a bigger sales volume, and attract more customers.
Flexibility. To keep customers interested and remain relevant, companies should be flexible. Brands develop unique and creative marketing campaigns to draw consumers’ attention and stay competitive in the market. However, they still need to remember about consistency which sets standards. Flexibility allows adjusting to the needs of the target audience. So if a brand’s old methods don’t work with the audience anymore, it’s time to change, try new methods to approach customers and make them happy.
Emotion. Many customers rely on emotions rather than use rational thinking. That’s why many companies choose to appeal to sensations. Being a part of like-minded people means a lot for connoisseurs of a certain product. Since people often strive to build relationships and be closely connected to others, companies need to establish emotional connections with customers. As an option, they can create communities to achieve them. If brands succeed in making consumers feel at home, they will drive loyalty.
Loyalty. If customers demonstrate dedication, brands should reward them. Customer loyalty is worth the reward since it helps generate positive feedback, comments, and recommendations. Loyal clients can act as brand ambassadors and promote a company. Brands thank these customers by writing personalized emails and providing them with special offers, gifts, and discounts.
Competitive awareness. Nowadays, the competition within industries is high. Knowing rivals and their methods will be very useful for a business. Brands explore the approaches that succeed and fail. It’s necessary to outline future tactics. This way, a company can improve its strategy and bring more value to customers.
So now that you know the key elements, let’s proceed to the next section to find out how to create a brand strategy for your company.
How to build a brand strategy?
A strong strategy is everything for the success of a brand. You need to have a unique identity, quality content, and consistency to reach customers and foster customer loyalty. Since a brand strategy means a lot for a company’s success, we’ve prepared several steps you should take to reach your long-term goals.
Identify mission, vision, purpose, and values. Every brand has a set of principles and beliefs it carries through its existence in the market. Mission, vision, purpose, and values can help you obtain customers and encourage them to stay with your company. You need to create statements that clarify your purpose and values. Answer questions that will enable customers to understand your mission and vision.
Define your brand essence. You need three key elements for your brand strategy: personality, voice, and tone. To identify your brand personality, you need to find human characteristics for your company. Your brand can be exciting, cool, sophisticated, luxurious, active, etc. Besides, personality should reflect your values, mission, and purpose. The next step is to identify your brand voice, the way you’ll speak to your target audience. It should be unique and recognizable. With the tone, you convey your attitude towards customers. It can be respectful and friendly. It encompasses words, phrases, writing style, and the emotional tone you choose to communicate with your customers. Lastly, tailor your messaging to convey your value and who you are.
Work on your visual assets. Most customers rely on visual associations when they think of a brand. That’s why your company needs a visual identity. It includes a logo, colors, visuals, and font. These unique assets represent your brand and differentiate it from competitors. A strong visual identity will help you create an emotional impression and connection with your customers and update them about the product you provide.
Develop guidelines. This step is necessary to write rules for those who create content. A brand guideline is especially useful if you work with freelancers. With its help, they will understand your goals, ways to create content and communicate with the target audience. You’ll control consistency across teams and ensure the quality of content they make.
The steps are clear, so let’s review some excellent examples to unveil how the strategy works in real life.
Examples of a Brand Strategy
There are many excellent examples of brand strategies with unique approaches. Some focus on creating a brand vision that talks to consumers, while others focus on developing personalities that resonate with the audience. Let’s now consider several most outstanding companies and their brand strategies.
Amazon
Amazon takes things seriously and gathers all efforts to establish a strong brand positioning. The famous e-commerce company took care of the features that differentiated it from dozens of others and allowed it to stand out from the huge competition. Now customers choose Amazon for its fast delivery and seamless customer service.
Tesla
Tesla is a super modern company that carries a higher purpose. It produces electric cars and promotes sustainability. You can find out about the company’s mission in its purpose statement. It mentions efforts aimed at bringing the world towards sustainable energy.
In a nutshell, a brand strategy helps you keep all your steps organized. With its help, you’ll reach your main targets faster and more efficiently.
Brand management
Brand management is the process of using a brand's logo, product design, pricing policy, and adcampaigns to boostits perceived value. It helps establish strong brand awareness, obtain loyal customers, build a positivebrand image, gain brand recognition, anddrive revenue.
In this article, we’ll explorewhy you need brand management and howyou canbenefit from it. We’ll alsoexplain the difference between brand management and marketing anddiscover 7 effective brand managementtips.
Why is brand management important?
Companies like Adidas, Burger King, and Apple have managed to reach lasting success through effective brand management. These brands were able todevelopsuccessful design and marketing strategiesand create outstanding brand personalities.
Brandingenables owners and customers to differentiatebetween variouscompanies' products, increasing customer engagement and influencing the competitive environment. If your brand is well-positioned in the market and is in demand among customers, it means that it brings real value, withstands the competition, and actually stands out.
Startinga company isn’t enough— you should constantly maintain your brand image.This is exactly where brand management comes into play. Business owners implement this techniqueto achieve strong brand awareness, consistent brand messaging, a good market position, high sales volume, and great profits. Besides, brand management helps evaluate and supervise brand equity.
To reach your audience and drive revenue growth, you need to stand out among competitors and provide customers with superb and consistent experiences. You’ll be able to do it if you implement strategies aimed at effective brand management. Managing a brand requires you to understandyourtarget audience andyourcompany’soverall vision. Brand managers use tangible assets to establish positive associations with a company andquality customer interactions. However, intangible properties like customer experience and emotional connections are to be reckoned with as well, as they can boost customer retention.
Now that you knowwhy you should carry out brand management strategies, let’s dive into the advantages this process can bring to your business.
Brand Management Benefits
Brand management consists of a huge number of processes that are vital for every company. No matter your brand's size, age, and industry, it’s a must for lasting success. Let’s now review the benefits you can reap once you work on your brand management:
customer loyalty;
brand recognition;
brand awareness;
revenue growth;
enhancedproduct and brandvalue;
higher product prices;
largersales volume;
trust, credibility, and authority;
strong market position.
Now that thepros of this tactic are clear, it’s time to compare brand management and marketing— the two terms are often confused.
Brand Management vs. Marketing
Brand management and marketingoftenimplementsimilar strategies and techniques to achieve their goals, so let's talk about the main dissimilarity between the two.
Brand management aims to create a perfect brand image that customers will perceive well. Brand managers do everythingin their power to align their company’s product with consumers’ needs and desires. They implement brand awareness strategies, assess whether customers perceive their brand’s image positively, track sales progress, and create sales and marketing strategies todrive revenue.
Brand management means building an excellent reputation, positive brand image, high brand equity, and healthy customer relationships. It’s about your brandvalue, how youcommunicate it to your target audience, and the emotions it evokes in consumers.
Marketing aims to present a brand toits target audience. Marketers don’t focus on brand voice, image, and personality. They develop strategies to reach prospects, present a product, and encourage purchases. Marketing teams search for the most appropriate marketing channels to communicate their message to potential customers and sell more products. Marketers work hand in hand to convey information abouta product and its value correctly. Their responsibilities also include tracking and analyzing demand fora product or service.
Now that youhave a clear understanding of these two widespread terms, let’s take a closer look at 7 tips that will help you manage your brand effectively.
7 Tips for Effective Brand Management
Brand management is a multifaceted process— numerous tacticsare at play to ensure that it runs smoothly. We’ll unveil how to implementyour brand managementstrategy effectively with these simple tips.
Establish groundrulesfor your team. Come up withguidelines to ensure your team runs at full capacity. You should structure your brand data andmaterialsand explain howthey should be presented to your target audience.Take the time to develop and round upyour brand assets, including alogo, design, fonts, images, symbols, names, etc. Once you establish your rules and guidelines, make sure that every person in your company has access to them. You should also assignparticular roles to your team membersandexplainwhat departments can useyourbrand assets and for what purposes.
Create a unique brand strategy. You need a long-term plan to develop your business and establish a positive image and reputation among consumers.Your strategy shouldbe clear abouthow your company should communicate your brand message. You should know how, where, what, when, and towhom to convey it.Analyze youraudiencebeforehand to figure outyour brandmessage.
Pay attention to customer experience. Think of the perfect customer experience you can provide to meetyour strictest clients' needs. Strive to understand customer behavior and make improvements to eliminate both existing and potential issues. To establish an outstanding brand with a strong presence, you should focus on your customers and their buyer journeys. Building good relationships with consumers isn’t as easy as creating a logo— this process takes time and effort, but the result will justify the means.
Make customers your top priority. A huge number of companies in the world reduce your chances of success. You have to stand out to achieve your goals. Customer centricity and excellent service help brands attract more attentionand become customers’ favorites. You need to find an approach and solution for every customer. There’s nosingle solution for all anymore. Remember, the best way to stand out is to provide a personalized experience tailored to each customer's individual needs.
Keep your brand assets together. Accessibility and transparency are also crucial for a company’s efficiency. Be ready to centralize all your assets and allow employees to access them. Once your assets are centralized, you’ll identify the gaps and figure out what you need to add or update.
Use one brand style for your content. There are so many brands, and people feel overwhelmed with advertising clutter every day. You need consistency across all channels to make people recognize your company. Using one brand style enables you to communicate your unique brand voice. Clear and concise messaging, quality content, and consistency across communication channels will enable you to gain trust. With a style guide, all departments canwork in the same direction and create consistent content.
Encourage collaborationamongdepartments. Encourage teamworkamong different company departments. This will ensure seamless workflows and faster goal achievement. While collaborating, different teams can discuss new strategies in real time and agree to implement the best of them.
Keep up with the latest trends to stay relevant. Consumers’ demands and requirements change fast, so you need to be ready to adapt. As the trends evolve, your product should evolve too and become more innovative and up-to-date. As a result, your company will stay relevant and one step ahead of competitors.
A visible and recognizable brand is one of the keys to success. However, it’s often a challenge for business owners to maintain a leadership position in today’s increasingly competitive market. Customers expect brands to be transparent, credible, and customer-oriented. Companies should sustain consistent brand voices across different communication channels and carry value.
