If you are a well-seasoned marketer, you probably already know the merits of effective branding. A strong brand can help your company connect with customers, make you more memorable, and have a massive impact on the bottom line. But if you’re just starting to develop a brand, you may need to start with the fundamentals.
So what are the basic fundamentals of marketing your brand effectively? This post outlines the basics and gives you some clear steps you can take to promoting a brand you can be proud of.
Develop a Consistent Look and Feel
The first step to promoting your brand is ensuring that you have a consistent brand. Consistency is king in the world of brand promotion, so a strong set of visual brand identity guidelines is important. Additionally, you’ll want to ensure that everyone who will be representing your brand can write with a consistent voice that is authentic to your brand.
Every brand touchpoint should feel the same to the customer. Here are some exercises you can do to test your brand’s consistency:
- Look at two products/product pages from your brand: What is similar about them? What’s different? Why do these differences exist? It’s important to make every single difference meaningful, so if you can’t explain why something is different, you should change it to make it more uniform.
- Read copy from a few different places: Does your website’s home page sound similar to your blog? What about your advertisements? Make sure your brand’s voice is consistent across all mediums.
- Go through your typical customer experience: Does the customer experience match your brand? If you claim to be a premium brand, do you provide a premium service to your customers? What’s great? What should improve?
Once you have a clear understanding of what you need to change in order to have a consistent, authentic brand, you can move into marketing that brand.
Build Templates For Easy Use
It doesn’t matter what kind of company you run, you will never have enough graphic designers to make everything you want to make from scratch. It’s important to build templates that can minimize the amount of time your design has to spend doing rudimentary tasks. You want to make sure you’ve got matching templates for the following items on hand:
- Collateral, including one-sheeters and brochures
- PowerPoint presentations, including standard and widescreen templates
- Microsoft Word letterhead
- Invoices and any other customer-facing document
- If inbound marketing is important to you, landing pages
Templates don’t need to be limited to visual templates, either! Strategic templates, such as a digital marketing strategy template, would be extremely effective at keeping your brand’s strategic approach consistent across channels.
Have a Plan
Finally, it’s important to approach everything you do for your brand with a plan. You don’t want to randomly try a dozen tactics just to see what works, you want to be strategic about everything you do so that your brand comes off as professional and dependable. Here are a few things to consider before launching a campaign to market your brand:
- What are my strategic goals?
- How do those goals align with others in the organization?
- What resources do I need to accomplish these goals?
- Do I need to hire a marketing agency?
- What potential roadblocks could stand in my way?
Once you’ve thoroughly considered these questions, you’re ready to build a strategy that will help you effectively market your brand.
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The post Branding Fundamentals: How to Market Your Brand More Effectively appeared first on Redwall.