In the contemporary business environment, branding and marketing has become important factors that aid in expansion, gaining more attention, and establishing an emotional bond with customers. A sound branding proposition gives direction to a marketing campaign that is able to attract and engage the target market in a diffèrent and unique way against other competing brands. But what is strategic branding and marketing and how can it assist business to the fullest?
Strategic branding and marketing entails more than just designing a tagline or placing commercials on air; it involves developing an integrated strategy that touches every aspect of your market, meets their wants, and explains what your business is all about. It begins with a thorough understanding of your business, which is why every relationship starts with the discovery phase. After that, businesses can start improving their brand, defining their mission, strategy, corresponding marketing channels, and importantly leads who buy their product.
In this blog post, we will dive into how both strategic branding and marketing are crucial to ensuring that a business starts from the ground upwards. We will list the different processes of coming up with your brand, various marketing strategies that are effective on the brand, and lastly how you make it work for your business.
To begin with, a strategic branding and marketing framework is quintessential for the growth of the brand. They summarize the growth strategy, enhance direction, and define the measurable outcome. As marketing focuses on building the core brand and engaging the target audience in various brand related activities, strategic branding on the other hand focuses on how to position the brand in the market long term.
The first step in the process of Strategic Branding and Marketing is the Discovery Phase. The discovery phase forms an integral part of any branding or marketing campaign as it ensures that a business understands its vision, objectives, key performance indicators and market positioning clearly. When the business objectives, vision and mission, and selling proposition analysis are performed, it is easier to determine corresponding strategies and tactics that suit the business.
This phase is where we establish the needs and requirements of your business. During this phase, we analyze key elements such as your company’s goals, target audience, competitors, and existing brand assets. It is important to understand these elements because they ensure the next steps in strategic branding or marketing are relevant and meet business requirements.
Starting with outlining your vision and definition of your business with you, together we set the course towards establishment of distinct brand identity in the marketplace. Analysis of the competitors gives us the already inhabiting resources in your sector as well as other niche opportunities. Further, researching the customer problems and needs assure that your marketing communication will target the right context.
Taking into account the information we received about your company, we then proceed to developing the framework that best suits your business model. Hence, we make sure that every detail valued under your brand and every marketing measure put out is geared towards achievement of the set targets.
The concept of corporate identity is a visual image of the brand and is also a Kap Jones which depicts all the constraints and symbols of a brand, message, values, and language attributed to your company. A clearly defined corporate identity is an important part of the branding that provides cohesion in all messages and therefore enhances recognition and attachment to the brand offered.
A very pivotal part of the identity embodies the logo. The logo introduces the business to the world as it is used extensively in advertisements. A good logo design is about simplicity and effectiveness and should be adaptable to various conditions, and largely denotes business ideas.
In addition to your company logo, you will also require a brand manual detailing the rules governing the use of your visual elements, colors, typography and tone. These guidelines are meant to control how your branding appears such as on your website or other social media platforms, printish materials, advertisements and the like. This uniformity creates trust which is central in building a good rapport with your audience.
Now that your corporate identity is in place, it’s time to start working on the planning and ideation of your marketing strategy. This focuses on the selection of measurable targets and the decisions that best fit these targets. This is where strategic branding and marketing begins. Proper planning enables the integration of all marketing activities with the entire business activities.
Planning cannot be complete without an in-depth understanding of the market and the processes involved in it. This gives insights on your audience’s preferences, behaviors and pain points. Additionally, it allows you to understand what is happening in the market such as industry dynamics, the strategies used by competitors and gaps within the market. This information facilitates the identification of the gaps and secondly the reengineering of the process to suit the customers.
Once background information is collected, the next step is setting specific goals which will help in focus of all sales and marketing activities. These goals will work as yardsticks that tell how successful the initiatives have been. Some general objectives set up by corporations are increasing brand awareness, number of leads obtained, conversion rates and number of retained customers. Whatever your specific goals may be, they must resonate with your wider business goals.
This is the stage where imagination takes over, as ideas begin to flow for product launches and advertising campaigns and their promotion. Each of these ideas should be in accordance with the brand persona and the audience that is to be captured. The emphasis during the second phase of the creative process is on the methods that advertisers will use to draw interest towards them and accomplish their goals – be it social media, video marketing, or tapping into influencers.
