What is brand marketing?
Brand marketing is the concept that, as an entrepreneur, you should create marketing campaigns that match your brand presence and meet brand standards. Your brand is the personality of your business. It should reflect your values, interests, goals and other unique qualities that set you apart from the competition. Brand marketing communicates that to your audience through campaigns that are designed to match your branding and convey essential information to potential customers.
Early adopters of brand marketing would attempt to create a brand presence by slapping a logo on any letterhead, advertisement, keychain or coaster that might get them in front of their customer. In 2020, brand marketing is much more sophisticated. While keeping your logo in the spotlight is still important, brand marketing extends beyond just the aesthetic presence of your brand and revolves around content.
It makes sense because content gives your brand a voice. You choose the topics that are important to your brand and the medium in which they are conveyed, and those campaigns make up the brand ecosystem that’s exposed to your customers.
Benefits of brand marketing
When you successfully convey your brand to your target market, your brand benefits. Here’s how:
- Customer retention: Branding helps your customers understand your brand and that builds trust and loyalty. When your customers see themselves in your brand, you connect with your customer in a meaningful way that promotes loyalty.
- Brand recognition: A recognizable brand practically sells itself. Take Apple as an example. Almost everyone recognizes the Apple logo and can tell you what it stands for. When a customer decides to upgrade to new technology, their recognition of the Apple brand may make them more likely to choose the company they see as a recognizable leader in the industry.
- Competitive differentiation: When you create a strong brand and market it to your consumer base, you use campaigns to tell your brand story. Your brand story is the narrative that differentiates you from the competition. Why is someone going to buy from you and not your competitor? The answer is your unique brand.
How to create a brand awareness campaign
A brand awareness campaign is one intended to expose your brand messaging to your target market. To create a brand awareness campaign follow these steps:
- Know your target audience: When you know who you are trying to appeal to it’s easier to determine in what ways your target market aligns with the core values of your brand. This determination should affect your messaging.
- Discover their online footprint: This is the fun part where you discover where your customers are hanging out online. From that, you can not only determine where to spend your brand marketing budget but also what kind of content your customers are interested in.
- Stick to a budget: With an idea of where to place your digital ads, you can determine how to spend your budget.
- Determine metrics for success: Your metrics tell you how what success looks like for your campaign. Set metrics at the start of the campaign. Some metrics might be user engagement with your ad, click-throughs, downloads, email sign-ups or conversion rates.
- Craft your brand message: Now, this is the important part. You need to craft a message that’s consistent with your brand. To do this, think about how your brand uniquely delivers on what your customers expect.
- Analyze results: Once you have launched the campaign, wait for the results to come in and analyze them against key performance indicator metrics.
Branding is an important part of your entrepreneurial image—and speaking of image, you can’t craft a brand as a Florida business without excellent brand photography. Learn more about how Kristina Maness Photography can serve your brand when you sign up for a branding session consultation today.