Brand platform
A brand platform is a marketing document created to describe the distinctive features of a brand both ideologically and visually. It is essential to form the holistic image of the business and provide a unique offer for the target audience.
In the article, we will explain why a brand platform is important, highlight its components and describe ways to create an effective marketing platform.
Why is a brand platform important?
According to Smallbiggenius, 89% of shoppers stay loyal to brands that share their values. Discover how the brand platform helps to develop trusting relations with the customers, increase brand loyalty, and sell more.
This document aims to provide effective business management, find a certain niche in the market, and raise income by attracting customers. Let's look closer at all the advantages of a brand platform.
It helps your business create a clear message. A brand platform makes all the components of a brand identity and marketing actions coherent. It creates strong associations with a brand and provides a clear position in the market.
It helps stand you out from competitors. Companies with effective brand platforms attract more customers because they have something unique and provide an amazing customer experience. A well-defined platform helps you send strong messages and evoke certain emotions that resonate with the audience to boost your brand in a competitive environment.
It helps expand the market share and find new ways to develop. A brand platform gives a clear understanding of the brand’s values, and you can use it to create a marketing plan that will make the product less prone to temporary changes. Moreover, a well-defined brand platform can show you unexpected ways to expand the product line and find directions for development on the market.
It provides efficient communication among the company's staff. Business owners with a strong brand platform can always give detailed guidelines for employees. This document provides a clear corporate vision and explains the purpose of the company's work. It helps motivate employees and unite them around common values. Using a brand platform, you can also attract collaborators with the same values as yours.
Now you understand why a brand platform is so important. Continue reading to discover its main components.
Brand Platform Components
Creating a brand platform can become the first step in building a successful brand or boosting your company in the market. Below there are the main components of a strong brand platform.
Purpose. What is the reason for your brand’s existence? What impact do you want to have on the world? Highlight the brand's main aim and the smaller goals.
Target audience. There can be a few groups of customers. You should define their needs, pains, interests, and values.
Values of the brand. They should be similar to the target audience’s values. What is important for your brand, what topics concern it?
Personality. Imagine that your brand is a person and think about its main human traits. It might be a good idea to give your brand qualities that your target audience value.
The tone of voice. It should include characteristics that shape your brand’s messages. Think about phrases and the way of presenting information that will differentiate your brand.
Unique proposition. Highlight the advantages based on the functional characteristics of the product and the amazing customer experience that distinguish your brand on the market.
The name of the brand, its logo, slogan, packaging of the product, and all other elements that you develop based on the brand positioning.
The brand platform can also include key functions, corporate values, brand history, and its marketing strategy. Continue reading to discover how to build a strong brand platform and make all the components clear to your employees.
How to build a brand platform?
Creating a brand platform can take weeks and even months of work. However, you can make this process faster and easier by following all the steps below. Discover how to develop a well-defined brand platform in this section.
Research the market. Conduct market research to discover your target audience, direct and indirect competitors. Firstly, think about people who buy your product. Create an image of your ideal clients and think about how you can persuade them to choose your brand. Secondly, identify your niche and take a look at the companies which already sell something within it. Gather all the information about the competitors, check their websites and social media, and then highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Do a SWOT analysis to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to develop a company's competitive strategy.
Create a brand's philosophy. Think of your brand’s purpose, values, unique proposition, and personality. All these components should resonate with the values and needs of your target audience, and reflect their way of life. Write down a list of adjectives to describe a brand as a real person. Think about the benefits you can provide to your audience.
Define a visual language and tone of voice. Visual language and tone of voice should correspond to the philosophy to create a holistic image of your brand. Choose the main types of content you use in marketing campaigns, define main colors and develop the brand's style. Then think about how you will communicate with the audience. This step will help you create strong associations with your product in the customers’ minds.
Choose the right business name, create a catchy slogan and an attractive logo. These are the first three elements that new customers pay attention to when meeting your brand. Your name and slogan should be memorable and easy to pronounce. Try to capture the values of your brand in these few words. Your professionally designed logo should reflect a brand personality.
Make a brand platform work. Now you are ready to apply a platform to your company. It is important to review it regularly, make changes, and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Make your employees read the brand platform in order to inspire them to work further.
Congrats, now you know all the main information to build your successful brand platform. Use this document to boost your company on the market.
Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty is a customer’s attachment to a certain brand or product and their tendency to make repeat purchases. It also includes consumers’ positive emotions and feelings associated with a company and its word-of-mouth promotion.
In this article, you’ll get to know the importance of brand loyalty, explore its benefits, and compare brand and customer loyalty. We’ll also reviewseveralstrategies, metrics, and examples to help you improve your brand loyalty.
Why is brand loyalty important?
Business owners allocate their marketing and customer service resources to ensure the best customer experience. This way, they try to build brand loyalty with a certain product or service and maintain good relationships with consumers. Clients loyal to a particular brand will buy from it without considering purchasing from competitors. They can buy products they need even at a higher price.
Since there are hundreds of options available for customers both online and offline, your company needs to be the best option for them. If everything goes well, brand loyalty enables a company to grow its customer base and encourage consumers to refer friends. Brand loyalty allows companies to establish emotional connections with customers and make customized offers. Everything is built on trust, which means that companies shapetheir reputation for years to make people choose them for credibility, quality, and innovation.
Brand loyalty is critical for the long-term efficiency and success of a company. By boosting brand loyalty, business owners can obtain the opportunity to increase their constant profits, reduce expenditures, and improve sales volumeand the number of repeat purchases.
Now let’s consider the main benefits of brand loyalty.
Benefits of Brand Loyalty
It’s pivotal for companies to make the best offers since loyal customers contribute to their business development. The pros of brand loyalty are as follows:
reduced expenditures on customer retention;
word-of-mouth promotion;
advantages over competitors;
new leadsand customers;
increasedbrand value;
customers who stay with a company for a long time;
brand recognition;
positive associations and emotions.
Now that you know all the pros, it’s time to find out the difference between brand and customer loyalty.
Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty
Brand loyalty and customer loyalty start to form when people have a good experience with a brand, positive emotions, and associations. However, there’s a slight difference between the two concepts, so let’s take a closer look at them.
Brand loyalty refers to the way consumers perceive a company. It also entails a customer’s attachment to a certain brand, emotional connection, and positive associations with a specific company. Companies implement different strategies to establish a positive image in customers’ minds and improve their brand loyalty.
Customer loyalty is about providing consumers with products and services that meet their demands and budget. To reach high customer loyalty, companies come up with discounts, special offers, and affordable pricing plans.
In a nutshell, if you provide consumers with a product or service that meets their expectations and has reasonable pricing plans, you’ll be able to increase customer loyalty. At the same time, it’s critical to develop trust to build brand loyalty. Customers who are loyal to your company will buy your product regardless of the price you offer.
Let’s explore our five effective strategies that will help you establish brand loyalty.
5Strategies to Build Brand Loyalty
Design a testimonial page
Provide the best customer service
Respond to customers’ comments on your social media profiles
Develop loyalty programs
Meet customers’ expectations
Building brand loyalty can often be challenging since it requires a lot of effort from a company’s team. However, it will bring positive word-of-mouth promotion, new customers, and significant revenues in the long run. Follow our five brand loyalty strategies to get started.
Design a testimonial page
If you want to become a leader in your industry and build authority and credibility, you need customers’ trust. Still, it takes a lot of time for customers to explore different products and choose one brand with the best quality. Consider creating a testimonial page and showcasing customers’ product reviews to help them decide.
Position yourself as an expert in the industry, maintain a positive reputation, and establish a unique tone of voice to communicate with your customers to earn their trust. Prove that your product is high-quality and your brand is reputable.
The example below demonstrates mHelpDesk’s customer testimonial page.
Provide the best customer service
To deliver an excellent customer service experience, you need to be friendly, polite, and respectful. Besides, your customer support reps should respond promptly. Good customer service needs a team of specialists who know a product well and are ready to listen to consumers’ problems and solve them. Build relationships with your clients: ask questions, explore social media profiles, or conduct a survey. These steps will allow you to provide customers with the support they need.
Respond to customers’ comments on your social media profiles
In order to simply ask a question about a product or service, customers often prefer to write a short message on social networks and receive a prompt reply. That’s why it’s crucial for you to track these messages and provide informative and clear answers as soon as possible. Apart from that, remember to monitor your company’s mentions on social media.
For example, Burger King answers customers’ questions on Twitter.
Develop loyalty programs
Many customers research available offers before purchasing. People look for flash sales, best deals, and reduced prices to save costs. That’s why you need to offer something more attractive, a loyalty program, for example. Give customers a special status when they comply with your conditions to encourage them to stay with your brand. You can provide themextra incentives, such as discounts, gifts, bonuses, and special offers.
For example, The North Face’s XPLR Pass loyalty program provides customers with exclusive access to limited-edition collections, rewards, gifts for birthdays, and a lot more.
Meet customers’ expectations
If you strive to become a favorite brand of hundreds or thousands of customers, you need to create quality products and keep your promises. Make sure to maintain a high standard of your products, customer service, and sales process and focus on your customers to make them stay with your brand for a long time.
It’s time to explore several metrics that will help you determine whether your brand loyalty strategy is effective.
4Metrics to Measure Brand Loyalty
To have a clear picture of your brand loyalty, you need to pay attention tothese metrics:
net promoter score (in a survey, ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to their friends);
repurchase ratio (the metric gives you an understanding of the number of customers who come back to repeat their purchase);
upsell ratio (the metric gives you a clear picture of customers who buy your new products and demonstrate trust in your company);
customer lifetime value(the metric helpsdetermine how much money a company can earn during the entire relationship with a customer).
Let’s grab some inspiration from the examples below.
Brand Loyalty Examples
There are dozens of great brands with high brand loyalty that implement successful marketing strategies. Next, we’ll explore some of them.
