Tag Archives: brand marketing

Brand Strategy and Planning Set You Apart

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Brand dominance sets your company or organization apart from others in today’s globally competitive environment. Yet, having an excellent brand position doesn’t come easily or happen overnight.

Brand building is an ongoing, strategic process. Your brand blueprint – vision, positioning and touch points – and your brand voice – main messages, tone and images – come from the consistent connections and collaboration with your stakeholders online and off. Your brand serves as a powerful motivational tool for your stakeholders. Branding is a way to differentiate your company, product or service from competitors.

Exceptional brand performance takes strategy, planning and proactive maintenance. Implementing a strong, actionable brand plan is crucial to achieving standout performance in your market.

To ensure future growth and profitability, companies and organizations must continually build, strengthen and revitalize brand value. You must focus on the emotional aspects of your brand – the proposition, which should make a quick and intuitive emotional connection with an individual that creates awareness, consideration, influence, buy-in and loyalty.

Customer loyalty and commitment are key to brand success. To accomplish brand success, brand strategies need to be relevant, have a differentiated offer and reflect values that are credible and believable. Your brand’s promise must reflect that your product and service are top quality and the very best available.

You can’t rely on the functional differences of your products or services. People have too many choices. Differentiating and communicating your brand’s unique value is essential. You need to craft messages that stir up specific words when someone hears or sees your company’s name, products or services. It means having a personality that is unique and one that emotionally appeals to stakeholders. This includes intangible components such as your brand name, graphic representation, slogan, key descriptive phases, brand story and fresh content in your communications. A strong brand communicates a promise and expresses your unique value through powerful words and images.

Professionals are constantly looking for new ways to grow their organization’s brand image. Many are creating innovative ways for building their brand and pushing boundaries to influence customer-buying behavior. They are getting their messages across clearly and effectively in a fully integrated, multichannel plan that includes traditional marketing components and as well as online, such as e-marketing and social media.

An effective brand strategy creates the kind of loyalty that leaves customers indifferent to the advertising and marketing of your competitors. Well-focused and consistent attention to branding through favorable, memorable positioning of your products or services in the minds of stakeholders is the most effective way to compete.

A powerful brand strategy and program can prevent poor market awareness, insufficient recognition, weak customer retention, lack of loyalty, inadequate lead generation flow and longer-than-expected selling cycles. Consistent communications are imperative to the success and life of your brand.

Whether you are a new or established business, one looking to refresh or strengthen your brand, your brand identity is crucial to your organization’s continued success.

Is Your Website Marketing You Well?

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In today’s world of savvy technology-driven customers, your Website is your No. 1 business calling card. Is your company’s Website positioned to do that? Is it marketing you well? Is it helping you meet your sales goals?

Any marketing investment must be focused on realistic goals and mechanisms for achieving them. No matter what method or application you deploy, first and foremost, focus on your Website. Your Website belongs at the center of your marketing strategy and connecting with customers, an activity that’s the core of every marketing effort.

Think of your Website as an investment in brand marketing, creating awareness in the minds of your stakeholders. If you develop a plan with your customers in mind, you will get a return on your investment. To do that, you need to know your strategy, create good content, and have simple, obvious and intuitive navigation.

Four-Steps to Consider

A customer-centric Website should follow a four-step development plan, which includes your assessing and clearly understanding your brand strategy, customers, objectives and marketing goals.

Website Brand Strategies

The most successful brand strategies take advantage of the Web, using a well-designed and carefully planned identity that has clear, precise messages (content) that fulfill user experiences.

You need to know and understand your brand. What makes your company and its products or services compelling, attractive and unique against your competitors. This requires that you honestly evaluate what your brand value is to your customers and other important stakeholders.

What do you want your site do? Provide Information, lead generation or sales. Or, a combination of these. You need to know your site’s purpose in order to structure it. If you haven’t answered all of the above questions, your strategy won’t be on target and you’re unlikely to succeed with your Website.

Website Customer Relationships

You’ve identified your customers’ needs, but what is your company’s image and reputation among important stakeholders?  Can these strengths be leveraged, and how? What do you want to accomplish with your customer relationships? Do you want to change them?

Website Objectives

Other considerations include the organization of your Website. It should be organized so that it will be easy for your customers to accomplish their goals. Don’t confuse them by organizing it by what you’d like.

Look at your Website just like you would your office building, and that includes your location, front entrance and interior. To ensure you reach your customers, you need a Website that has curb appeal and is easy to navigate. Maximize your layout. Customers only give you a few seconds to find what they want or they’ll leave and never return.

What about the copy? Your Website should be loaded with good searchable content, and powerful words that convince your potential customers to keep reading and to help eventually gain their trust. Features don’t sell, benefits do. Solve your customers’ dilemmas. Address their problems, interests, values and how they want to receive service. And, don’t forget a call to action to get your customers to contact you. A call to action statement is needed to help motivate a customer to buy your product or service.

Also, be smart about your Website design. Consider the pros and cons of elements that represent a design aesthetic that is not needed and simply annoys your customers. And even worse, using these features makes it harder for search engines to index your site.

Other questions to consider include: where will the site be hosted? Any technology limitations? How many pages? What types of content, charts and photography do you want to use? Do you need any contact, request information or quote forms? Who will update the site in the future? Does the site need a content management system so an administrator can update it easily? Or, do you have a tech-savvy programmer? Who will write the copy? Are you linked to your social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?

Website Marketing

Having a great Website is a job half done. To complete the other half, you must drive traffic to your site. Fill your site with good search engine optimization (SEO) to get your site found. SEO done well will boost your Website traffic and help create a lead-capturing mechanism, and keep you ahead of your competitors.

