Branding is a slightly vague and misunderstood concept for many companies and marketers. In your opinion, why do consumers agree to pay more for goods or services of well-known, respected brands?
It is the result of a successful consistent business branding strategy, processes and decisions that have created a strong positive brand perception as a trusted business known for its distinctive quality and exceptional competitive advantage.
What is branding?
While marketing is about strategies, tactics, channels, solutions, and methods to promote your business’s products or services to potential customers.
Branding is important for marketing activities, as you must determine the main aspects of your brand before choosing or developing any marketing strategies or decisions based on the answers to the following questions:
- What are your business mission and goals now and in the future?
- How is your business perceived by your target audience now?
- What are the features and competitive advantages of the available products or services?
- What qualities or attributes do you want to associate with your brand when your target audience encounters anything related to your brand?
- What are the most effective branding solutions for communicating your brand’s identity, values, and messages to your target audience?
Why is branding important for business?
Business branding processes are essential to get better results from marketing and advertising campaigns as they transform the target audience of potential and current customers into more attractive loyal customers and brand advocates.
Developing strong brand equity with consistent branding activities that position brands as trustworthy choices will enable businesses to:
- Increase conversions and sales.
- Increase business value.
- Get instant positive recognition.
- Increase trust and emotional connections.
- Get more customers through positive advertising.
- Retain more customers and brand advocates
In other cases, brands with declining market share or a shift towards negative perception due to poor product quality, poor customer experience, and other crises that result in brand promises to customers not being delivered will require a quick planned response with appropriate rebranding activities and processes.
Achieving all the mentioned and possible benefits of business branding and rebranding will require the selection and application of the most appropriate branding strategy and solutions tailored to the needs, goals and current positioning of your business among competitors.
How to turn your business into a brand?
A common mistake many companies and marketers make is that branding is just the creation of a company logo, business cards, and official printed materials.
Branding is about developing and maintaining a positive perception and positioning in target markets through all your business communication tools, including:
- Messaging your brand.
- The quality of your products or services.
- Your pricing strategy.
- External identity.
- All marketing and advertising channels and campaigns.
- Attitude of internal staff “ex: customer support team, store experience”.
The first step to turning your business into a respected brand is to find the “best branding agency” in your country or city to support your business in the transformation process, depending on the experience and skills of the agency team in this area, as well as related experience in:
- Plan, create, launch and manage offline and digital marketing campaigns.
- Plan, create, launch and manage offline advertising campaigns, including (TV and print ads).
- Plan, create, launch and manage digital advertising campaigns, including (social media advertising – search engine advertising – YouTube advertising).
- Multimedia production (graphic design and illustrations – high quality video – motion graphics video – professional photography).
- Schedule and manage branding events.
You can determine if it is an experienced branding agency or not by checking their portfolio from previous branding projects and official media production related social media accounts such as the official YouTube channel to find out how experienced and qualified the agency team is.
How can a branding agency help your business?
Hiring a professional branding agency is your top priority to develop strong brand equity and emotional attachment that continually increase your customer loyalty and your business’s market share.
Once you have chosen the best professional branding agency that provides cost-effective branding and rebranding services and solutions, you will need to cover the main steps and areas in your business branding processes and activities to achieve the desired results, namely:
- Determine the demographics and interests of the target audience of your business.
- Defining your brand’s core principles (values - brand messages – brand tone and voice – desired positioning and perception attributes).
- Defining a branding strategy (the right solutions for each step of the process – the right marketing and advertising channels for the target audience – the right metrics to measure the level of success).
- Design and create your brand’s visual identity (business logo – product packaging – official and promotional printed materials – e-campaign and signature design – your website and mobile app design – design templates for social media marketing campaigns).
- Plan and produce media content for advertising and marketing campaigns through selected appropriate channels.
- Plan and manage branding or rebranding events for your business (such as launching new products or new services).
- Maintaining your company values, professional attitude, appropriate tone and voice in all marketing or promotional activities (e.g. social media moderation).
- Evaluate and improve the branding process and performance based on current perceptions of the target audience and other business results, including sales and customer retention.
Transforming your business into a brand and developing sustainable brand equity into “higher conversions, market share and profits” will require a long-term commitment to the application and development of effective branding solutions and strategies designed and produced by a selected experienced marketing and branding agency.