GoPro
The technology company famous for its high-quality video cameras is widely perceived as one of the best in this industry. The brand strives to be closer to customers through its website that contains user-generated content. It provides visitors with a sense of ownership. GoPro also entices customers to join its huge following of fans by growing its social media presence. The company rewards its social media contest winners with great prizes.
The MINI Cooper
The brand presents its vehicles as different from others. In a world full of cars that become bigger, the company decided to make its products smaller in size.
Congrats, now you know why brand loyalty is crucial for the success of any business. Make use of the strategies mentioned in this article to establish brand loyalty and assess it.
Brand image
Brand image is a set of associations that form consumers’ perceptions of a certain company. It is based on the people’s interactions with the brand and their beliefs about its personality.
In the article, we explain what brand image is and why it is important, compare it with brand identity, and provide some tips on building a strong brand image. We also give examples of brands with strong brand images.
Why is brand image important?
Brand image is the customers’ impression of your company that conveys emotional value. It consists of the brand’s personality, tone of voice, visual language, company’s values, products, pricing, quality of the service, etc., and the way people perceive all these elements. Smallbizgenius states that 89% of consumers are loyal to brands with the same values. These inspiring statistics show the importance of building a positive brand image. Discover more about its benefits below.
It helps increase brand recognition. A strong brand image evokes specific associations and makes people recognize the company better. It helps consumers remember a brand faster and, in such a way, saves costs on increasing people’s brand awareness.
It creates a strong competitive advantage. Most consumers choose goods based not only on their features but on the values that brands stand for. A positive reputation means that people are ready to pay more for the products to feel brand affiliation. It helps increase the company’s profits and market share.
It influences customer loyalty and retention. Trusting the company stimulates people to buy goods more often and recommend them to their friends and family. Also, consumers tend to feel positive toward new products. Moreover, a strong image of the company helps retain customers and reduce brand switching.
Understanding all these factors motivates many business owners to work hard on the image of their brands. However, building a strong brand image is impossible without developing a brand identity. Read more about the peculiarities of these two terms in the next section.
Brand Image vs Brand Identity
Both brand image and brand identity form the reputation of the company. They are similar, so sometimes it is difficult to understand the difference between them. Continue reading to discover how these two terms vary.
Brand identity describes the associations that marketers create to transmit the company’s values to the customers. You can control these characteristics and change them because brand identity is developed inside the company. This term is about how the business wants people to think of it. Usually, establishing the brand identity is a constant process.
Brand image describes the way consumers perceive your company in their minds. It is almost out of your control. However, you can influence this perception by transmitting certain values within your brand identity. Brand image is based on the existing experience of interactions. Sometimes, it can coincide with what marketers want us to think about the company, but sometimes it can be completely different.
Building a positive brand image may be challenging if you do not understand how to work with it. In the next section, we provide some tips on how to develop a strong brand image and make it coincide with the existing brand identity in the minds of your customers.
How to build a strong brand image?
Building a brand image can boost your company on the market, help attract more customers and increase revenue. Below we provide the steps you should go through to develop a strong brand image.
Create your buyer persona. Firstly, you should think about the people who will purchase your products. Discover their pains and needs, study worldview and buying habits. You can conduct interviews with potential clients or use questionnaires to collect more information. Segment these people into several groups according to their specific preferences and think about the brand’s qualities that will attract them.
Study your competitors. Understanding the pros and cons of each company on the market will allow you to develop a strong competitive advantage and avoid mistakes made by other business owners. Think about the ways to distinguish your brand from the others. Competitive analysis can also help you discover the trends in the sphere that you can focus on to develop cutting-edge products and stand out in the market.
Identify brand values. Oberlo states that 64% of people will buy from a brand because of its position on social problems. These statistics show how companies’ values influence consumers’ preferences. It is essential to transmit a clear position and be transparent to make customers trust you. A consistent realization of a well-defined brand mission helps companies build a strong brand image.
Develop a brand identity. Once you pick out your values, it is time to focus on the company’s tone of voice, visual language, and unique position. Describe all these elements into the brand platform to have a holistic image of the business’s ideology. Their combination will let you transmit the brand identity more effectively.
Focus on providing a positive customer experience. Now you should make your plans coincide with your actions. Your company will have a strong brand image if it broadcasts its position through every interaction. Moreover, a positive image of the business motivates your employees to work better for your company’s success. It is crucial because 73% of people continue buying from a brand when they receive helpful service.
Now you understand how to build a strong brand image and what you should focus on to make this process faster. Continue reading to discover companies with a positive image and get inspired to make your brand even better.
Brands with a Strong Brand Image
In this section, we describe three companies that most of us know and like. However, only a small number of people understand that they are so popular because of their strong brand images. Find out how they were able to achieve such success below.
Coca-Cola
According to Smallbizgenius, 94% of consumers worldwide recognize the Coca-Cola logo. These statistics are rather impressive, but they are not surprising. The company increased brand awareness through regular advertising campaigns and building strong associations. Its drinks are always perceived as joyful, positive, and cheerful. Coca-Cola has a consistent image of a friendly brand that always accompanies you in happy moments.
Look at the example of the Coca-Cola New Year’s ad in 2010. This one and their other videos always bring the holiday spirit and make people watch them again and again. People sing songs from their commercials every year before Christmas. Moreover, no one will miss the opportunity to take a photo with a legendary Coca-Cola truck and share it on their social media.
Nike
According to Wallstreetzen, Nike has a 51% market share in the segment of athletic footwear. This brand is known due to its successful collaborations and special projects. Nike's central values are sustainable innovations, dynamic development, and inspiration to reach its goals. The company has a clear mission and a strong identity that makes it the cult brand in the market.
Look at the advertisement for Nike’s Space Hippie sneakers. The brand is socially responsible, so it decided to reduce its carbon footprint while producing its models. Nike started to use garbage as a material for the sneakers. The result was awesome: Space Hippie became rather popular on the market. Also, this special project improved the reputation of the brand significantly.
Congrats, now you know what brand image is, why it is important, and understand its difference from the brand identity. You know how to build a strong brand image and use it to boost your company on the market.
Brand extension
Brand extension is a strategy where a company creates a new product category under its well-known brand name. It helps launch new products easily, obtain higher profit, reduce costs necessary to launch a new business, and meet customers’ needs and wants.
In this video, you’ll learn what brand extension is and how to leverage it.
Why is brand extension important?
Increasingly competitive markets make it impossible for a company to stay ahead if it doesn’t present something new to its target audience. Entrepreneurs consider brand extension strategies to increase their market share, become more innovative, and create a new product category. It’s a critical step that helps boost their business and engage new leads.
To successfully implement this technique, brands must study and analyze new trends. With the help of research, companies try to figure out the wants and needs of their prospective customers to create a product that will satisfy these requirements. Afterward, they strive to create a product that will be sold under an established company’s name and remain in high demand.
The process brings several benefits to businesses. Corporations obtain an increased brand image, save funds on the development of a new brand, use their costs on promotion efficiently, and gain more revenue.
With the help of brand extension strategies, companies can present products that their customers accept. Nowadays, the tactic is popular because businesses can assess their opportunities in new product categories, determine how relevant and appealing their brands are and define the resource requirements.
Now that you know the reasons why many firms use a brand extension, let’s review the advantages of this technique.
Advantages of Drand Extension
It’s worth noting that brand extension helps upscale your business in various ways. Since the number of competitors in the market is constantly increasing, brands should prepare multiple strategies to stay ahead.
Companies can create new products, provide better customer experiences, and present some innovations or new services to gain revenue. When you decide to extend your company and create a product or service, it can be related or unrelated to your business. Brands often leverage brand extension because it can:
help launch products in new categories seamlessly;
enable brands to meet their customers’ needs and wants;
allow companies to receive higher revenue;
reduce expenditures when launching and developing a new company;
encourage customers to try a new product from a trusted brand;
reduce the risks for customers because they can purchase different products from reliable brands;
help spend costs on promotion efficiently;
improve the overall brand image;
provide consumers with a greater variety of products;
enable brands to attract more leads;
help revive a company.
As you’ve noticed, there is a list of reasons why a company should consider implementing brand extension. Now let’s review the types of this tactic.
Types of Brand Extension
Product form
Companion product
Company expertise
Brand distinction
Brand prestige
Transfer of components
Leveraging a lifestyle
There are different ways in which companies use this strategy, so it’s time to walk you through the types of brand extensions.
Product form. It is when a company decides to change the form of an existing product. This allows a product to compete in a different category. For example, Snickers used to launch ice cream bars.
Companion product. Companion products are those that complement the main products. They belong to the same niche and relate to the original products. For instance, Colgate, famous for its toothpaste, also decided to release toothbrushes under its brand name.
Company expertise. This is when a company expands its production and designs a new product under an established name. Let’s take Fender, a brand known for its high-quality guitars. It extended its expertise to making earbuds.
Brand distinction.Companies are often considered unique because of the exceptional benefits or experiences they provide. These advantages are usually associated with a certain brand name. Therefore, marketers use such companies’ names to compete in new markets and extend their brand equity. Let’s consider Parachute, a brand name for a variety of coconut oil-based hair products. These goods are manufactured by Marico, a consumer goods company famous in India that produces other hair products.
Brand prestige. This strategy involves a brand that creates a product unrelated to the main company’s expertise. BMW is a great example. The brand, widely recognized as a corporation that produces luxury vehicles and motorcycles, started to operate in the apparel industry and produce watches.
Transfer of components. Sometimes brands try to use the successful elements of their old products in new ones. They strive to leverage this element and gain the same success. These components are flavor, ingredients, scent, and color. For example, Fanta, a brand that produces fruit-flavored carbonated soft drinks, has around 100 flavors worldwide.
