Consistent Branding Means Survival

To ensure the future growth and profitability of your company, you must use a brand management strategy to continually build, strengthen and revitalize your brand. Building and maintaining a valuable brand isn’t easy.

Brand positioning is a process, not an event. Your brand blueprint (vision, areas of focus and touch points) and your brand voice (main messages, approach to language, type, color and imagery) come from ongoing emotional connections made with your customers every day.

You must focus on the emotional aspects of your brand – the proposition, making a quick and intuitive emotional connection with your customers that creates awareness, has influence, and elicits their buy-in and loyalty.

Exceptional brand performance is no accident. Implementing a strong, actionable brand plan is crucial to achieving standout market performance. You can’t simply rely on the functional differences of your products or services. Customers have too many choices. Differentiating and communicating your brand’s unique value to the marketplace is essential. You need to craft messages that stir up specific words or emotions when someone hears or sees your company’s name, products or services.

Your brand serves as a powerful motivation tool to all your stakeholders such as employees, investors and customers. Companies are constantly looking for ways to grow their brand image, using new ideas and initiatives in the market. Many are creating innovative ways for building their brand and pushing boundaries to influence customer buying behavior, getting their messages across clearly and effectively. Branding today must include social media across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more social communities.

Customer loyalty, commitment and collaboration are the key to business success in today’s competitive environment. Brand strategies need to be relevant, have a differentiated offer and reflect values that are credible and believable. This is only achievable by ensuring consistency in product and service quality with your brand promise.

Your branding identity strategy will be more successful if you closely target your market. Focus on getting your company name and your products or services in front of your current customers and best potential customers. An effective brand marketing strategy creates the kind of loyalty that leaves customers indifferent to the advertising and marketing factors of your competitors.

Branding is the intangible part of your business. A brand, unlike your product or service offerings, is a collection of ideas, feelings, word associations and visuals that represent your value proposition. Customers choose one particular brand over another because of its intrinsic value. Your brand serves as the link between your product’s promise and the customer’s desire.

Branding is a way to differentiate your company, product or service from competitors. It means having a personality that is unique and appeals to customers. This would include your brand name, graphic representation, tagline, key descriptive phases and brand story.

Well-focused and consistent attention to brand identity marketing will create a favorable, memorable position of your products or services in the minds of your prospects and customers. You must brand consistently to compete and become a factor in the industry sector in which your company participates.

A powerful brand identity and active brand strategy can prevent poor market awareness, insufficient product or service recognition, weak customer retention, lack of loyalty, inadequate lead generation flow, longer-than-expected selling cycles and low product valuation.

Whether you are a new or established business, one looking to refresh or solidify your brand, your company’s brand identity is crucial to your company’s success. A strong brand communicates to your customers a promise and expresses your unique value through words and images.

Developing your brand doesn’t happen overnight. Consistent communications that differentiate your company are imperative to the success and life of your brand.

In today’s fast-paced, multimedia world, it is more important than ever to promote recognition of your company, and its product or service by stressing the quality and the unique value of your brand.

Establishing Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

You must leverage social media if you want to successfully market your business. You will reach a huge amount of customers and prospects worldwide in just a few minutes.

If you are a newbie to social media management, this new way of marketing can be overwhelming.

With the advent of social media, many new communications and content marketing channels are available. Social media creates a new environment for customer conversations. And, just about the time you get comfortable with using a few, another new social media community pops up.

Where do you start and what social networks do you focus on? Many choices are available. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are the most visited social media sites.

Using social media on a regular basis will help you gain valuable customers that are in the know, and like and trust your business. With social media, you let people know what’s going on with your business. This contact and interaction will help your company build relationships; make friends with customers and prospects. With social media, many ways are available to profile and highlight your company.

You should frequently post informative content that lets prospects get to know your company, its expertise, brand messages and offerings. By reaching out and having interaction with your social networks, you are able to touch base with hundreds of people each day.

Social media is particularly critical to reputation management, brand messaging and reaching customers. How you interact with others through social media will have a big impact on how others view your company, its products and services, and maintaining your brand identity.

The information that you put online should enhance the reputation and expertise of your company, and support your brand. You need to make sure that everything you write and put as your content elevates and guards your company reputation, including how your company looks and acts, what it says and how it says it.

Social media pages are designed for content postings that build relationships though content interaction. It is important to make sure that you balance how much marketing you do. Your social contacts will become very tired of your company, if day in and day out you do are making a hard sales pitch.

Your social media content is King. Once you commit to be social online, you must keep your content fresh and valuable to your followers and fans. Informative content will help your company stand out from your competitors online.

You need to use good content marketing with your social media efforts. Informational content generates trust. It provides prospective buyers with the information needed to nurture their interest and push them through the sales cycle. You can even figure out what they are interested in simply by looking at what content they interact with online.

When you first do your social media planning, a huge challenge is to find out what social media venues that your customers are using. After doing your research to find them, you need to analyze and find out what type of content your customers’ are interested in. Knowing their areas of interest will enable your company to become a resource in your product or service arena. You also need to think about how your company can create continuous beneficial and informative content. The key to retaining loyal customers and attracting new buyers is telling valuable, relevant and compelling stories.

You need an ongoing social media strategy and plan to make sure you will reach your goals on an ongoing basis. Social media marketing is only one part of an Internet marketing plan, but it is a very important part. Social media activities are an essential element to capture business online.

How’s Your Brand Image?

Today successful businesses are very aware of their brand image. The value of a strong brand identity lies in the impression left with anyone who comes in contact with your company. It’s how your customers see you.

Branding is not just about logos or updating your Website. It’s the entire “feel” associated with your company.

When defining elements of your brand strategy, the most important priority is to articulate your brand’s promise. You need to have a consistent visual brand image, including a set of strong, unique brand messages, outstanding service and business conduct at each customer touch point. A strong and effective brand will create, build and increase awareness and brand loyalty with your customers.

With the increase in technology, companies have many more points of brand contact with stakeholders from e-mail, Websites, social media, blogs and much more. As online marketing continues to evolve into new spaces, your brand should be closely guarded and represented to protect your brand and company reputation in places, channels and formats that you use.

In order to develop successful branding strategies, your brand and business have to stand out. You must emphasize what you have that the your competition does not have. You need to tell your customers what makes your business different than all the other companies that they can also choose.

You need to be consistent, proactive and informative with your brand messages. Brand awareness and purchase intent are highly correlated with repetitive viewing and consistent branding. For example, you should encourage viewers to return to your Website by placing frequently updated and informative content.

Taking time to carefully develop and maintain your brand will set your business apart from other businesses. It will encourage frequent brand engagement that creates strong brand loyalty through successful branding.