Before we dive in, let’s first go over the business definitions of both branding and marketing.
Branding is the perception your business creates to relate with the public. Branding is the way in which your business positions itself in the public eye. Your brand consists of an easily recognizable identity and tangible elements that represent your business. A great brand uses this identity to create a relationship with it’s audience and maintains that relationship through social media interaction and content creation. Branding is the emotion and relatability of your business.
Marketing is the action of promoting and selling products or services. Marketing is your “Call to Action” for your audience. Simply put, marketing is the research of your target demographic and the advertising efforts of your products or services.
Branding Influences the Success of Marketing
Branding contributes to your success of your marketing efforts. It’s important to distinctly separate branding from marketing even though it influences your marketing efforts. They are not one in the same and that is the common misconception between the two. Marketing is a strategic umbrella for your business. Under this umbrella you have market analysis, targeted advertisements, communication, social networking, brand identity, call to action, etc. Marketing is your strategy to influence your audience to do something while branding is your strategy to influence your audience to feel something. If your audience doesn’t feel inspired to do something, then will they do it? The likelihood is probably not.
Marketing is Broad, Branding is Specific
You can’t point a finger at marketing and say, “Yep! That is marketing.” Marketing is more than we perceive and I believe that is why it gets confused as branding. While branding is a part of marketing, branding is not marketing as a whole. It is a piece of the marketing pie. Branding is specific to your business. As discussed prior, it is your identity, your interaction, your emotion, your presence with your audience. All of these things influence your marketing’s core purpose of getting your audience to do what you want them to do. Whether that is subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, or getting involved with your business; branding leads them to those decisions and makes it easier for your business to convert fans into consumers.
A Strong Brand Equals Easier Sales
With a strong brand identity you create trust. Your brand is essentially your relationship with all who interact with your business. By creating a strong brand identity, you will inevitably create trust. Trust between you and your audience is more important than the price tag they see. Fostering that relationship and care for your customer is far more important than coming in with 10 percent less price points on similar products than that of your competitors. People will likely buy into your relationship with them more than the price you give them. The great thing about your brand identity and presence is that you don’t have to necessarily speak to your customer first. By having strong branding through strategic marketing, you’ve already created a trustable relationship without even having to speak with the customer first. Getting your branding right seems like a no-brainer. With a strong brand you can shorten the sales cycle. By having a brand known and recognized within your market will lessen the time strain and communicative stress on your sales team by not having them explain what your company is about and why they should buy from you. If the brand is not strong, sales has to start at the bottom with every sales opportunity when this could be avoided by having most of the leg work done through branding efforts established through your marketing strategy.
Take Advantage of Engagement Opportunities with Your Brand
Branding should come first with your marketing strategy. Branding is how you get out in front of your competitors. Luckily branding doesn’t have to work in isolation. It creates engagement opportunities with your target audience.
Below is a list of ways to increase engagement and strengthen your brand:
- Construct a Beautiful Company Website. Your website should be easy to navigate, contain fresh content designed for your target audience, and have landing pages and conversion forms to help capture leads for sales.
- Produce Content. When your content is frequently new and current with your target audience, sales conversions are easier. Keeping your target audience continually educated and meeting their informational needs helps bolster your businesses reputation and trust with your audience.
- Use Advertising. Using targeted ads is a way to retroactively engage with your audience. By understanding your market, you can use it to your advantage to get ads placed in the eyes of potential customers. As a digital company, Bigfoot can use their products to promote themselves and their customers by sharing the finished products on social media and tagging their customers.
- Newsletters. Getting into your customers inboxes can be a huge way to consistently pop-up on your customers radar.
- Establish a Social Media Presence. Ignoring social media because it’s not a big lead generator can be a huge mistake to your brand. Social media is the ultimate way to keep your brand visible with the general public. Using social media to distribute content, participate in conversations, and establish your position as a market player is beyond effective to keeping your brand visible to customers and the overall market.
- Tradeshows. While tradeshows haven’t necessarily been a thing since the 2019 pandemic, they are slowly roaring back as we get back to normalcy. Exhibiting your business at an industry specific tradeshow is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility to the market.
A Strong Brand Produces a Stronger Business
Building a strong brand identity can be hard to navigate, but is definitely worth the time spent to build it. Its return for your business can be monumental. So when you start thinking about your marketing strategy in the early stages of your business, establishing your brand identity is a must. Once the brand is established, it makes it easier to use the other branches of marketing as you’ve created and established who you are as a business.