Leveraging a lifestyle. Some companies present a particular type of lifestyle that can be conveyed through a particular way of living, culture, values, or interests. They possess certain traits customers find relatable. Companies can have different types ofbrand personalitieslike “sincerity,” “competence,” “sophistication,” and more. Let’s take Jeep, for example. The company presents an outdoorsy lifestyle and uses this particular image for other products, such as knives, tents, bicycles, etc.
It’s time to proceed to the differences between brand and line extension.
Brand Extension vs. Line Extension
Bybrand extension, we mean an established brand that creates a new product category that is assumed to meet the needs of consumers. In this scenario, a company heavilyrelies on its loyal customers,who will be glad to see more products from a trusted brand. With a successful implementation of brand extension, a firm can reach new demographics, acquire new customers, boost sales, and increase revenue.
A line extension is when a firm extends an existing product line. A manufacturer brings a new product to the product category that a company already manufactures. For example, a brand adds “Vanilla” or “Lemon” flavor to its cola line and creates a variety of available products.
Usually, line extension is associated with a product’s new scent, flavor, formula, color, and style in a current product line. The strategy is less risky than a brand extension as consumers are familiar with the product and will be eager to try it with a new twist.
Now let’s move to the next section to grab inspiration from our examples.
9 Examples of Brand Extension
Colgate
Apple
LifeBuoy
Sunkist
Dyson
Callaway
LIKE.TG
Fender
Google
If you consider extending your product category, check out our list of brand extensions that will inspire your own.
Colgate
A company famous for its toothpaste made a new useful product, a toothbrush that is complementary to the main product. It turned out to be a great combination. This move allowed Colgate to enter the toothbrush market.
Apple
Apple, a technology company that is known for its computers and phones, also used brand extension. You can find Smart Watches and MP3 Players designed by Apple.
LifeBuoy
LifeBuoy is a brand of soap marketed by Unilever. Over time, the company managed to enter other markets, such as the supply of sanitary towels and sanitizers that are always on hand. Now you can see LifeBuoy’s sanitizersthat are ready to ensure your daily hygiene on store shelves.
Sunkist
The brand is usually associated with oranges, health, and energy. The company decided to make the most out of it. Sunkist’s production of vitamin C tablets spawned the business of vitamins and supplements.
Dyson
The company started with manufacturing vacuum cleaners and household appliances but further extended its products to desk lamps. Now the brand is popular among young people because of the hairdryers, bladeless fans, and stylers it produces.
Callaway
Callaway is known for its golf clubs, yet not only for them. This company also manufactures and sells equipment for golf and accessories like bags, gloves, and caps.
LIKE.TG
Another excellent example of brand extension is LIKE.TG, an email marketing service. The company has also introduced two new products: CRMand landing page builder. Now you can automate your communication with customers and create a landing page or an online store.
Fender
The company, recognized as a manufacturer of guitars and amplifiers, now also produces earbuds. Their products bring dynamic and high-quality sound to their owners.
Google
We all know and use Google as a web search engine. Nevertheless, it’s not the only product from Google. The brand extended to hosted email services. Google Workspace empowers brands to access great digital products (Google Drive, Cloud Search, Google Meets, and more) anytime and anywhere and provides security of your information.
Simply put, when you have an established brand admired by customers and want to release a new product category, go ahead. It can bring many benefits to your business, such as increased profit and an opportunity to meet your client’s needs and improve your brand image. If you have an excellent idea for your new product that your audience will accept, give it a try.
Brand development index
A brand development index (BDI) is a ratio that shows the level of a brand's performance in a defined segment of customers. It indicates the relation between the total sales of a company and the population of a particular market, helping brands improve their marketing and advertising techniques.
Why is a brand development index important?
Companies use various marketing approaches to come up with the most appropriate budget allocation. By doing this, they try to achieve the main marketing aim — to reach the largest possible number of people with the help of advertising without making any unnecessary spendings. Brand development index is one of such approaches. It helps identify the relation between the total sales of a specific company and the population of a certain market.
Depending on the company's strategy, BDI influences the number of funds allocated to a particular region. This data enables businesses to tailor their marketing, advertising, and sales efforts because it gives them insights into where most consumers live. The index is usually associated with aggressive and defensive marketing approaches.
For instance, a brand with a defensive marketing strategy will invest more in the regions where the company is more popular (the brand development index is higher) to strengthen its hold in those areas. If the company uses an aggressive strategy, it'll allocate more money for advertising in the regions where the brand's products aren't trendy, and the BDI is low.
When a brand development index in a specific region is low, a company needs to improve it, for example, byallocating more funds for advertising to that region.
One thing is clear: BDI is essential for a brand's marketing initiatives. Let's make sure that you know how to calculate this index.
How to Calculate a Brand Development Index
BDI can be vital in developing audience segmentation, targeting strategy, and a company's positioning. It gives the measure of the brand with respect to its market and number of consumers. Below you can see a formula to calculate BDI for your business.
Note that the result obtained after using this formula should be a whole number.
Now that you know the formula to calculate BDI for your firm, let's explore the distinctive features of the brand development index and category development index.
Brand Development Index and Category Development Index
Companies calculate brand development index to qualify the relative performance of their business in a particular group of customers. You need to own such information as demographics or psychographics. As a result, you'll obtain data on strong and weak segments for specific companies. Besides, you can use this index to evaluate the presence of a company within a particular target audience.
Category development index defines the sales of goods' category within a market related to the average performance among customers. It helps companies receive information on the performance of a particular product category among certain customers and determine strong and weak groups for product categories.
When used with BDI, CDI is beneficial in any marketing strategy. It enables companies to access data necessary to allocate advertising budget to specific areas properly to maximize product category awareness and revenue.
Example of a Brand Development Index
Imagine that you need to obtain the BDI of Samsung laptops in one of the country's cities (further called city A). First, to get this indicator, you need to calculate their sales in city A as a percentage of their total sales in the country. Next, you compare it with the population of city A as a percentage of the country's total population. Then, use the obtained percentages to calculate the BDI for city A.
Let's say if the country's population is 50000, the population of city A is 10000, sales of the Samsung laptops in the country is 1000 units, sales of these laptops in city A is 100 units.
Let's proceed to the calculations to obtain the BDI of Samsung laptops.
BDI in city A = (100/1000) x 100 / (10000/50000) = 50.
Therefore, the brand development index of Samsung laptops in city A is 50.
Brand development index is an essential measure that can demonstrate your company's performance in different segments of customers. You can easily calculate BDI for your company by using the formula above.Understanding the index allows you to efficiently segment your audience, allocate resources to suitable regions, and so much more.
Brand consistency
Brand consistency is a vital component of any business. It implies perfect comprehension of your brand message by the clients.
Brand consistency is achieved if:
clients recognize your brand
clients are aware of your brand benefits
clients know what to expect from you
clients trust your brand
This is hard work for every marketer as it requires much work to be carried out. If your brand lacks consistency, customers won't manage to get the full image of it.
How to maintain brand consistency?
Work out the strategy
Define what makes your brand unique
Keep your brand identity
Keep your staff engaged
Monitor your brand image on the market
1. Work out the strategy
Brand strategy will help you both start off on the right foot and plan your growth for 3-7 years ahead. Without a well-thought strategy, you will fail to analyze the effectiveness of your work as you won't have a plan to stick to. It's the same thing with your customers — they will certainly feel these gaps in your business.
2. Define what makes your brand unique
When working out a strategy, define the significant benefits of your business that make it unique. Entering the market, you deal with competitors that already have something unique to offer. It's pretty difficult to lure customers away from them, so be ready to provide clients with exclusive benefits.
3. Keep your brand identity
Make sure that you deliver the same message via all communication channels. Stick to your brand design: use the same colors, fonts, and style throughout the website — for your logo, emails, and call-to-action buttons. It makes customers identify and recognize your brand.
4. Keep your staff engaged
First and foremost, make sure that your team understands your brand. If it is fully aware of what it does — there are more chances to deliver the right message to your audience. An engaged and interested staff works more effectively, hence, makes much effort to satisfy the clients.
5. Monitor your brand image on the market
Brand image refers to the perfect comprehension of your brand message by your customers. Regularly monitor what the target audience thinks about your brand, whether they understand it the same way as you do. Hold opinion polls, compare your clients' perception of the brand with yours, correct the strategy to improve your work.
Keep to these tips to maintain your brand consistency. Provide the best user experience!
Brand engagement
Brand engagement is the process of building and sustaining a commitment to a brand from its customers. This is one of the most important marketing goals for every business. It allows companies to constantly interact with customers and increase their brand loyalty.
Why is brand engagement important?
Building a strong emotional connection with customers provides several important advantages. Let's look at them in more detail.
It means high client engagement. This is the first and most obvious benefit of building brand engagement. A well-thought strategy along with a set of effective techniques will help you interact with users on social networks, messengers, and via email campaigns. As a result, you'll build a great community around your brand.
It allows companies to increase both customer retention and loyalty. If you take care of your clients' needs and preferences, ask their opinion about your brand, and do your best to ensure a positive user experience, you will certainly be rewarded. Customers will pay you back with their loyalty. As you know, it's a lot easier to sell to an existing client than to a recently acquired lead.
It helps boost sales. This benefit comes as a result of the previous point. The level of customer engagement directly affects the number of sales. Users buy not brands' products, but solutions to their problems, so the goal is to persuade a client that cooperation with this particular brand will bring them the benefits they want.
It facilitates the improvement of products and services. If a brand manages to build trusting relationships with its customers, it will result not only in high sales but in collecting valuable feedback. Clients are happy to help their favorite brands grow and improve. Your task, as a marketer, is to use various channels and techniques to interview clients. They include surveys, polls, quizzes, feedback forms, etc. You may reward customers for feedback shared with a discount or any other offer.
Now you know why brands invest a lot in building relationships with their community. Very often brand engagement and brand awareness go hand in hand. Let’s find out the differences between these terms.
