June 2020

The business world keeps on advancing year after year, so does the manner in which companies need to market themselves to stand out among the competition.

A company is merely a company without a strong brand value. You wouldn’t sustain for long in this era unless you build a powerful image for your company in the marketplace.

Why Branding?

Economic and technological development will continue to level up the competition in the market, it will become increasingly difficult and risky to depend on products and services only for a profitable business. That’s when branding comes in. To stand out in the market, businesses need to build a strong brand. 

Branding is a combination of the features that define a business. Along With a catchy name, attractive logo, and color schemes, there is a lot more that plays a major role while building a strong brand for your company.

The story that you have written for your brand, the language that is used for different social media platforms – even your captions matter, the product packaging, tone of the brand, website, and the list goes on. Every aspect plays a role in building a strong brand.

Customers today don’t just purchase a product, they expect an experience. Conducting surveys is an old school practice now to find out what your target audience wants. Companies today involve the customer in their product developments. 

This is a smart move of demonstration of letting them join your inventive procedure to engage them. Moreover, this methodology makes you look progressively dependable, trustworthy, and authentic.

There’s a difference between Branding and Marketing

Have you at any point pondered the contrast between branding and marketing? Yes everyone does, but you are not alone with this confusion. While the two are without a doubt associated, there are minute differences between the two. 

As an entrepreneur, it is essential that you understand branding and marketing both in extraordinary detail, with the goal that you can successfully use them together. The following is a more critical gander at the contrasts among branding and marketing.

Branding is the strategy you follow to meet your marketing goals.

Marketing is the process or the tools and ways a company uses to deliver the message of their brand.

Branding defines who you are and what your company is about. While marketing is the process of creating awareness about your brand and increasing credibility in the competitive marketplace. 

Marketing is the practice of getting people engaged with your business and branding is something that keeps them coming back to you.

Effective branding makes marketing easier for your company. Moreover, branding cannot stand alone. Branding without marketing doesn’t work for any business.

Latest Branding trends of 2020

1. Create your story

How, when and why did this company start?

Your audience wants to know your story. A story with facts, not fiction. 

Branding is not just about the logo of your company or the products and services you offer with great packaging. Storytelling is a part of branding. Invest some time in learning how to share your story. About the adventurous lifestyle, adversity your company has faced and aim in creating human connection by adding some emotional touch.

2. Be Bold!

Be bold while building brand guidelines or a strategy for your company. Take the risk with your image. People will remember the brands that stand out in the market for their boldness. It stays in their mind for a long time. This can be executed by using strong language, powerful artwork, or even bold colors. Break the norms and don’t be afraid to take a chance. 

Take the example of The Rolling Stone – An American monthly magazine about popular culture. This Brand is known well for the strong language they use and powerful artwork.   

 3. Brand Influencer 

Have you ever followed a brand or made a purchase because a well-known personality you admire has endorsed a product or service of that brand?

May be you started following Manyavar when Virat Kohli became the brand ambassador. 

Influencer marketing is no longer a newbie in this era. Every other brand uses influencers to reach out to a greater audience. It is one of the best practices to increase your followers, gain popularity and boost your sales.

Influencer Marketing is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. People tend to get influenced while making a decision for their purchase when someone else refers to them about it. 

A well-known influencer can help you increase your brand awareness, traffic, boost sales and engagement by leveraging their social media power. 

4. Immersive Technology

The impact of technology on branding is changing the market like never before. Companies now focus on giving a human-like experience to their customers with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence analyses consumer behavior and provides businesses with insights into their competitors, current performance, and resource allocation. Marketers can leverage these insights to create a better connection with their audience in the future and improve their performance.

Chatbots are the most commonly used AI platform by companies today. The introduction of chatbots has improved customer engagement. People can chat in real-time with 24*7 customer support.

5. Creative Customer Experiences

Customers start expecting more from you when your brand stands out from the rest. Branding is not just about selling, logo, and image. Creating an experience for the customers is a major role for your company. You can deliver the expected experience only if you understand the needs and behavior of your customers. 

Though your products may be great, your profits won’t last unless you nail your customer service. And this will let you stand different from your competitors.

Design the experience you want to give your customers by keeping in mind that they are your long term need. Give them a reason to come back.     

Importance of Branding in Marketing

1. Stand Apart from your Competitors 

The market out there is crowded. The competition for every company to stand out has reached the next level. Every business wants to present itself as a unique niche field. To beat your competitors, do everything that they do and differentiate yourself at the same time by filling up the void they leave.

For example – Differentiate your brand in terms of pricing, by focusing on a narrow niche. It can be innovation, convenience or by delivering extraordinary services. 

But sometimes take the chance and be quirky, weird, and bold. That’s what makes you different from your competitors.

People tend to connect better with brands that have a face. Show your audience YOU.