Rather than only driving traffic to your Website, concentrate on getting motivated prospects and valuable customers to visit your Website. A few well-thought out key words and phrases that differentiate your core messages will increase valuable clicks and conversions. It’s much better to attract fewer visitors with precise words, who will convert to a sale, than thousands of random, web-surfing visitors.

And, remember that your Website can get old quickly. You must update your content frequently. Take down old products and services, keep press releases current, and provide relevant and updated information.

Launching a Website can be a real challenge. The key to developing a winning Website is to clearly identify your goals, know what you want to accomplish and work with a Website firm that understands both the front end (what people see – the design and content) and the back end (what makes it work – building and development).

Defining and Protecting Your Brand’s Image

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Image may be one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in branding.

The perception of your image has marketing implications that are significant and important to the success of your business. Strongly branded organizations maximize their value through effective management of their brand and image. Companies that succeed build relationships with stakeholders that transcend products and services. The stronger your brand, the clearer the position it occupies in their minds.

What is image? Image is created –

  • Through the presentation of your company, its products and services to the market through advertising and promotions
  • Across your portrayal of your organization through your corporate communications, publicity and public relations efforts
  • By the actual package, product or service design and delivery
  • In the course of your actions with employees, community, public affairs and your customer service

Your image is basically shorthand for your brand and what your company is all about to your audiences. With all the volume of competing images, you need to have something that strikes a chord with your stakeholders in a simple, concise way. Your brand creates a belief about what your company delivers to them.

The purpose of branding is to articulate your brand’s promise – your promise to your company’s stakeholders. It is a way to differentiate your company, products and services from competitors, and to highlight a personality that is both unique and appealing. It is a multifaceted, multilayered process and discipline. It’s much more than simply marketing slogans and icons.

Well-focused and consistent attention to branding is the most effective way to compete, to rise above the noise and become a factor in your industry. It has taken on a greater significance as companies now see their brands as assets – as valuable and as tangible as their factories and patents. It’s the cornerstone upon which brand equity is built.

Managing your identity so it is an accurate reflection of your company’s image is an ongoing process. Brand management has sound disciplines that make significant differences for how well a brand is protected and presented. It means focusing on the big picture – the brand’s essence, mapping out competitors in your brand’s category, identifying new obstacles or opportunities to ensure building your brand’s value. Brand management is the ultimate protector of profit margins.

Developing and reinforcing your brand takes four steps –

Identify your brand – All the distinctive elements associated with your products and services must be identified. Why customers care or should care about what it is you offer and what makes it different from your competitors. This is the identity that you are creating for your customers.

Build your brand – After the distinctive elements are identified, it must be framed in succinct messages that people can understand and relate to. This will reinforce your brand.

Promote the brand – What good is a message if no one hears it? Your company must make a strong pledge to consistently market its products or services, and, over time, to solidify its identity in customers’ minds.

Be your brand – The message is chosen; marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns are busy promoting it. The entire organization also must be living it. There must be a direct connection between your brand and the customer’s experience – when he / she walks in your door, talks to your sales team and purchases your product or service. A strong brand identity that creates your desired image is essential for success, no matter what the size of your company.

Powerful and consistent branding has a unified look, recognizable image and concrete messages that communicate key aspects of who your company is and what it is doing.

Brand development starts with clearly defining your brand position via a unique value proposition. Your brand’s promise of value should create an emotion in a person and build value in their mind.

Positioning a brand relies on strong research surrounding your competitive landscape and your target market’s needs. You must clearly uncover and define the attitudes and preferences surrounding this need. Understanding your brand opportunities is very important. Only with clarity, will you be able to fine-tune your brand’s position to capture the best marketplace opportunity that your company can attain for its products or services.

Your brand slogan is key to your brand positioning. It should clearly define – what business your brand is in, what makes it different and why customers should value this difference and remain loyal to your products and services. It must be a strong promise of value to encourage customers to buy your brand and not go with a competitor. Your slogan must communicate your value story in a few words or phrase. A strategically positioned brand becomes known for the business it is in and its unique value.

Your brand logo intrinsically symbolizes this value. Once your brand is established and you have a well-defined and known brand position, your logo standing by itself will symbolize your unique proposition of value.

Your key messages or brand story should bring your unique value proposition to life. Your messages should make your brand name and slogan believable and easily understood by your stakeholders. Typically, it is a distinctive, one-line umbrella statement supported by few other sentences that create a picture of truth in the minds of your target audiences. Your brand story will be used in many mediums – online and offline – such as press kits, press releases, sales materials, marketing collateral, Website, blog, social media, e-mails and other communication channels.

Whatever time and effort is required to complete the evaluation of your image and brand process, it is well worth the effort. Your image, supported by your brand, is critical to your market positioning strategy and its success. The image projected must convey the competitive posture of your company. To assure that your current strategies and communications clearly reflect your company’s goals, get feedback and input from your various audiences. Do their perceptions and interpretations reflect the image you had intended?

You need to continually assess and monitor your image perception on a regular basis, identify trends and changes over time and the influence of any new efforts made to alter your image in the marketplace.

Your organization’s image is critical to your company’s long-term success. Make sure you know who all of your audiences are and how to appeal to them. Prioritize your audiences in order of need to know. Select the most appropriate means of communicating with each audience, keeping in mind key differences.

Communicating your corporate identity as envisioned by top management must begin within the organization and should involve employees in a team effort.

Deepening your brand and extending its reach takes proactive, ongoing management of your brand and image. You should put in place good planning, incorporating sound actionable strategies for enhancing and adapting your corporate image to meet your long-term goals. If you do, you will be well on your way to aligning your brand toward the image that you want others to have of your company, its products and services.