Everything has to go as per the written plan, but it is also important to know how effective the marketing strategy has been and if it did what it was intended to do. This is where the KPI mapping comes in. Key Performance Indicators are detailed metrics that show how successful one’s marketing campaigns have turned out to be. It may be the number of visitors to a website or the number of leads converted, or the level of activities on social media that give clues on the performance of one or other strategies.
From your preceding analyses and appraisal of your organization, KPI Mapping should be self explanatory. Because the strategy fails to withstand the business rationale and motivation, the enterprise informs and establishes which metrics are the most significant for its operations and in achieving given targets. Case in point, should your aim be to bring more people to your website, the key performance indicator’s (KPI) achievement could be the increased number of visitors to your site. If your orientation is towards lead generation, then leads captured through filling of forms or calls to action would be the KPIs that are relevant. So we are looking at charts, and using it as a yardstick in determining the course of a marketing strategy.
Even understanding the business case will provide you with the justification for the different marketing initiatives, and the budget that you put in. All of them would be placed in the investment perspective ro justify the marketing campaign, so with each marketing activity, the business case provides the insight of looking at it from an ROI perspective. Building every detailed business case of every marketing initiative would allow you to plan your marketing activity spending to the BRL by ensuring its meeting your business objectives and marketing activities increases value for the business.
Brand visibility is today one of the more popular hot commodities, once traffic to your website there are maximum chances for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to be applied successfully. Marketing and advertising these days are ever more designed to generate leads and bring in mass conversion through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay Per Click (PPC).
In today’s world having an online presence has become more of a necessity than a luxury. Search Engine Optimization has become a vital factor in increasing your business’s exposure and attracting prospective clients. Customers using google often tend to make purchase decisions based on the options that appear first on the search query. Considering the importance of organic search results, it is crucial for businesses to implement an SEO strategy that integrates on-page as well as off-page and technical aspects for faster operational efficiencies and longer lasting effects. Through effective link building and using as many keywords as possible along with optimizing your site you can increase your site ranking heavily.
Online visibility can be increased by using Search Engine Marketing as it appears when the consumer is already looking for a solution to a problem. Advertising your business based on relevant keywords helps you attract users who are already looking for your business’s offerings. This helps lower the customer acquisition cost as you only attract customers who are more likely to make a purchase decision while maximizing your business’s reach.
PPC is an advertisement model that allows advertisers to pay only when their ads are clicked. PPC advertising for platforms such as Google Ads and social networks enables advertisers to reach specific age, location, interests, and behavioral attributes. The use of SEO and SEM along with PPC can achieve instant results in PPC while also providing good targeted traffic.
The main purpose of strategic brand marketing and all activities around it was to take the prospects and convert them to paying customers. Lead generation is where businesses begin collecting interest from prospective clients intending to convert them into sales in the long run. Good lead generation strategies include content, emails, and social media.
Engaging an audience and generating leads can be made possible due to the creation and dissemination of valuable content that is relevant to the target market through advertisements, webinars, ebooks, etc. Through blogs, videos, case studies, and whitepapers, you can attract potential customers and build relationships with them over time. You can provide free help that is relevant to their interests in the form of multimedia resources; through it educating them when necessary and allowing them to nurture them until the time when they need to make purchasing decisions.
Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies for transforming leads into purchases. Emailing customers along with the offer they are targeting, with updates and other relevant information helps to keep the customer in touch with the leads on a regular basis. By means of email marketing, leaving a relationship with prospects is not an option but rather, a prospect is guided through the sales funnel until their need is fulfilled by the offerings resulting in the prospect becoming a customer.
Generating discussions and connecting with media audiences or other possible leads is also very well facilitated through social media. Posting useful content, advertising to target audiences, and responding to followers enable a lead to build up a fan base that can be interested in what the lead offers. Customers can also be directly contacted through social media, assisting in providing customers with confidence and making them more likely to purchase.
Last but not least, it is important to note that having a business strategy around branding and marketing helps in establishing a permanent business or an ‘empire’. Business goals include many phases that turn an idea into reality: beginning from the discovery of a business concept, creating a visual aspect of a business and the strategy for it, then coming up with tactics on how to make the business work. Emphasis on KPI figures, enhancing marketing and advertising on the web, as well as controlling new business strategies can be a way to performance growth in a given market.
When a business has proper branding and marketing strategies in place, it’s not just able to exist but excel in the face of so much competition in the digital evolution of the world. Are you excited to get started? Let’s collaborate to set the foundation of the glory that is yet to come for your brand!
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