It is well known that every company wants its product to be sold and recognized and hence in the process of doing so these companies try to create such strong brands that can be acknowledged, loved, and preferred out of a long queue of options. This creation of a strong brand will help the business to be favored, admired, and remembered. In this article, we will talk about the notion of branding, which helps a beginner to know what is branding.
What Is A Brand?
Before plunging into branding and its benefits let’s go back to the core: What is a brand?
A brand is simply the name given to the product, idea or service having a unique design, symbol or logo, character, brand voice, or tagline. It is the overall personality of the business that distinguishes one organization from another.
What Is Branding?
Branding is the process of generating a unique and non-generic name, logo and/or design for the organization that distinguishes one company from another in order to let consumers identify your brand with your services or products.
In today’s world branding is more compound and even more important as it is a constant process of getting in touch with your customers and your venture.
Reasons And Benefits Of Branding:
Here are some reasons why branding is beneficial for small-scale businesses:
- Improves Recognition: Logo is a very important part of the brand. A logo should be simple to memorize but at the same time, should leave a powerful impression of your company.
- Builds Financial Value: Branding helps in Increasing your financial value because a reputable brand always provides you a secure business future. If the brand value of a company is very high, then it definitely receives better financial returns.
- Inspires Your Employee: if you have a very strong brand value, then your employees definitely understand the mission of your business and this encourages them to give 100% in their work so that your company can grow at a rapid pace.
Common Misconceptions About Branding:
Well there have always been a lot of discussions regarding branding and marketing, often people tend to mix the meaning of these two words with each other and that is one of the most common misconceptions about branding. Here’s a list of some common misconceptions that many businesses and brand strategist make:
Misconception 1: Branding Is Identical To Marketing Or Advertising.
As mentioned above, this is a misconception since a lot of people think that branding is the same as marketing campaigns or advertisements.
These things are interconnected but they are not the same. Advertising is generally a way by which businesses try to promote their products and services in the market. Marketing is the whole concept that promotes the buying or selling of a product or service, including market research and advertising while branding is about the ideology of the business in which we look at things like voice, mission, visual elements.
Misconception 2: Branding Is Just About A Company’s Logo.
As a matter of fact, a brand is so much more than a logo and a name. Branding has grown to comprise a lot of components that are used to identify the company and the brand statement.
Logo or name is a very small element of the company’s overall branding. The logo is just a symbol that represents a company, but the brand encircles many more layers of the company.
Misconception 3: When We Talk About Branding, Success Has A Blueprint.
Many marketing professionals think that if everything in the online market can be measured then everything has a formula but the truth is that there is no formula as such, though you can measure the success of your brand by keeping in mind the behavior and interest of your target customers.
As no two organizations are similar. In the process of developing a brand similar things may work for businesses in the same department but they are still going to have their own uncommon identities and needs.
Misconception 4: Branding Is Too Costly.
Branding doesn’t need loads of effort. Branding is used to build the personality of your company.
Branding makes the customer choose what you offer rather than what somebody else is offering and that’s how in the long run it will help you make more money. Establishing or reviving a brand could just be a subject matter of doing a lot of things in a new and finer way.
5 Things About Branding That Everyone Must Know:
1. Being Consistent Is The Key
Consistency is one of the most important traits for any business to become successful. Without consistency organizations never have the chance to develop into unceasing brands. Consistency builds trust and in the long term, it drives tremendous profits. The audience is going to stick to your brand if you promise to deliver them the same metaphors and the same message again and again and try to build awareness and loyalty with customers.
2. Try To Frame Your Own Market
For making your brand visible in the eyes of a valuable number of customers, you need to frame or create your own market and that is how you can guarantee your success. Just try to have a look at the markets that are undervalued and think of launching something different for the customers and analyze it, and then at that point rapidly get to the work.
3. Stay Attentive Towards Small Items
It is important to stay attentive towards every stuff that relates to your business but sometimes we tend to ignore small stuff which is of great help and as it is said often the best ideas are simple. Try to construct easy ways to get customers on the same page about your brand. When you make an effort for small stuff then a lot of times it automatically leads to taking care of big stuff.
4. First Know Yourself, Know Your Brand
Start by questioning yourself as to why you want to build a product? If the answer to this question is to change the lives of the people and to bring them to ease then you are on the right track because this is how many companies have started their branding journey of building their prominent product. Get customers involved in understanding the purpose that is why you exist. Try to keep your conversation positive and focus on brand values.
5. Restyle Your Brand
Sometimes confusion arises among customers regarding two products of the same brand because multiple product lines can cause problems for a brand mainly in the case where the brand name and the product name aren’t lined up. Hence, to avoid this confusion just start from the top down again and ask yourself why you want to build the brand and then start building products underneath that. Hence, don’t be afraid to restyle as it helps to end brand confusion.
Strategies For Online Branding:
Online branding helps your business to connect with the customers in the digital spaces where they spend time. By branding your business online you will get more hype for your brand on all levels of online marketing like search and social.
Here are some online branding strategies you can start applying now:
1. Begin With A Blog
Starting a blog can be beneficial for brands for it helps in brand visibility and improves your chances of success. Blogging is an efficient way to improve your brand visibility online, it improves your search engine rank and helps to develop relationships with customers and other influencers.