2. Products get recognized 

When your audience has a good relationship with your brand it gets easier to promote products.

Branding helps your company to build up an image in the marketplace and in addition,  boost the sales. Your brand becomes recognizable once you bring it to your audience’s notice. 

Moreover, arranging different occasions to announce the newly launched product can add a cherry to your cake. Advertising will lead the way. Different gadget companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Oneplus have established themselves because of the outstanding branding. 

Fundamentally, the more you bring your service in front of the crowd, the higher the odds of your service being known by the partners. There is a more prominent significance of brand recognition.

3. Generates Increased Revenue

  A brand is a valuable asset. Branding is an investment for companies.

Apart from the sales of products and services you offer, people perceive your brand because of your brand equity. Let’s take the global brand Apple for example. They have great leveraging power and through effective branding, they have gained huge brand equity. They rule the market at this time. They have the power to increase the prices of their products three times and their audience will still pay for it. 

Once your brand is positioned as a leader in the industry and marketplace, with great brand equity and customer loyalty, you will see a huge increase in market share. 

4. Branding increases employee productivity

People are willing to work for you when your brand is well established. This frees your company up to the top ability and furnishes you with the most qualified and skillful workers for your organization. When you have the most ideally equipped individuals for the activity, your organization’s profitability level will also increase.

Your employees need to stay motivated to work efficiently. When the brand is well-known and has the potential to fulfill the employee’s requirement, it will result in the growth of the business.   

5. Branding helps you connect with your customers emotionally

Creating strong emotions helps in building bonds between the customer and the business, which is definitely one of the best practices for building a brand. Brand intimacy results in the growth of the business to a great extent. 

The best practices to build a strong connection with the customers are listed below:

• Try fulfilling the needs of your customers beyond their expectations.
• Help customers become better and smarter through their products and services. As mentioned earlier, give them a reason to come back. 
• Give your customers a fun and gratifying experience. Get your customers to indulge in your brand.
• Create an identity and image for your brand that customers can resonate with, so they may feel connected with you. 
• Keep your messages simple and clear. A message that is relatable and can be easily understood.  

Always remember Branding is an actio.. Empower your business with branding and in the process, if you feel lost, always get help from professional branding managements and get your business back to life. 

There are various well-known brands in the market right now. What makes these brands memorable to their audience, how are these huge brands made? The journey from being an organization to a brand name isn’t a simple one. Brands are not made overnight. It is your clients who hold the ability to turn your products or services into a hot-selling brand! The key is communication. Your communication sets a precedent for your brand. So if brand communication is clear and hits the targeted audience in the correct place, you will achieve your organizational goals.

What is Brand Communication?

Brand Communication is one of the central activities of brand communication strategy and management and it is essential to have a healthy and purposeful discussion with partners. It is one of the promotional strategies utilized by brands to influence the clients’ opinions about the brand, the organization in general, and about the products and services that they offer. 

It is the act of conveying and delivering significant and focused messages relating to the brand, to its partners. This includes the blended utilization of traditional marketing channels, for example, newspapers and TV with the key strategy of social media. For instance, content promoting, blogs, and digital marketing. These are the four R’s of brand communication. 

Here are the effective tips of brand communication you must know and follow: 

1. Be real, genuine & honest

You need not bother about the celebrity brand ambassadors to advertise your brand if your clients become your brand advocates. If they’re the ones discussing your brand, imparting to their peers and spreading positive verbal exposure for your brand, who needs any other person? They are genuine and authentic specialists in brand promotion. In this way, it is your role to guarantee that all brand communication from your end is additionally certifiable and spontaneous. Try not to utilize automated answers nor react like a bot. A humanized, compassionate and true brand voice constructs a quick association with the crowd which is based on trust. Try not to cause your reactions to appear to be forced. Handle them with a human touch, consistently.

2. Don’t oversell

The minute a brand begins overselling, it begins to lose the trust of their audience. Keeping your marketing procedures subtle enough that they fit in splendidly, is the thing that you should watch out for. Brands will, in general, go over the edge with their ideas and neglect to put quality over quantity.

3. Be authentic

Since you’re a brand, not just an individual, being credible and dependable consistently pays off. Overcoming the gap between the brand and the customer comes to a great extent with trust and confidence. Authentic communication is consistently in demand. Individuals love to talk one-on-one and what could be better for your consumers than to interact with their loved brand! It is essential to depict that the eyes and ears of your brand are constantly open for feedback, just as for communication. The tone of your content shouldn’t sound unexpected and direct, but should rather have space for comfort and great relationship building.

4. Create engaging content

In case you’re making content for your audience, the least you can do is make your content engaging and interactive. Educational content is most often received by the audience without any feelings. Effective brand communication is powerful when communication occurs on both sides. Along these lines, making connections with content allows your customers to enjoy what you bring to the table.

