If you have amazing products and services, but you’re still not seeing growth in your business, then you might need to reevaluate your marketing and branding efforts. Effective brand marketing can help you strengthen your brand and reach your target customers so you can make more sales, among other benefits. Keep on reading.
What is Brand Marketing?
As the term implies, brand marketing describes activities that focus on promoting a business’s brand. These marketing activities include but are not limited to:
- Building a strong brand identity
- Promoting brand awareness through various marketing channels (such as advertising, social media, and content marketing)
- Improving customer experience
- Measuring brand performance
There are different types of brand marketing, such as content marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing.
Regardless of the approach, the main goal of brand marketing is to always create a strong and positive brand image that not only your potential customers will be aware of, but have lasting connections with. 😉
By having a reputable brand that your customers trust and are loyal to, they are more likely to recommend you to others.
Trust is an important aspect of brand marketing because it helps you establish a credible and reputable brand in the market. According to a survey, trust is a “deciding factor” in making buying decisions.
How Do You Create a Brand Marketing Strategy?
A brand marketing strategy plays a critical role in achieving a strong, recognizable, and trusted brand. You can develop your strategy by following these tips:
1. Define your brand identity
Brand identity is the visual, verbal, and experiential elements that distinguish a company from its competitors. By defining your brand identity, consumers can better remember your brand.
To achieve a strong identity that makes you stand out, here are the steps you can take:
Identify your mission and vision
A company’s mission statement and vision statement aren’t just there to make a business look good. Remember that these are important components that give your business a purpose and long-term goal! 💪🏻
To help you understand these concepts better, let’s define the two:
- Mission: A mission statement states your brand’s purpose. You can put this into words if you answer the question, “Why does your brand exist?” 🤔For example, Google’s mission statement is "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." If you think about it, that’s exactly what they are doing. For this reason, you can easily find what you need on the search engine.
- Vision: On the other hand, a vision statement states where your brand is headed to and its long-term goals. To give you an idea, Tesla’s vision statement is, “To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world's transition to electric vehicles." This goal guides their activities, that’s why you’re seeing more and more Tesla vehicles nowadays.
Determine your unique value proposition
Unique Value Proposition (UVP), which is also often called Unique Selling Proposition (USP) explains the unique benefits that your brand, product, and service can offer.
Think about it like this: Why should your potential customers choose your brand over the competitors?
To establish your UVP, identify your brand’s unique strengths. This could be the features of your main product, your more affordable pricing point, or the quality of your service! Next, research what your target audience needs and relate that to your brand’s strengths.
For example, a coffee shop that sources and roasts coffee beans daily can serve coffee lovers who only want fresh coffee. They craft a UVP that reflects their brand identity: “The Freshest Brew In Town.” ☕
Develop your brand story
A brand story can help your company connect with your customers on a deeper level, which can help promote brand loyalty and advocacy. It communicates your brand’s values, history, mission, vision, and personality.
When crafting a brand story, it is helpful to use the elements of storytelling. This means that you need to have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Start by writing about your company’s origin and history, and finish the narrative with your vision for the future. Don’t forget to highlight important milestones and achievements in your journey.
🤓Pro Tip: Relate to your customers on a personal level by being authentic and genuine. Tell your brand story through your experiences and challenges!
2. Research your target audience
Knowing your target audience is an important step when it comes to marketing because it can help you craft the right strategy to effectively connect with them.
Just think about it. If you make your customers feel that your brand understands their needs, they are more likely to choose your products or services over competitors. This allows you to improve customer relationships and brand loyalty.
When researching your target market, look into the following information:
- Demographics: Gather information about age, gender, education, occupation, income, and geographic location through surveys, census reports, and social media insights.
- Psychographics: Understand your audience’s lifestyle, hobbies, interests, values, and beliefs through surveys or interviews.
- Behaviors: Analyze buying habits, media consumption, and online behavior through sales data and social media engagement.
- Pain Points: When you understand what your target audience is struggling with, you can offer them a product or service that provides real value.
- Purchase Intent: Assess the factors that affect your target audience’s buying process. This may include their level of interest, pricing (whether they find your price reasonable or not), their previous experience with your brand, and reviews/testimonials from other customers.
3. Choose the right marketing channels
Marketing channels are the different ways you can market your brand’s products and services. Note that many brands use a combination of channels to reach as many people as possible who are at different stages in the customer journey:
- Content marketing: Make blog posts, videos, and ebooks to reach your target audience online.