Brand Awareness vs Brand Engagement
Both terms belong to the key concepts of brand marketing. This approach implies reaching several objectives each brand needs to pursue to be successful. They include brand awareness, brand engagement, brand loyalty, brand advocacy, brand equity, brand identity, and brand image.
Brand awareness comes first when designing your brand strategy. It requires marketing activities aimed at raising awareness of your brand. Potential clients should be able to recognize your brand among competitors and recall your products. In other words, if they find a need for a product they haven’t used before, your company's name should be the first to come to people’s minds. Brands invest a lot in advertising on various channels to achieve this goal.
After you build brand awareness, you should work on increasing brand engagement. Users need to be interested in your company to make a purchase. So, let them interact with you on several channels — let them know that their opinion matters. The higher your brand engagement, the better the relationship with your audience, resulting in more sales.
Now you know a lot about the advantages of building brand engagement, so it’s time to find out some effective techniques. We’ve shared a few tips below.
5 Tips and Examples to Increase Brand Engagement
Hold giveaways, contests, and polls
Organize events
Personalize communications with clients on different channels
Encourage user-generated content
Ask clients for feedback
Internet marketing opportunities are only limited by your creativity. A great variety of channels, content formats, and tools that are available today let every brand find the best fit for their audience. In this section, we’ll share proven practices that will help you boost your brand engagement.
Hold giveaways, contests, and polls
These content formats allow companies to skyrocket their engagement rates, bring in new clients, and increase sales. People enjoy interactive content as well as getting freebies. That is a win-win for both parties.
Giveaways are especially popular among young companies since they help build brand awareness and bring in potential customers. Motivate users to join your mailing list or share your brand with friends in exchange for an incentive. It can be a special offer, a discount, a free trial, or anything valuable.
Below you see a giveaway held on Facebook. The company encourages users to interact with the post to win a divan set.
Contests work almost the same way. Polls are popular on Instagram because they help brands increase customer engagement in posts and stories. Since users check stories first, they’re very likely to interact this way. Besides, it makes customers feel meaningful and lets brands discover their most active clients.
Check out the Instagram poll below. A wedding dress retailer asks its followers to choose their favorite shape for the back of a wedding dress. Then, the brand can use this information to promote the dresses users like or give a discount to increase sales.
2. Organize events
Event marketing is a sure way to promote a brand. Events help brands acquire new leads, build brand recognition and awareness, educate leads, and increase engagement. This is all possible with the help of both online and offline events: webinars, seminars, conferences, thought-leadership events, workshops, etc.
You can use a bunch of marketing tools to promote your future event. Send an event invitation email, create a landing page, promote events on social media.
With LIKE.TG, you can create a professional event invitation email for free without any technical skills. Our drag and drop editor allows users to use text, images, buttons, add videos, and design each element to their liking. Look at the process of creating a campaign below.
3. Personalize communications with clients on different channels
Personalizationis the key to building long-lasting relationships with customers. Clients won’t be committed to your brand if you know nothing about them and interact with your entire audience the same way.
To approach every user individually, make use of personalization and segmentation. The first tool allows marketers to use clients’ personal information to send targeted messages. This data can include name, gender, country, birth date, address, etc. Segmentation enables brands to divide their audience into segments and address each segment with highly targeted offers. You can create segments based on demographics, interests, preferences, buyers’ journey stage, purchasing behavior, etc.
With segmentation, you can provide a client with a highly relevant offer at the right time. For example, if a user adds an item to their shopping cart without buying, they will be added to a corresponding mailing list and receive an abandoned cart email. Incentivize them with a discount or free shipping to boost sales.
You can send triggered emails automatically according to predefined events. Automation 360 is exactly the tool you need for this purpose. It allows marketers to create events and an email will be sent automatically after a user performs the necessary action — books a hotel room, places an order, adds a product to the shopping cart, registers for a webinar, etc.
You can see an abandoned cart email below. The brand saves their customers’ picks andinvites them to go back to their shopping cart. To provide an additional incentive, the company offers a 15% discount.
Follow this step-by-step guide to creating an abandoned cart email flow with LIKE.TG.
4. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
User-generated contentmeans content created by the audience of your brand. It’s extremely effective since it helps promote your company, increase brand awareness and engagement, reach new potential clients, and works better than any type of content created by the company itself. People trust other people.
UGC can be anything — photo and video reviews, comments, participation in contests, and giveaways. Very often brands let their audience generate fresh ideas and win a prize for the most creative one. To make this strategy work, analyze both your audience and the most promising channels. Hashtags on Instagram and Facebook will help your content go viral.
Below you can see how Starbucks collects UGC. The brand encouraged clients to create a new design for their cups and share it on Instagram with the corresponding hashtag. 4,000 peoplw took part in the contest which definitely helped increase brand engagement on socials.
5. Ask clients for feedback
It’s hard to find any popular big brand that doesn’t collect their clients’ feedback. It helps companies not only better understand their customers, but find ways of improvement. You can reveal the weak points of your products and some issues with the customer support team.
Customers are pleased to share their opinion with the brands they adore. This way you’ll show that you care and appreciate the opinion of every user. Besides, you can reward those who really help your brand grow and improve.
Ask clients to leave comments on socials or product pages. You can also send a feedback request email in a week or two after the purchase. Check out below how Biscuiteers asks clients to share their thoughts on products in a review.
Now you have at least five effective tips to increase your brand engagement. It’s time to find out how to measure the achievement of this goal.
How to measure brand engagement
Everything depends on the channels you use and your short-time goals. If you put all your effort into social media, monitor the number of shares, reposts, hashtags, and mentions. Choose the necessary periods to have a clear picture of the performance of your strategy. Find out more about SMM KPIs in this article.
If you want to track user engagement on your site and particular pages, make use of analytics tools. Google Analytics provides businesses with reliable and accurate data on user activities on their site. In particular, you can discover the way users navigate your site, their interests, devices they use, traffic channels, and even real-time users. This information will provide you the insights on the most interesting pages and how users interact with your site.
If you communicate with clients via email campaigns, you should monitor email analytics. These metrics include email open rate, click-through rate, and conversions. Of course, there are many more indicators worth your attention, but these three influence your brand engagement mostly.
Your email open rate shows the level of engagement in general and how well your subject line reveals the topic of your email. The click-through rate indicates whether you managed to create a relevant offer interesting for subscribers. The conversion rate shows the number of users who performed the necessary action. It tells whether your email marketing efforts bring results.
You can also monitor high-quality backlinks and branded search terms. Use Ahrefs to track links and Google Trends to see how often your brand is mentioned.
Measure these important metrics to have a clear picture of the performance of your brand engagement strategy and be ready to improve it.
Congrats, you know pretty much about building brand engagement, so it’s time to outline your strategy. Make use of LIKE.TG tools to communicate with your customers effectively.
Brand differentiation
Brand differentiation is an essential aspect of a brand marketing strategy. It enables companies to reveal their profitable qualities that help develop a unique selling proposition. This way, they understand their competitive advantage and stand out among competitors.
Why is brand differentiation important?
Customers don’t value brands that sell the same items and don’t provide them with new solutions. It makes them believe that these companies are easily interchangeable. This can cause a price war among brands because the only thing left to compete for is the price. As a result, undercutting your competitors’ prices leads to lower net profit.
Companies need their brands to stand out to avoid predatory pricing. This strategy provides them with both short-term and long-term goals. The main one is to find your competitive advantage — a unique offer that your business opponents don’t have. It will help boost your market share in the long term. As a result, you’ll increase your targeted audience, sales volume, and revenue.
In addition, a clear and valuable unique selling proposition will help you build an army of loyal clients who love your brand not only for your product but for the positive user experience and values you share. Hence, it’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your potential clients to reveal their problems, wants, and needs. This way, you’ll create a successful brand differentiation strategy.
Let’s find out how to create one for your business.
5Brand Differentiation Strategies
Become an innovator
Choose a winning pricing strategy
Solve clients’ unique problems
Appeal to emotions
Deliver unique customer support
In this section, we’ll share some ideas that will help you differentiate your company from competitors.
Become an innovator. This method is a surefire way to stand out. You can either create a product that people have never seen before or optimize and improve an existing one. For this purpose, you need to carry out research to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, preferences, etc. Brands that bring innovations to the market are the most successful, remarkable, and trusted.
Choose a winning pricing strategy. You can make your brand stand out eitherwiththe lowest price for a high-quality product, which will make you a leader in the mass market, or you can become a premium brand charging more for a better experience like Starbucks does.
Solve clients’ unique problems. You may successfully occupy a concentrated niche offering an exceptional quality that your competitors don’t provide. Today custom T-shirt design or sewing lingerie according to personal measurements is not surprising, but someoneoncecame up with this idea. Hence, you can also create a better product.
Appeal to emotions. People will definitely remember such a brand and come back for an extra dose of dopamine. These brands sell not products but experiences customers have after buying them. Coca-Cola is associated with joy, happiness, and holiday; Nike motivates people to take action with their “Just do it”; Apple makes its clients feel like they belong to something huge by selling products that have their own ecosystem.
Deliver unique customer support. While taking care of a prospectbefore the purchase is mundane, do your best to support your client after the sale. You can offer a prolonged guarantee or any special and personalized services depending on your product type. Customers appreciate brands that care about them after they’ve paid.
Congrats, now you know why brand differentiation matters, can use its benefits, and have five effective strategies at hand.
Brand identity
Brand identity is a set of visual components that represents a company’s ideas and allows customers to remember a brand and distinguish it from dozens of others. It helps shape consumers’ perceptions about a company, build loyalty and trust, and make a brand memorable.
In this video Anya explores the key strategies for building a strong brand identity, essential for businesses seeking to stand out in today's competitive market.
In this article, we’ll review the importance of brand identity, compare brand identity and brand image, unveil its elements, get to know how to develop a powerful brand identity, and see examples.
Why is brand identity important?
