Why Branding Is Vital in Your Marketing Campaigns
April 23rd, 2019 by
Branding and marketing are terms often associated with each other. Though they’re not synonymous, they should be harmonious. Your brand is what you market. The colors, logos, voice, tone, and so much more dictate how you should market your products or services and ultimately show the world (or a tiny segment of it) exactly who you are.
But wait a moment…what does that even mean?
Let’s break it down with Merriam-Webster:
As a New Orleans native, I like to think of a brand as the roux of a delicious marketing gumbo. Your branding, much like the roux, is the foundation and soul you put into your overall marketing campaigns. Without it, you’re simply not going to get the results you were hoping for.
Your branding encompasses who you are as a company and what your customers see. Your culture, core principles, values, and ideas are the foundation of your brand, along with the way you present your company visually. An effective marketing plan will take who you are as a company and personify that as a character who is able to interact and relate to your customers. While your campaigns will have many objectives and goals, the overall structure, tone, and theme of these efforts should be consistent and more importantly, recognizable.
So with that being said, what makes your company unique? What truly sets you apart, or how do you want to set yourself apart from the competition? Your brand is your company personified, so get creative! You may be incredibly focused on your commitment to quality, customer service, or your community. Customer loyalty may be an issue you need to improve, so build your brand around that key metric. While a marketing plan can exist separately from your values, the most successful campaigns will include your key strengths in the eyes of your current customers and broadcast them to your potential target base.
So We Got Branding Down…What Next?
The connection between your brand and your marketing lies within the confines of what will have the biggest impact on the most important part of any campaign:
Conversions!
Getting potential customers to take action and engage with your business is critical. Marketing plans based on Google keywords and Facebook data alone won’t pack the punch needed to grab the attention of a market that is perpetually bombarded with the messaging of your competitors. Simply put, thoughtful and effective branding helps produce engaging content. In a world where the average consumer reads 11.4 pieces of content before making a decision, content reigns supreme in this crazy, competitive battle for attention.
When your branding is developed and reinforced over time, you can use this foundation to create content that educates customers about your products or services, differentiates you from competitors, and influences your perceived value in the eyes of your customers. This brand-rich content should be utilized in every holistic approach of the digital marketing campaigns you create. (Or we create for you!)
Don’t Stop Now!
You got the brand down, and people are converting, but you can’t stop there. This is an ongoing, endless ride, my friend. Between the continual upkeep of your search engine optimization, email marketing, content marketing, social media, and paid advertising, branding never stops! Your customers are hungry for more information from you, so it’s time to put on your thinking cap and start a blog. You can use blogs to demonstrate your industry expertise and meaningfully connect with your audience. It can also help establish your company’s authority in the eyes of search engines to increase your rankings in search results.
The combined efforts of your marketing and branding can create a powerful message to the customers that you already have the ones you need to target to keep growing. A comprehensive marketing plan will bring in new business, while your branding and customer service will ensure their satisfaction and loyalty.
Interested in learning more about how your brand is perceived online and how to build a successful campaign around it? Start a conversation with us today! As you can see, we’ve been doing this for a while…
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Now, I understand why my chief always used to stress on the branding of our company. He would always have a clear idea in his mind on how to brand our company in our customer’s mind. He also made it mandatory for all our team members to follow that idea.
Thanks for writing this wonderful piece of article on branding stressing it’s importance in marketing.
this is a great post for beginners who want to know the difference between branding and marketing and how the two combined can help build a brand. So thanks Shawn for sharing this! really informative