- Email marketing: Send targeted newsletters and promotions to an email subscriber list. Check out this blog post where we discuss email marketing for small businesses.
- Direct sales: Sell products and services directly to customers through physical stores, sales representatives, or company-owned websites.
- Retail stores: Distribute products and services through supermarkets, shops, and department stores.
- Social media marketing: Partner with social media influencers to promote products on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
- Affiliate marketing: Work with affiliates who earn a commission for driving sales or leads through their websites or other marketing efforts.
Choosing the right channel increases your chances of connecting with your target market.
You can also tap into your existing customers to learn which channels are effective! For example, you can run a survey to identify how or where they discovered your brand and what influenced them to purchase.
4. Plan your content strategy
A clear content strategy will help you establish your brand identity. Moreover, it will help increase brand awareness and drive sales and conversions. Content is also key to establishing brand loyalty. In fact, in many cases, content marketing is considered more cost-effective compared to traditional advertising.
There are different content formats that you can choose from. Here are some popular options:
- Blog posts: Blog posts are articles that you can publish on your blog or website. You can cover topics that are relevant to your target market, which can help you improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
- Videos: Videos can take the form of vlogs, product demos, or tutorials. These are beneficial if your target market includes visual and auditory learners.
- Podcasts: This type of audio content is accessible to customers that are on the go. You can build a connection with them as the host of the podcast while positioning your brand as the expert.
- Social media posts: Social media pages can help you build a community among your customers. You can post different kinds of content. For example, you share informative content and even real-time updates and announcements to keep them in the loop.
🤓 Pro Tip: You can encourage engagement through interactive content such as surveys, giveaways, and contests. This brings us to our next point: referral marketing.
5. Implement referral marketing
Referral marketing is a strategy that relies on word-of-mouth recommendations to promote a business and ultimately gain more customers. To motivate your existing customers or brand advocates to refer others, offer incentives. These rewards can be in the form of a discount, gift card, cash rewards, or enticing offers. 🎁
Here are the reasons referral marketing effectively works for brand marketing:
- Highly credible: Existing customers who trust your brand are more likely to recommend it to their family and friends. Since it is a personal recommendation, it is more credible compared to traditional advertising.
- Brand awareness: Referral marketing can help you make your brand known to a wider audience.
- Cost-effective: Let’s face it, traditional advertising methods can be expensive. With referral marketing, brand advocates will promote your brand to their networks, so, at the end of the day, you spend less on your marketing campaigns.
So, how do you implement referral marketing? You’ve come to the right place because here at UpViral, you may see significant results in one month (or even less than a month) as long as you do your campaigns right. 🔥
Referral marketing case study: Silvia Llop’s UpViral Campaign
Let’s take a look at Silvia Llop’s UpViral Campaign as a brand marketing example. As a psychologist and love and relationship specialist, Silvia wanted to grow her subscriber base efficiently.
Her first UpViral campaign resulted in 2395 direct leads and 2934 referral leads.
How did she achieve these results? Silvia’s strategy was to run a campaign to her existing email list. Since these people were already familiar with her, they didn’t hesitate to recommend her to their friends.
Silvia rewarded five sign-ups with a special PDF, and other prizes were given to participants who got ten, 50, and 100 referrals. A grand prize — which was time with her in Spain where the winner gets to have a chat with her about life and love — was also available for the participant who had the most shares.
Check out the screenshot below showing her campaign:
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6. Regularly visit and refine your brand marketing strategy
Last but not least, always evaluate your current brand marketing strategy to find out what’s working and what’s not. This would mean having to revisit certain aspects like:
- Industry trends
- The needs of your target audience
- The effectiveness of your marketing channels
- Your content, whether it’s still relevant or already needs updating
Consumer behaviors can change quickly, and your competitors are also doing their best to get noticed. The most important thing is to continuously monitor your progress and revise your strategy as needed to meet your goals.
Final Thoughts
As a business owner, you need to understand the importance of brand marketing. When done properly, you can create strong brand recognition, gain trust and credibility with your audience, foster customer loyalty, and attract new customers! 🙌🏻
There are numerous ways you can promote your business, but if you’re looking for a reliable option, check out UpViral! Run sweepstakes, giveaways, and viral waiting lists with ease. See our examples right here!