You don’t need to have a large market share and a huge customer base like other well-established brands. However, having a strong brand identity is critical if you want to receive such benefitsas customer loyalty, brand recognition, customer trust, and constant growth. It helps represent your brand’s values and personality and convey consistent messages across all marketing channels.
An increasingly competitive market makes brands come up with something new to stand out. By creating a powerful identity for your company, you’ll be able to find an appropriate position for your brand and create a unique design that people will recognize. As a result, you’ll improve yourbrand awareness.
Now that you know why brand identity is important, let’s dig deeper and compare the two terms that often evoke confusion.
Brand Identity vs. Brand Image
Brand identity is a set of visible elements like logo, design, and color that helps a brand stand out among its competitors in consumers’ minds. A business owner’s team selects a name, develops a logo, crafts messages and a certain way of communication, creates shapes and visuals, and uses colors to shape a specific image in the minds of consumers.
Brand image is the perception a consumer has about a particular brand after interacting with it. Simply put, it’s a result of a company’s team’s efforts to create a brand identity. If it is successful, they shape a positive image.
Now it’s time to walk you through the main components of brand identity.
Elements of Brand Identity
Brand identity isn’t merely a logo, it includes more components that you should consider.
Logo. Logos can be presented in the form of images, texts, and shapes that depict a brand’s name and purpose. Of course, a logo is the key element of a company’s identity since customers usually pay attention to it. You can also use a text logo (a distinct text-only typographic treatment of a brand’s name). More and more companies now choose text-only logos since they are easier to remember.
Font. Once you decide on your logo, you should think of the corporate font you will use on your website and in different marketing campaigns. Find an attention-grabbing and easy-to-understand font. The best fonts include Proxima Nova, TT Norms Pro, and Helvetica Now. They are used by famous brands like Spotify, Jeep, Bosh, Panasonic, and many more.
Style consistency. By mentioning style, we mean visual elements of your brand. You should be consistent when it comes to images and other visual elements on your website or in promotional campaigns.
Shape and form. One more essential component is a shape or form that represents your company and makes people recognize your product. Ensure that you have memorable packaging and an interesting form. For example, McDonald’s effectively utilized a unique element for promotion. Now the iconic “M” form is known all over the world.
Now when you are acquainted with the key elements, let’s jump into the next section.
How to Create a Powerful Brand Identity
Analyze your ideal customer, unique value proposition, and competitors
Come up with unique visual elements for your brand that reflect your ideas
Think of the language you use to communicate with customers
Avoid several negative practices
Monitor your progress
To establish a strong brand presence, you need to have a powerful set of visual assets. However, that’s not all. Check out the steps below to find out more.
1. Analyze your ideal customer, unique value proposition, and competitors
You need to conduct market researchto understand your audience, unique value proposition, and rivals. Firstly, make sure that you know your ideal customers and their needs. By understanding your audience, you will be closer to developing a product that people will admire.
Secondly, analyze your product and identify what makes you unique among others and allows you to stand out. To develop a successful brand, you should know the difference between your company and your rivals. Thirdly, create a clear mission statement that includes your vision and objectives.
For example, Mercedes-Benz is an exclusive brand that demonstrates the success of someone who has its products. The company communicates superiority and exclusivity. This strong brand reflects German precision, quality, and discipline. The company targets customers that are 25-45 years old and havehigh incomes. The brands’ clients value luxury and comfort.
2. Come up with unique visual elements for your brand that reflect your ideas
Once you do your market research, create a logo that combines your values and represents your product well. Remember, it helps customers recognize your brand and come back.
A logo is always included in online and offline forms of promotion:email campaigns, web push notifications, chatbots, posters, billboards, infomercials, commercials, etc.Trybrainstorming with your team to create something unique and easy to recollect. Besides, it’s also imperative to develop appropriate packaging and an interesting form.
Lots of women worldwide would recognize the product package from Tiffany Co. — a small but valuable blue box with jewelry. Now it has become the world’s most popular package.
3. Think of the language you use to communicate with customers
At this step, you need to connect with your customers. For this purpose, use the language that suits your brand personality. For example, if your company is laid-back, use conversational language. It’s essential to use the same tone across all marketing channels. Since people like storytelling, consider creating a story for your brand. It helps build connections with your target audience and evoke certain emotions.
4. Avoid several negative practices
It’s critically important to avoid several things when developing a strong identity. First of all, don’t communicate mixed messages to your audience so as not to confuse them. You should always know what to say and use the language and visuals that fit your company.
Secondly, be unique and innovative. Find ways to improve a product you want to offer or add something special. For example, provide customers with a new feature or better quality.
Thirdly and most importantly, remember to be consistent in your values, ideas, and messages. You need to stick to your plan and use the same colors, font, elements, and shapes when interacting with leadsand customers.
5. Monitor your progress
Finally, track your performance metrics to know if everything goes right. Consider leveraging Google Analytics, surveys, reviewing customer feedback on your product, and checking social media to get an understanding of how well customers perceive your brand. Moreover, surveys, reviews, and comments will help you figure out the areas that require some changes. This, in turn, will enable you to improve theuser experience.
Now let’s look at several examples.
Strong Brand IdentityExamples
Visual elements stay in the minds of customers long after purchase. Let’s discoverwhat famous brands do to achieve such success among consumers.
Coca-Cola
This brand is an excellentexample of a well-established company with a strong brand identity. When customers hear the company’s name, they probably have several associations with Coca-Cola. It can be its red logo, a polar bear, or its popular “Share a Coke” campaign. The drink evokes feelings like happiness and joy.
Fashion To Figure
The brand that focuses on selling women’s plus-size apparel has a powerful brand identity. The company has clear values and always tries to convey its central idea that fashion is for everyone. The brand’s motto is “Fashion is a state of mind, not a size range.” Hence, the company strives to provide its customers with the latest looks.
With a strong brand identity, you have a chance to reach the hearts of buyers and make them recognize your company. Make sure that it includes your values, ideas, a memorable logo, and colors that fit your product perfectly.
Brand experience
Brand experience is a combination of feelings and impressions consumers have after interacting with a company at different touchpoints. Positive experience helps establish an emotional connection and build long-term relations with the audience.
In the article, we explain why brand experience is vital and describe its difference from the customer one. Also, we provide ways to measure it using different metrics and improve it to boost your company on the market.
Why is brand experience important?
According to PWC, 65% of buyers think that a positive experience influences them more than a great promotion. These statistics prove that the emotions you evoke can be a powerful tool to improve your company’s performance. Study why brand experience is so vital below.
Consistent positive impressions let you create a strong connection between your company and potential clients. When target consumers get positive brand experiences at every touchpoint, they feel empathetic and loyal to your brand. It helps encourage them to purchase your products for the first time and reduces brand switching later.
Such people are more likely to trust your company and provide qualitative feedback. You can find out more about the audience's needs and preferences and align your efforts to meet their expectations. Also, consumers’ reviews will help you discover problems as fast as possible, fix them immediately and grow faster.
One more important point is that positive experiences lead to higher consumer engagement. Loyal buyers deliver 300% more value to the business over a year. Moreover, satisfied clients are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family. According to Semrush Blog, 78% of people talk about their recent positive experiences at least once a week, and 90% of consumers tend to trust a recommended brand. Consequently, you can attract new clients for free using word-of-mouth marketing by providing great impressions.
Understanding all these advantages motivates many companies to improve the impressions they make. However, it is vital to differentiate the brand experience from the customer experience. Continue reading to study the peculiarities of each term.
Brand Experience vs Customer Experience
Both brand and customer experiences concentrate on consumers’ emotions from interacting with the company. They influence each other and look similar, but brand experience is more complex and includes a customer experience.
Brand experience refers to the impressions of all consumers who have already interacted with your brand. They can be your existing clients, potential ones, or people who are just aware of your company. Sources of brand experience can vary from communication with your sales team to interacting with your promotions. Usually, marketers develop long-term strategies to engage consumers, build strong relations and create a consistent image of the company.
Customer experience is a narrower concept. It appeals only to existing clients of the brand and their emotions and feelings after the purchase. Improving the customer experience means delivering more value to consumers through the company's products and services. However, this concept doesn’t include impressions of potential clients after interacting with your website, social media, marketing activities, and other aspects before the purchase.
Now you understand the difference between these two terms. Tracking and optimizing impressions your company provides is essential to improving your performance. Go further to find out the ways to measure the brand experiences of your clients.
How to measure brand experience?
There isn’t one metric to identify the consumers’ impressions of your brand. Measuring brand experience requires collecting and analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. In this section, we give some tips on how to get a holistic image of the feelings and emotions you evoke in the audience.
Track Net Promotional Score (NPS)
Marketers use this metric to study buyers’ loyalty to the brand and the chance of word-of-mouth marketing. To identify NPS, you need to ask your clients to rate how likely they are to recommend your products to their friends and family. Usually, companies use a scale from 0 to 10.
NPS = (Consumers who rated as 9-10 — consumers who rated as 0-6) / total respondents * 100%
Conduct Customer Satisfaction Score Surveys (CSAT)
This metric lets you measure how satisfied your clients are with a company's products and services. CSAT helps measure consumers' attitudes to specific aspects of the brand’s work. Usually, respondents rate their satisfaction from 1 to 5.
CSAT = Satisfied clients / total respondents * 100%.
Analyze social media engagement
The two previous metrics help collect qualitative data and measure impressions of existing clients. However, studying the experiences of potential buyers may be more difficult. It is where social platforms play an important role. They allow you to collect qualitative and quantitative information, which can help you get a holistic image of the situation.
Firstly, you can use an insights overview to monitor trends in the number of followers, and the reached and engaged consumers and compare this data with the content you post. Secondly, social platforms let you track mentions and consumer reactions to the messages you communicate. Analyzing them will help you find out more about users’ experiences and interact with people to collect their reviews about your company.
Interview focus groups and collect customer feedback
This method helps you collect qualitative data about consumers. You can question different segments of your audience based on their stages in the sales funnel or peculiarities of buyer behavior. Such interviews will let you discover the impressions of both potential and existing clients.
