social media marketing

Brand Identity

Develop Your Brand Identity With These Five Steps

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What is Brand Identity?

Brand identity is what draws customers to you, what keeps customers coming back, what inspires them to stick with you if things go wrong and what can drive you to grow and improve your company. You can establish your own brand identity with these five key steps!

 

How You Can Establish Your Own Brand Identity

1. Know Your Company’s Vision.

What do you want to accomplish? What problems do you need to address? What makes your brand stand out in its industry and draw in customers? Your vision statement should clearly explain the journey you want your business to take.  If you’ve done a thorough analysis of your company and your goals and figured out what you want the company to stand for you have taken the first step to building your brand name.

2. Develop a Relationship With Your Consumers. 

With the growth ecommerce, consumers have a large range of vendors they can choose from – which means you need to market yourself correctly and attend to your customers needs.  You need to engage them and keep them coming back. This can happen through essential elements like website design and email marketing layout and your preferred social media channels. Once you have established a reputation with your customers, they will expect you to deliver and meet their expectations no matter what.

3. Your Company’s Passion.

What is the heart and soul of your business? What does it stand for?

Nearly as important as knowing yourself, and being able to establish your brand identity, is knowing what sets your company apart. That passion may relate directly to your brand – why you established the company in the first place – or it may not. The important fact is that this passion differentiates you from competitors, provides a point of reference and familiarity that customers can attach to. For example, your niche might target children, business owners, golf lovers etc. You need to be passionate about your niche and provide the right information that is not only relevant, but also interesting and different from your competitors.

4. Know Your Customers.

After spending time to shape your brand identity and figure out how to share your passion effectively, it’s imperative that you understand what will appeal to your customers, which should be fairly straightforward. Knowing the interests, concerns, motivations, and passions of your customers helps direct marketing efforts and can provide you with essential tools to build your customer base.

5. Be Consistent.

Customers look for consistency from brands. Dramatic or sudden shifts in company position will put them off and undermine your relationship with them. Once you have a compelling, unique brand identity– stick with it and repeat it again and again. Customers don’t like any sudden or big changes and it will take time for them to adjust to it.

brand inconsistencies

Find and Fix Brand Inconsistencies

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Five Ways You Can Improve Any Potential Brand Inconsistencies

Most marketers and brand strategists understand the dangers of brand inconsistencies: without a well-defined logo, color scheme, and brand voice, your brand won’t stand out in consumers’ minds. And if consumers can’t remember your brand, you won’t have a chance against competitors.

While brands are constantly trying to uphold a strong visual image, the internet is always on the watch uncovering small inconsistencies (many of which reside in the most unexpected places.)

To make sure that you’re covering all the bases, here are six potential places where brand inconsistencies tend to hide — from the depths of your product descriptions to that email you’re about to send.

  1. Tone and Style of Writing

From email to blog posts, you want every piece of content you publish to reflect your company culture and ideals. A consistent brand voice makes this possible.

Whether your content team is small or large, you’re inevitably going to end up with different writing styles. Having a range of voices is a good way to keep your audience interested, but there’s a fine line between an interesting variation and writing that’s inconsistent. When the tone of voice or the writing style goes from one extreme to the other  your readers will be confused about the message you’re trying to send.

Try to make sure everyone is on the same page with what message your company is trying to send to their audience. One way to achieve this harmony is to create a detailed content style guide. This guide can include information such as what types of stock photos to use, whether or not to use oxford commas, and what language to avoid.

  1. Search Engine Results

If you need information, fast, where do you typically go to get it?

We’re going to take a gamble and say that your answer was Google. People looking for information about your brand probably have the same train of thought. After all, Google is seen as a trusted method for finding information.

Make sure that your brand is up to date with the your newest logos, titles, photos, etc. Google will pull up anything that is under your brand name, so make sure it’s the things you want to see. SEO is a huge part of keeping your brand on Google’s pages. Set-up a Google Adwords/Keywords account to keep track of your SEO and other marketing strategies. You can also look into HubSpot which is a great resource for keeping all your files in one place.

  1. Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are designed to do one thing well: sell the merchandise. Consequently, they sometimes ring false because the branding and voice are different from what the consumer seeks on your blog or in your emails.

Before you write product descriptions, read some of your other content to re-familiarize yourself with your brand voice. Keep that voice in your head as you craft your descriptions, staying true to the tone and inflection you have developed elsewhere.

  1. Social Media 

Most likely, your brand has an official Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. But, with so many options for marketing your brand on social media, it’s hard not to feel pressured to have a presence on all of them. However, trying to tackle all of these platforms is difficult — can you really maintain and post regularly on all of these sites? If you can, you might have an employee that focuses social media marketing, which is great, but if you don’t it can be a daunting task with all the other things you have to manage on a daily basis.

The best way to stay consistent on social media is to choose a few platforms that make sense for your audience and your product — then master them. Delete the profiles that you don’t use and make sure to keep an eye on how much you are posting on them. If someone adds you on Twitter, they might re-consider if they noticed you haven’t published a tweet since 2014. This wouldn’t make a very good impression so it might be a good idea to either delete the platform or to give it more attention.

  1. Reviews / Ratings 

Since product review sites are regulated by people who usually know nothing about your brand, they often portray the wrong information. Whether your business has the wrong location, or is missing a proper company description, review sites can be a huge source of concern for potential customers.

First, reach out to these sites and do whatever you can to correct your brand’s information. Another way to boost your presence on review sites is to reach out to your best customers and ask them to leave a review (if they haven’t already). This will help filter out the not-so-positive reviews, so people visiting these sites understand both what your brand is about, and what people honestly think of it.

We hope you’ll consider these tips and try to implement them for your brand. These are simple ways that you can boost your brand name and appeal to more customers.

Source: HubSpot

social media marketing

Rules For Social Media Marketing

Marketing has changed quite a bit since the start of this social networking era. Before this, marketers would use billboards, newspapers, magazines and radio to help advertise. While these methods are still very useful, social media has become the best way to promote brands and companies.

While using social media to advertise is quick, easy and up-to-date, there is some controversy with the consumers. Marketers are using three different ways to catch the consumer’s attention. The first one is reaching out to people who are skeptical or don’t like the brand or product. The second type is where the company and the consumer work together to help create ideas. Thirdly, they promote a product with someone who is an expert or professional in that subject. For an example, Keegan Bradley promoting a new set of Cleveland golf clubs.

These tactics are very successful in appealing to the audience’s emotions and getting the company’s name out there. When social media marketing, there are three rules every company that is social media marketing:

1) Don’t be so serious.Many consumers appeal to playful marketing rather than serious marketing.

2) Take a risk. Putting yourself and the company out there is the best way to sell and get consumers attention.

3) Forget the rules.Having fun with marketing is the most important aspect. As long as the company isn’t tricking or lying to the consumers, they can do whatever they’d like.