A standard flow of such content expands commitment and gives the customers a reason to return. With only a little bit of tweaking here and there, one can transform their customary content into engaging and shareable content. By following this technique effectively, a brand may likewise land up with clients who become brand advocates.

5. Always focus on reliability

Individuals love simple and relatable content. The relatable content is amazingly sound for boosting up brand communication. The picture of the brand turns out to be all the more inviting, open and approachable. What’s more, a little attention ain’t that bad. Content other than straightforward brand promotions do incredibly well for such strategies.

6. Create a persona

After you have effectively figured out how to keep up a picture and make a personality, remember to keep it easygoing and have a ton of fun. Try not to restrict yourself to a specific sort of content. Be flexible and brimming with surprises because buyers love that! Adhering to a specific sort of content limits the huge pool of chances and material that you can work upon.

7. Create Conversions

At the point when a customer shares a positive experience, go further than saying ‘Thank you’. Give open-finished reactions and strike discussions that help your brand discover its humanized voice. Individuals love it when a brand takes the time to discuss with them – one on one. Regardless of whether it’s an enjoyment and fun-loving discussion, individuals will recall your brand more for how you affected them. When you arrive at that stature of having common ongoing and positive discussions with your clients, soon they will be the ones doing your advertising for you.

8. Expand your brand on multiple channels

In the world of social media, networking is most probably the best component that the web brings to the table. Sufficient for us, we can work with it in numerous manners. effective brand communication can be reinforced significantly if a brand is available on numerous channels. Brand communication is made viable just when you are dynamic in all the channels you are on. Social media life is like a blessing, particularly for any brand searching for effective communication.

9. Make content for customer fun 

In some cases, you should simply kick your feet up and unwind. The dull nature of the brand communication procedure, where you need to post continuously, can accidentally disturb the nature of the content and become upsetting and exhausting for the beneficiaries. The fun object can come in numerous ways, you should simply analyze and see what works directly for your brand.

10. Leverage customer-generated content 

Give close consideration to what your clients are sharing or saying in comments or forums about your brand. When you recognize what they need, act snappy, and give them what they need. Utilizing the client-created content isn’t as difficult as it appears. Share customer content and change your products/services/communication to give your audience precisely what they want. 

With the arrival of the digital age, the major focus is not on how to showcase your products to the buyer, but on how to advertise your item with your customers! With these 10 tips of collective promoting, an effective brand communication system will do some amazing things by focusing on its customers viably and effectively.

Focus on the following points: 

• If you need your audience anticipating your blog posts, you have to offer them something that delights them and adds some value to their lives. This will improve their trust in you since they will see that you aren’t simply determined to promote your services and products.
• Don’t be hesitant to attempt new ideas and ensure your posts spread different topics other than simply your organization or industry. Sharing extraordinary posts by other industry pioneers can be valuable as well. Fluctuate your content to ensure individuals don’t lose interest. 
• Helping individuals in social networks is one approach to make a presence in social media. If your brand is known for offering truly supportive guidance, it will give your brand connections everywhere. At the point when you focus around helping individuals as opposed to driving traffic, your business makes certain to develop all the more quickly.

Everybody is aware of the brand Coca Cola, they follow an amazing communication strategy which makes them the no. 1 brand.

Let us read in detail about the communication strategy which Coca Cola follows:

Coca-Cola was established by John Styth Pemberton in 1886. He may not have thought at the time, that Coca-Cola would be the moneymaker it is today. The organization is the world’s driving maker of beverages, working in more than 200 nations. The organization delivers over 500 beverage brands, with over 1.06 billion beverages consumed each day, throughout the world.

Coca-Cola has consistently invested energy towards keeping up a good client to organization relationship. They need their brand and products to be a part of people’s daily lives and they use social media life to make feelings and sentiments of association towards clients.

At present, the communication that is followed by the brand includes advertising, interactive/internet advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, public relations,  sponsorship promotions and personal selling. Marketing is very important for this organization because its client base is so wide. So to do this effectively and bring aboard new clients, the organization utilizes influential advertising techniques. The slogans utilized in the Coca-Cola promotions are exceptionally appealing and relatable, they make a strong and permanent impact on the viewers.

The medium of advertising: 

Coca-Cola utilizes advertising to create a mindful approach towards their products,  among potential clients. They have various mediums of advertising that are shown the world over.

• Print media
• Point of purchase advertising
• Television commercial ads
• Outdoor advertising

The organization utilizes snappy or “cheerful” slogans to hit the target audience emotionally and urge them to purchase the product.

A final word

Responding immediately to client assistance questions is a part of your responsibility towards them. You should be on the same page as your clients and be prepared to help them consistently. Rather than simply producing official statements to promote your organization, communicate with your clients, and provide them with the best brand experience. Building brand value is an exceptionally long procedure and brand communication plays an essential role in it. 

We are a brand communication company, So let’s talk.