Also, you should be attentive to consumers’ reviews. It is the easiest way to find out more about existing clients’ experiences, as they willingly tell you about the pros and cons of your company. To motivate customers to provide more feedback, you can offer a discount on the next purchase. In such a way, you will discover more about people’s impressions and how to make them better.
While measuring the experience your company provides, you will possibly find roadblocks and weaknesses in your strategy. In the next section, we give some tips on fixing them and building strong emotional connections with consumers.
How to improve brand experience?
According to Forbes, only 39% of business leaders state that their company resonates with potential clients. Such a small percentage highlights problems with giving positive impressions on the market. Find out how to improve the experiences of your buyers below.
Identify the values of your company and transmit them. To make your business resonate with consumers, it is necessary to understand their priorities. Some people consider their family the most important thing in their life, others are sure that a career is vital. Once you identify them, transmit your position through your branding, marketing activities, service, etc. Also, you can show that your company is socially responsible, as it will make buyers feel more loyal to your brand.
Develop the visual language and tone of voice. Identify your brand’s colors to help you evoke certain emotions. For example, yellow means optimism and happiness, while blue is about calmness or serenity. Once you choose the colors, develop visual elements, such as logos, packaging, signboards, cards, etc. Then think about the tone of voice that should align with the company's image. Use storytelling to engage people better.
Evoke emotions and affect certain senses. Emotional connection is the most important aspect of solid relations with consumers. Your brand should provide consistent experiences and create strong associations. It will let you become more memorable and raise people’s awareness and loyalty. One more important point is to influence consumers’ perceptions. This is what determines the rhythm of the music in stores. Think about how affecting senses will help you provide positive brand experiences.
Make consuming processes effortless and pleasant. Analyze your sales pipeline and find the touchpoints where too many consumers leak out. Then fix the problems and optimize the strategy so that people will be highly-engaged during the whole customer journey. Pay attention to the quality of your service. Create a chatbot for Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp for free using our chatbot builder to answer customers’ messages faster and better.
Personalize the brand’s messages. 70% of people state that a brand's understanding of their individual needs improves their loyalty. Segment consumers to deliver relevant messages to each group, make a good impression on potential clients and raise the satisfaction of the existing ones. LIKE.TG free CRM can help you collect consumer data to personalize content. You can manage all the information in one place and get in touch with buyers through the most convenient channels.
Provide helpful content. You can write articles with tips on how to use your products that will be appealing to existing clients and guides related to your industry that may be interesting to potential ones. Post accurate and interesting information in your blog or on social media. Such content will help you highlight your brand’s expertise. Moreover, such articles will let you grow organically by attracting already interested clients through the search engine.
Congrats, now you understand what brand experience is and why it is critical, can measure it, and distinguish it from customer experience. Use LIKE.TG services to improve the experience your brand provides and boost it on the market.
Brand building
Brand building is the process that implies using direct advertising campaigns to boost brand awareness, promote a specific product, establish connections and provide value to the target audience. It increases customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and brand recognition.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of brand building and the 7 steps to building a successful brand.
Why is brand building important?
A brand is a crucial asset since it helps shape a positive perception of your business in consumers’ minds. With its help, people become aware of your company’s values, brand personality, and mission. If you succeed to create a strong brand, you can reap the following benefits:
increased recognition;
high level of customer loyalty;
word-of-mouth promotion;
trust;
credibility.
Moreover, you can attract new leads and convert them into customers. People who share your values and mission will be interested in your product and ideas. Besides, it will also help you gather an excellent team of like-minded people. Employees who support your company’s values and principles will shape a dream team for future business development.
The most crucial aspect is that a strong brand can generate brand awareness, establish connections with the audience, and gain trust. Brand identity enables you to stand out, encourage customer loyalty, and increase your value among consumers.
Now that you know why it’s important to consider brand building, it’s time to delve into our guide to explore steps to build a successful brand.
7 Steps to Build a Successful Brand
Brand building can be broken down into seven key steps. Let’s review each of them in more detail to find out how to develop a successful brand.
Define your target audience and research competitors. Conducting a comprehensive analysis of ideal customers and competitors is a must for every successful brand. Direct your efforts to explore the market. You need to identify and describe your ideal customer and define the level of competition. To understand your target market and its needs, conduct a short survey to ask potential customers about the brands they prefer to buy. Besides, you can look through social media accounts of companies that offer similar products. Analyze their strategies to figure out the preferences of your potential audience.
Work on your brand personality. One company can’t be a perfect choice for everybody, that’s why it’s essential to create a brand that will be suitable for a specific audience segment. You need a clear brand personality to communicate your message and drive customers’ attention to your product. For this purpose, you should think of your positioning statement that covers your claim in the market. Besides, you need to determine your unique value proposition. It should be something significant your company can offer, and others don’t have. To become closer to your customers and establish strong connections, you should identify individual qualities that suit your company. This way, you’ll be able to communicate the feelings and emotions you associate with your business.
Decide on the business name. A brand is a vast concept that covers many different things. The brand name is essential too. Since the name of your future company influences your marketing strategies, logo, domain, and trademark registration, you need to choose a relevant and memorable name. It should be unique, easy to remember, and short. If you plan to expand, keep in mind that your company name should be broad, for example, if you want to create new product lines.
Choose a catchy slogan. You can use a slogan on your social media networks, business cards, and website. It helps describe your product and deliver the necessary message to the audience. A catchy slogan can hook customers’ attention and keep a specific brand in mind. It’s also critical for your brand identity and reputation.
Think of your brand design. Color scheme and font play an important role when you create a company. Using the same brand design across different marketing channels allows you to be more recognizable among customers. The design should visually represent your company. With the help of the right colors, you can communicate the necessary message and feelings.
Create a unique brand logo. The logo also belongs to the most important elements of a brand. A unique and recognizable logo enables you to make a strong first impression, serve as a foundation for brand identity, grab attention, and increase customer loyalty. Remember, a brand logo is the face of your company, and it should be outstanding for people to pay attention and memorize it. Once you develop a great logo, make sure to include it on your website, social media accounts, product, banners, all possible ads, etc.
Share your brand story. Apply your branding across different marketing channels to educate people about your company’s values. You need to tell people a brand story with facts and feelings to evoke emotions in customers and encourage interaction. Ensure that your mission and purpose are clear so that people can find out about your brand and values more and decide whether to become your customer. For example, TOMS, the famous footwear company, is widely known for its aim to improve lives. The brand contributes to people in need and donates shoes to children through charitable programs.
If you strive to connect with the audience and hook their attention, you need to have a strong brand and values. Once you succeed in building an outstanding brand, you’ll be able to increase awareness and drive conversions.
Brand attributes
Brand attributes are the brand’s traits that resonate with consumers’ personal characteristics and feelings. Examples include credibility, uniqueness, relevance, consistency, proper positioning, etc. They help a brand stand out among competitors and be recognized by customers.
In this article, we’ll make the difference between brand attributes and personality clear. We’ll also review the brand attributes list and examples and get to know how to define characteristics for your company.
Why are brand attributes important for your branding?
A strong brand with a set of essential brand attributes provides a unique value proposition and stands out from the competition. Customers appreciate competitive businesses and recommend them to friends. A business that offers excellent customer service, high-quality products, and a seamless user experience can attain brand recognition. Customers promote brands with positive characteristics to their friends and family. Brand reputation and credibility help business owners close more deals and win new customers.
Businesses with well-defined brand attributes empower marketers to choose suitable brand positioning strategies and develop a clear brand identity. Having brand attributes in place allows you to select the right marketing approaches and tools to market your products. As a result, marketing and sales efforts are aligned with your business goals.
Now that you know about the importance, it’s time to compare brand attributes and brand personality. Although the two concepts might seem similar, they still have distinctive features.
Brand Attributes vs Brand Personality
Since the difference between the two terms might evoke confusion, we’ll see each of them in detail. It will help find this difference.
Brand attributes are the traits that describe your brand. Credibility, relevance, consistency, and proper positioning are examples of attributes. Consumers see these characteristics when they look at your business as a whole without paying attention to the product you sell. Every company has hard and soft attributes. Examples of hard attributes include name, logo, slogan, website, product, vision, and mission. Uniqueness, credibility, and consistency are the soft attributes.
Brand personality is a framework that enables business owners to shape a specific perception among customers regarding their product, service, and mission. Brand personality evokes certain emotions and feelings and encourages emotional response that leads to purchasing decisions. Entrepreneurs believe that consumers are more willing to buy from a brand that has a similar personality to their own. There are different types of personalities: competence, sophistication, ruggedness, sincerity, and excitement.
Now when the difference is clear, let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to define attributes for your brand.
How to define brand attributes for your business?
If you hire a marketing agency to determine your brand attributes, you’ll see what to do. Let’s explore the process in detail.
Determine your brand culture. The brand culture of your brand combines psychology, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. These aspects impact brand behavior and brand experience and shape brand reputation. Brand culture influences the story of your company and the way team members work. Your company will bring significant returns if you successfully shape a strong brand culture. Your business can be knowledgable, smart, unique, or reliable. Conduct research to find out how customers perceive your company.
Identify attributes that describe your prospects. When creating a buyer persona, explore the characteristics of your potential clients. Identify their traits and individual preferences to provide them with a targeted offer. Your leads’ attributes should be positive like smart, organized, detail-orientated, ambitious, etc.
List the desired emotions of your clients. Focus on the emotions your consumers will have after purchasing your product. Make sure that your brand attributes and product will deliver value and positive feelings to your target audience. For example, people can be satisfied, happy, understood, etc.
Identify your brand voice. Brand voice is the unique way you represent your company and product to the target market. It can be elegant, inspiring, ambitious, exclusive, powerful, or strong. After you identify your brand voice, make sure to be consistent with your brand voice over various communication channels.
