If there ever was an oversight that cripple or severely slow the progress of any business’s success it would be losing your way with your branding - for example, check out this law firm and their excellent branding - for an example of excellent branding, check out this law firm
Having a consistent branding strategy that falls in line with the time, effort and investment put into a business’s brand identity in today’s competitive business environments is the one factor that will make or break the company’s growth.
It is surprising to see just how many companies are getting along just well enough to survive and get paid enough to tick over for another year. Many of these businesses do very little to create a solid brand reputation that passes on the kind of word of mouth that gets people’s attention. The kind of attention that spells value for money – that means quality printing and design, interactive online media and systems in place that allow you to connect with your customer base on order to give them a chance to see what kind of added value you offer and for your customers to understand exactly what your business is all about.
Why branding is important?
Whether your _prices or target market are targeting high end or low end price/profit segments the one selling point that is vitally important is your brand image. You could be selling penny sweets and the reason everyone comes to your shop to get their fill and satisfy their sweet tooth rather than visit the large chain stores’ pic ‘n’ mix sections is because your shop offers a more personal services. For example, this Dating Single website have branded their site to focus on their target market, which is finding love in Switzerland via legitimate dating services.
You could be selling cheap ink cartridges and every one uses your service because your website has been designed with totally user friendly web pages. The site is easy to make orders from and the ink cartridges are send out within a moment’s notice.
Of you could be Apple – a company that sells a quality, fashionable and durable range of electronics known for innovation. A company that manages to sell its non-generic product with expensive add-on bundles – Apple’s brand image is well thought out that they have a loyal following of Apple fanatics willing to fork out a large investment just to own an Apple product.
Branding encourages brand loyalty and repeat sales
Just a little bit effort on your branding could last for years. Imagine investing in a nice logo that really stands out. This will then stick for years – it will be on your letter heads, business card, and stationary. For many contracting and commercial firms the logo will also be on their vehicles and shop fronts.
It is the effort in the basic branding concepts that should be concentrated on initially. In today’s day and age your web presence is more important than ever. Before a website was enough, but nowadays that website needs to not only stand out from the rest but it will also need to be optimized for mobile devices.
Branding Via Digital Marketing and SEO
See Big Bangly Guide to Auckland SEO for some of the best SEO analysis we have seen so far.
When your web presence is so important to your business, you need to think about not just your website, but also how easily found your business is online. If you can build a brand image online, then you could double or even treble your income.
One of the problems many companies are finding with their digital marketing campaigns today is the fierce completion in areas such as pay per click marketing and SEO. Many of the keywords that relate to their business have already had thousands of dollars spent on their SEO, however, even if some keywords do have a low search volume they usually come with very little invested needed to rank on page one of search engine results. With this kind of SEO tactic you still have a chance to gain some kind of web presence and as you keep building up those keywords soon you will be attracting very reasonable amounts of traffic.
Targeting keywords that won’t exactly get you sales is also very good branding. It gets your name out there in the industry and these type of keywords can often attract those on the early stages of buyer behavior model. This is the stage whereby these people are thinking about buying your product but they are looking for more information before taking the jump and committing to a purchase.
If your website is consistently turning up in these purely informational keyword searches, then you are effectively getting your brand name out there. However, you are probably thinking that this could be very difficult when you are up against global competition, but then again if it is a global search, then you are likely to be able to target a keyword with low competition and expose your website to possibly tens of thousands of people searching that key word.
For example, if you target the keyword ‘marketing’, this keyword has tens of thousands of searches per month and very low competition. You could rank on page one of Google and plenty of people will click through to your target landing page. Now with the keyword ‘marketing’ you are going to get a lot of university students, copy writers and people looking for information on how marketing works. Then again, just 1% could be looking for marketing services or be persuaded by hour awesome content and web page to look into signing up for your services.
Even if people just book mark your website and return to visit your page, this will improve your website’s Alexa rankings, traffic count and help to boost your rankings because your website is popular. Also, with so many people visiting your website, you may have angle to sell advertising space or add Google AdSense Ads, which are the display ads used with Google AdWords.
On the other hand, if you target keywords with low search volumes for more localized services or information, you are building up local brand recognition. You may be a company that sells dog collars or pet products. You may target a keyword that says ‘where to walk your dog in London’. Now even though this is not a keyword related to getting you direct sales it is related to pets and people will begin to recognize your brand name – especially if your store has a good local physical presence.
What we mean about physical local presence is your brand’s logo is seen regularly – maybe on vans, company attire, stationary or even having a shop in a prevalent location on the local high street that people will see often and associate it back to the logo they saw on the internet when they read about dog walking. They may even decide to come on and buy one of your dog collars or leads.
SEO Branding – the chance to gain word of mouth
Basically branding with SEO is better than you think. A keyword with 20 searches per month may bring you 2 visitors a month, which equates to 24 visitors per year. If just 2 people purchase from you, this will make up the investment you spent and some.
Word of Mouth
Once just one person purchases your product or service, that person has now bought into your business. Marketing research says that on average one person will tell at least another 10 people about your product or service. Those 10 people will tell at least another 10 people and so on. This means just from a very low search volume keyword, your website sales or local business sales if you sourced the customer through local SEO will have gained at least 5 sales a year from a keyword that cost $30 to $100 to rank.
Add another 10 similar keywords and your sales should increase dramatically while your competitors are scratching their heads wondering how you do it unsuspecting of the fact that you took the jump to target low search volume keywords that are being completely overlooked – an awesome secret that keeps your business growing.
Social Media Marketing and Branding
The gold mine of branding is social media. It may not seem like your business can gain a lot from social media marketing but in actual fact it is your Facebook page or Google+ pages that will give your customers a place to connect interactively with your business.
Social Media has so many different purposes.
- It captures a huge mobile market
- It allows people to comfortably message you
- New blogs, newsletters and PR activities can easily be advertised
- Those that like your page will effectively be endorsing your product
- You can speak with customers using interactions via post comments
- Videos can easily be posted on YouTube and linked to Facebook, Twitter, Google+
The list of advantages to social media is a lot more extensive than this and it is also a great way to get your logo recognized so when people see that logo, they know exactly what it stands for.
Managing Your Finances in Line with Branding
We all know that creating a brand takes time, effort and money. It is tough to free up finances in order to promote your brand and it can also be a headache finding reliable resources that can help with your brand building activities. However, slowly but surely is better than not at all.
If you spare even a hundred dollars a month to build your brand then that’s $1,200 a year. The monthly payment may not sound much, but for $1,200 over a year think what you could get. Multiply that by 5 years and you will have spent enough to at least build some kind of branding that helps your business stand out from the competition.
Other points to consider are the cost of social media marketing. Either you make tome for your customers in order to interact with them over Social Media or you hire someone to do this. It really depends on the nature of your business and whether it is more valuable for you to spend your time and expertise on your products and service; while in the meantime, you hire an expert to look after your social media.