If you share informative blogs about your organizations, you are likely to get much more traffic and social shares, you just have to be honest with yourself about your brand’s value.
2. Stay Consistent With Branding
As mentioned in the previous topic, being consistent is the key to success. It is very essential to portray a consistent branding strategy across all online mediums. This helps in brand recognition. There are many ways a business can use to reach out to customers. For example, using a website, social networks like twitter profiles, etc, blogs, and more.
3. Getting Involved With Your Audience
If you want to build a brand that stays with customers for a longer time then you will have to engage yourself with your followers, subscribers, or fans. In doing so it is important to have an active account on which you can post a lot of updates about your brand. Your brand is derived from who you are so it is important to interact with your audience actively in order to tell them about your brand and products and services. In order to engage socially for your brand, you can use Twitter Engagement, Linkedin Engagement, etc.
How To Use SEO For Branding:
SEO is an ongoing practice that helps you to increase the rank of your websites on web search engines. Here, we will talk about how to use SEO for branding:
- Use Attractive Headlines: According to the famous copy bloggers, if there are 100 visitors visiting your website, then approx 80 users read heading only and rest read the whole text, so it is very important to make attractive headlines. The attractive headlines also give a brief idea about your content. You can use these tools to make attractive headlines.
A.) Content Idea Generator by portent.
B.) HubSpot Blog Topic Generator.
- Use Trendy Keyword Phrases: Use of right keywords is very important for the SEO performance of your site.
With the help of keywords search engines collect the information about your content, when anyone searches the query that is related to your content then the search engine displays your website on its web page.
If you are a beginner, then it is very difficult to rank your site for competitive keywords, so you can use long-tail keywords, they are less competitive and you can rank your website for these keywords.
- Build links for your website: There are many types of links that you can use to increase the traffic on your website.
- Natural Links
- External Links
- Manually Obtained Links
- Internal Links
- Self-Created Links
With the help of these links, crawlers can crawl your page easily and collect whole information about your content. And this is the fact that if your website shows every time in the search result whenever the user asks the query related to your content, then your brand awareness and brand value automatically increases.
Steps To Implement Successful branding campaign:
- Keep Your Budget In Mind: This is very important that you have to know about your budget before spending. If you have less budget than you can show your creativity here, you can show your ads only to your targeted audience, so that you can easily get a genuine visitor at your website. You can make business accounts on social media apps and then find your targeted audience and then try to get the organic traffic from these platforms. You can easily generate handsome traffic with very less investment.
- You Should Know About Your Targeted Audience: This point is very important. About 60% of the brand campaigns are failed because they do not know which is their targeted audience and which is not.
If your content is delivered to the right audience, then 40% of your work is automatically completed, if you reach that audience who is in need of your services then from here you can get a potential visitor and customer for your website.
- Check Your Outcomes Regularly: Checking your outcomes regularly is a good practice, because if you do not receive a calculated output from your current branding campaign then you can easily make any necessary changes in your branding campaign that are very essential to increase your brand awareness towards your targeted audience.
- Choose The Right Platform For Branding: This is very important, you have to find that platform from which you receive the maximum traffic for your website because it means that your audience is active on that platform. If it is Facebook? Then place your ads there. And make sure that you do not advertise your product on every social media platform, for example, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc because here you are trying to reach those people who are not your audience.
Case Study:
In this section, we will talk about Simmons & co. who improves its branding to increase the traffic on its website.
Simmons & co is one of the largest investment banks in the energy industry. To start things off, they designed a simple and creative logo. Then they made a strategy on how to improve their branding strategies. The most important thing they found is that they need to make a strong bond with those people whom they give their services to.
To do this, they took numerous online surveys and interviews of those people who were using their products and asked them how it could be improved. They wrote down the suggestions and made improvements to their website and services.
This helped them improve their customer satisfaction and using these feedbacks and branding techniques, within a span of 3-4 months, they were able to increase traffic on their website.
Summary:
Branding is the process of generating, researching a unique and non-generic name, logo, or design for the organization that distinguishes one company, product from another in order to let consumers identify your brand with your services or products.
Branding improves recognition, inspires your employees, and also builds financial value. Before knowing about branding, you must have knowledge about these points.
- Consistency is the key to branding.
- Try to make your own market.
- Stay attentive towards small items.
- First, know yourself, and then know about your brand.
- Make the necessary changes to your brand.
We also talked about the best strategies for online branding:
- Begin with a blog
- Stay consistent with branding.
- Stay connected with your audience.
We also talked about the steps to implement successful campaigns.
- Keep your budget in mind.
- You should know about your targeted audience.
- Check your outcomes regularly.
- Choose the right platform for branding.
We also discussed a case study of Simmons & co with the help of which you can understand the power of branding.
I hope that with the help of this summary, you will get a brief idea about branding, to know about the details of branding you can read the article thoroughly.
Conclusion:
In this article, we discussed branding and the benefits of branding, we also discussed the important things you should know about branding and how to use SEO for branding, we also talked about the case study of Simmons & co which improved their branding to increase traffic on their website. So what are you waiting for? Go and try these ways to improve your branding and increase the traffic on your website with the help of branding.