After going through these essential steps, you’ll have a long list of attributes. Choose the most appropriate words that will resonate with your customers’ traits, needs, and problems. To reduce the list and make the right decision, take one best word from each step. This way, you’ll be able to determine relevant brand attributes for your business.
Now that you know how to find attributes for your company, let’s review the traits that might suit your brand.
Brand Attributes List
A company should have several brand attributes which are necessary for success. In this section, we’ll uncover the characteristics so that you can consider them when developing a brand.
Proper positioning strategy. Your branding and marketing team should collaborate to determine the relevant positioning strategy for your company. It will provide your product with a unique position, competitive advantage, and the possibility to stand out from the competition. After setting proper positioning tactics, you’ll be able to stay on top of consumers’ minds. Your company should be able to showcase the product’s advantage. It can have superior quality, low price, or advanced features. Make sure to align your brand positioning strategy with your offering, mission, vision, value, and business goals.
Relevance. To establish an emotional connection with prospects and loyal customers, you should meet the needs of your target audience. Strive to comply with consumers’ expectations and exceed them. Make sure that your customer support agents understand prospects’ problems and offer relevant solutions. If your company succeeds in meeting the demand, your sales and revenues will rise.
Consistency. If you want to gain customer trust, be consistent across different communication channels, deliver logical messages, and solve customers’ problems regularly. Coherency should be present everywhere starting from website design, logo, slogan, vision, and mission, and ending with your after-sales service.
Credibility. To look credible in consumers’ eyes, your brand’s team should meet expectations, ensure excellent customer service, promptly respond to clients’ inquiries, and create authoritative content. Remember that trustworthiness and expertise of your company influence customer decisions. To boost credibility, your marketing team should create informative quality content, ask influencers for promotion, establish a strong brand identity, protect customer data, and build a community.
Uniqueness. Although now you might find businesses that offer similar products, you should gather all your creativity to present a unique and inspiring product. Having such an offer allows you to stand out from the competition. Better yet, you’ll build a strong identity widely recognized within the market and among consumers.
Inspiration. Innovative marketing approaches and technologies should serve as inspiration for your customers and employees. Organize meetings, prepare presentations, and demonstrate opportunities for growth to inspire employees to do their job well. As a result, consumers will be satisfied and feel inspired to make something extraordinary using your product. For instance, offering a landing page builder can encourage customers to start a small business.
Now that you know the most popular brand attributes for businesses, it’s time to explore the examples. After reviewing them, you’ll be able to do the same thing for your company.
Examples of Brand Attributes
You can find examples of brand attributes in any industry: electronic devices, apparel, cars, and skin care. Every brand has its unique characteristics and traits the same way people do. We’ll now unveil some brands that succeeded in identifying attributes that resonate with their target market.
Levi’s
Customers can describe good old Levi’s with words like originality, quality, and courage. Customers pay money for durability and can rely on the brand. Levi’s jeans have high quality and are in use for years after the initial purchase. You can wear a pair of jeans to go to work, do some housework in the garden, or even repair a house. The brand stands for durable clothing and condemns one-season items. Levi Strauss managed to turn blue denim pants for minors into clothes people wear every day.
Volkswagen
Established in 1946, the brand is famous for quality stylish cars. The Iconic Beetle, VW Bus, and Volkswagen Touareg are among the best Volkswagen vehicles ever made. All cars have the same characteristics in common: quality, durability, and style. The brand often communicates its main message about its cars — their reliability. The company produces practical and safe cars. As a result, customers perceive the brand as an honest and reliable company. “Think Small” marketing campaigns communicates Volkswagen’s main principles.
Congrats, now you know what brand attributes are and why they are essential. Hope that our examples gave you a clear understanding of them.
Brand ambassador
A brand ambassador is a professional with an outgoing personality and strong social media presence who speaks for a brand and promotes its products online and offline. This person helps create content, becomes a spokesperson at various events, handles word-of-mouth marketing, and promotes a brand and its products through different digital platforms.
Watch the video below to figure out how to make your brand grow with the help of a brand ambassador.
In a world with 3.78 billion social media users, the influence of digital platforms is very strong. That’s why brands seek professionals ready to become their representatives and promote their products and services. In this article, we’ll unveil the reasons why businesses look for brand ambassadors, their responsibilities, and salary. Next, we’ll jump into our step-by-step guide on how to become a brand ambassador.
Why do businesses need brand ambassadors?
Every company needs a “face,” a real person who has all the required traits and shares the brand’s values and tone of voice. Brands search for the perfect candidates to speak for them because they can:
improve brand awareness;
create a higher level of customer trust;
reach a new audience and bring in new customers with the help of referral sales (links and coupons) and word-of-mouth;
enhance customer lifetime value;
blow up conversionsthrough user-generated content;
reduce extra expenditures on the creation of in-house content;
increase a company’s effectiveness across different channels;
establish credibility;
build a good reputation;
boost sales;
drive traffic to a brand’s website.
An employee, a huge fan of your brand, or just a customer can easily become your brand representative. The person should know the details of your brand’s product, vision, and mission, manage brand accounts on social media, have experience in marketing, and be a great spokesperson. Real people are more likely to engage a wider audience by trying a product or service and recommending it to a company’starget audience. Moreover, they help obtain new customers and retain the current ones.
Ideally, brands want to see a public figure who has a great influence on the masses. You’ve probably heard about Dua Lipa representing Puma and Selena Gomez being an ambassador of Pantene. Influencersinspire people all around the world through their campaigns and initiatives.
Now that you know the key reasons, let’s proceed to the responsibilities of brands’ faces.
What do brand ambassadors do?
As a face and voice of a company, a brand ambassador creates buzz around a certain brand and promotes products both offline and online. To make people talk about a company and recommend it to others, opinion leaders leverage word-of-mouth marketing, distribute merchandise and information to prospects, and communicate a product’s value and benefits. Moreover, the position involves becoming a company’s spokesperson at various events, product launches, and conferences.
Since more and more people become familiar with social media platforms, a candidate should navigate Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and various messengers perfectly. Areal professional should create quality content for a brand’s site and social media to bring leads.
These employees regularly communicate with their audience in different ways to generate brand awareness: participate in events and represent a brand online through videos, and educational materials and offline through various live events, meetings, and conferences.
Large companies seek professionals who are ready to make every effort to shape their marketing strategy, communicate a brand’s message, and promote it through the most effective channels. A great communicator with excellent networking skills also collaborates with the sales and marketing departments to achieve a company’s objectives.
Now that you know about the responsibilities of brand reps, let’s talk about the compensation you can receive when having a job like this.
Do brand ambassadors get paid?
Becoming an ambassador of a brand is an excellent idea for friendly, outgoing, and enthusiastic people. According to Indeed, an average salary is $17 per hour and $39,834 per year in the United States. 49% of Americans who work as brand ambassadors are satisfied with their incomes and say that they earn enough money for living.
It’s worth mentioning that there are a lot of great companies that offer higher salaries and let brand reps earn $55,000-65,000 annually. Hence, salaries vary and depend on the brand you endorse.
Sometimes brands employ a different strategy and prefer to pay their professionals based on the number of promotional materials they can distribute or leads they generate. As a result, brand ambassadors who work on commission can earn a lot in case they bring many prospects or nothing if they don’t succeed in expanding a customer base.
To become a perfect candidate for this position, you need to consider the following guide.
How to Become a Brand Ambassador
Look for the brands you would like to represent
Create a unique personality
Engage a wider audience
Communicate with your followers
Increase the number of subscribers
Contact the companies you would like to work with
Today, you don’t need to be a celebrity, an influencer, or a public figure to become a corporate ambassador. Since companies strive to build brand recognition and drive theirsales volume, they look for young enthusiasts good at multitasking. If you feel that you have great networking and communication skills, stick to the following steps to get started.
Look for the brands you would like to represent. To start, search for the companies you would like to endorse. Bear in mind that brands would like to see opinion leaders who share their values and suit their primary purpose. For instance, a beauty blogger is a perfect fit for a cosmetics company. Therefore, it’s useful to research the brands that relate to the content on your social media. Follow them to comprehend their fundamental principles and the people they need.
Create a unique personality. Get ready to demonstrate a clear personality online. For this purpose, find your niche: traveling, lifestyle, beauty, fashion, or business. Brands need ambassadors with certain vibes and intereststhat suit their products perfectly. Many well-known brands of sportswear choose athletes as ambassadors. For example, Tony Hawk, known for his achievements in skateboarding, took a worthy position as a brand ambassador of Vans, a famous brand of skateboarding shoes and apparel.
Engage a wider audience.You need to create quality content to build a good reputation and trust. Do your best to create engaging posts, share quality pictures, create stories to gain more followers, and collect likes and comments. Employ different strategies and approaches to reach more people. As an option, consider commenting on famous pages or blogs, conducting giveaways, turning to bloggers for promotion, or using paid advertising. The more activity your page has, the more attractive your personality is to companies in the same niche.
Communicate with your followers. Be active with your subscribers. Ask them to share their experiences and opinions. This is an excellent opportunity to build a dialogue and engage followers in a conversation. Your interactive approach won’t leave them indifferent. As a result, you’ll not only retain your existing followers but also attract new ones.
Increase the number of subscribers. One of the main aims of every blogger is to have a large following. To attain it, opinion leaders cooperate with other influencers in the niche, conduct giveaways, create blog posts regularly, use hashtags, and actively communicate with their audiences.
Contact the companies you would like to work with. Once your social media account is ready, and you have decided which brands you would love to endorse, start reaching out to them. You can send them a message offering your services through social media or email. You can also do it in person by visiting special events and meetings.
To conclude, by enlisting your best employees or customers as brand ambassadors, your brand can reach leads, bring in new clients, forge a deep bond with the audience, and improve conversion rates. If you think about representing brands and their products, becoming a spokesperson, and designing effective marketing campaigns and strategies is your cup of tea, go ahead and show your knowledge and skills as a brand ambassador.
