In the world of digital marketing, your campaigns will fall apart if brand building is not your priority. Sales and marketing are vital, but brand awareness is most vital in driving sales. 82% of consumers have said that they while searching online they always look up and favour the brands they know.
What is Branding?
Branding is not who you are or what your name is but what your customers think you are. A brand represents the sum of people’s perception of a company’s customer service, reputation, advertising, and logo. When all of these parts of the business are working well, the overall brand tends to be healthy. On the flip side, we all probably know a company that offers excellent products or services,but has a tarnished brand due to poor customer service cannot win customer loyalty.
Most marketers know that brand awareness is equally crucial for a digital marketing campaign as is lead generation strategy. The foundation for building a brand is to exactly know the target audience that you’ll be focusing on.
No amount of investments works if you and your customers do not share a connection and do not favour your brand. Here is why.
Brand helps you stand out
Over 80% of shoppers hit the internet just to research products. Their ultimate goal is never to make a transaction. And during this research, the customers can come across new brands that might diminish your reach and penetration. But your brand will act as a shield. If your target customers can relate a product or a service with your brand, they are less likely to give others space.
A strong brand sits in the customer’s minds and the idea is quite unshakeable. To build a brand one needs to be consistent and true to the promises made to the customers while they are searching for a service or product. Consistency is a key factor in gaining and keeping consumer’s trust in brand promises.
Brands invoke pride and trust
People buy Mercedes because they feel proud to own a Mercedes. A Louis Phillipe shirt radiates professionalism and corporate executives like to flaunt it. Once a customer associates a brand with pride, they start trusting its products and become loyal patrons for a lifetime. Proper branding brings home such effects. And if the digital campaign is centered around such an axis, the results that will come and soon you will be more than merely impressive. Offering the cheapest service or product is not always ideal, you need to offer quality and the marketing campaigns need to send out this message.
Brand makes you less dependent on funnels
By building strong brands at the initial stages of your digital marketing campaigns you do not have to worry about marketing or sales funnels. You do not need to educate the audiences anymore, neither direct them to lucrative landing pages.
Your digital campaigns can become more focused. The customers already come educated. The brand that you have build captures your users directly in the transactional phase and helps you to generate fast revenues.
Employees and Customers become your advocates
Just like there is a pride-factor in owning a product of a particular brand, there is also pride in working for one. Top brand employees roam around advocating a product’s quality, value and contribution. When customers love a product and share about the same in social media or with friends through word of mouth, this is the best kind of brand building.
Building brands benefit both employee and consumer sides and digital marketing can leverage these to create something solid.
Social Media and Brand
One of the top 10 reasons individuals say they spend time on social media is to buy products or know about products and services. 37% of the social media time is spent interacting with branded content. Worldwide an average person spends over 2 hours a day on social media. Teenager much more. Social media is where people are, and no branding campaign can ignore social media.
The right influencers talking about a new brand on social media can make huge difference. digital marketing allows small businesses to get into the branding arena with smaller budgets. The goal is to differentiate from the competition and have laser-focus on the target audience.
Branding is an inseparable part of any digital marketing campaign. It takes time, investment, loads of hard work and patience to build and maintain a brand.
