Brand building, the process by which a company creates or improves customers’ knowledge and opinions of a brand, is a strategic way for a company to build name recognition, increase consumer confidence and drive sales. It helps businesses create a unique identity, segment their audience and build a community of supporters. While your competition spends its energy increasing “likes” on Facebook, learn why branding or rebranding would be a more beneficial strategy.
Successful Brand Building in 3 Stages
1. Create a Unique Identity
Today, your brand’s identity is behind the eight ball if it doesn’t have a digital foothold. A unique domain address that ties into your business’ name is a necessity. A brand-specific web address offers more authority online.
A website gives your business credibility and helps it to reach more customers. Depending on your brand’s needs, your company could benefit from a one-page website, a multiple-page website, a payment gateway or other web design options.
The creation of a logo is a crucial step in brand building. The most effective logos are unique, memorable and true to the brand. If you decide to give your logo a facelift, keep it simple and functional, like Target or Twitter.
Once the website package is complete, email marketing is an effective way to inform all your contacts about your website’s launch.
2. Segment Your Audience
As you continue with branding or rebranding, focus on developing a target audience for your business. This will guide you through the inbound marketing process. While brand building, devote time to developing buyer’s personas. These fictional representations of your ideal customer will help direct your marketing strategy. For example, if your business’ ideal customer is a middle-income, retired man, Twitter advertising might not be for you.
3. Build a Community of Supporters
A new website is just the beginning. The site may be used as a springboard for launching a new marketing strategy that includes social media marketing, blogging, search engine optimization (SEO) and more.
Social media is now one of the most important vehicles for successful brand building. If your business doesn’t already have social pages, creating accounts on platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is a good starting point. Social media marketing will enable your business to broadcast updates to large online audiences of potential customers.
Blogging is an effective way to build an online community by continuously educating your target audience about products or services related to your company. Through a process called the buyer’s journey, visitors follow a natural progression as they become leads, then customers and later supporters.
As a way to bring in new audiences, a marketing strategy may also include online advertising options, like pay per click (PPC). PPC campaigns position your company’s website information on relevant search engine results pages (SERP). PPC ads target web searchers who may be in the consideration or decision stage of the buyer’s journey.
Finally, every business must focus on delivering its brand’s promise by offering great products and services. This builds customers trust, which leads to repeat customers and referrals. Building and sustaining a brand takes time, effort and dedication to sustaining the company’s mission, but this overall strategy is proven to contribute to a business’ financial health in today’s digital economy.
