What is brand marketing?
Brand Marketing Explained
Your brand is not just your logo, it’s everything that comes to mind when your potential customers hear the name of your business. Branding and marketing are often grouped into one activity (marketing), as they go hand in hand. However, branding encompasses so much more than marketing - brand development, brand strategy, brand awareness and brand management.
Your brand is the reflection of how you look, feel and emotionally engage. You want to have a consistent message across all touch-points and platforms, so that the consumer perceives this unified identity when they see your logo or hear your name.
Branding is one of the biggest buzzwords in modern marketing, and with good reason: it’s important. It’s not something you can do once and forget about; instead, branding is a long-term commitment to creating an emotional connection with your audience.
In order to brand successfully, you need to create an emotional connection with the consumer. This can be done in many different ways, and no matter what field you’re in—from retail clothing to selling pies—you’ll find that it’s an important way of creating a lasting, meaningful relationship with the people who matter most: your customers.
In this article, we explain the concept of brand marketing and why it is important for your business. You will also learn how to market your brand successfully.
Great Brands Need Great Messaging
Every brand is unique and speaks to a specific audience. When you’re developing your brand, it’s important that you communicate who you are and what you represent through your marketing messages.
What makes a great company? A great business needs more than just a good product or service. Consumers don’t care about your sales figures, your profit growth or your company structure. They care about how you make them feel.
Think of Harley-Davidson: it's not just about the bikes. The brand represents excitement, rebellion and freedom. In fact, when Harley-Davidson began to sell its first cruiser bike in 2001, they released a marketing campaign that featured an office worker with a day job who also had a passion for bike riding. It was more than a bike to the company.
Make an emotional connection with your audience, and you’ll have an immediate advantage over businesses that don’t take their brand as seriously. Caring about how consumers perceive you is important because every brand needs to be positioned in a unique way if you want to win the loyalty of potential customers. This is where brand marketing comes in.
What Is Brand Marketing? The Basics
There is no universal definition of brand marketing. It can take on several different forms depending on the type of product or business being discussed. But there are some basic principles that apply to every type of brand and every type of business. You need to:
Build a distinct identity for your brand
Define the needs of your customers, and be able to deliver against those needs
Create a real and valuable emotional connection with your target market
All brand marketing begins with an idea: it’s what sets you apart from everyone else in your industry. If you want to make money, that idea has to be different enough from the other brands in your field to make people really take notice. Identifying a niche—something that makes you the best at what you do—can be an important step towards branding success.
The next part of brand marketing is defining the needs of your customers, and being able to deliver against those needs. You’ll find it much easier to build a following if people think that you understand their problems and can help them solve those problems. That means knowing not just what they want, but also who they are, where they live, how much money they have, and so on.
One of the best ways to meet the needs of your customers is through research. Find out what they’re looking for. Find out what makes them tick—what keeps them up at night, if you will. Understanding your customer’s pain-points is one of the most valuable things you can learn in business. And once you know that, give it to them.
Finally, brand marketing means creating a real and valuable emotional connection with your target market, the people who are likely to buy from you or use your services. The best brands are built with love, and that means putting in the effort to get to know your customers as people.
The result will be a bond of trust and loyalty. If people like you, they’ll buy from you again. And if they trust you—if they think you understand them—they’ll recommend you to their friends, and buy from you again in the future. This is brand marketing at its best: if you can make people feel good about your product or service, they’ll be more than happy to keep buying.
Strong brands are built on a foundation of trust—a bond between consumer and company that creates a deep emotional connection. Many companies try to create that bond through advertising, but you’ll find that it’s much easier to emotionally engage if you truly understand what your customers want and are able to deliver against those needs. You don’t just want a sale; instead, you want a happy customer who buys from you again and again for years to come.
Why Is Brand Marketing so Important?
The days when customers would buy from just about anyone are long gone. Today, a strong brand is mandatory if you want to maintain healthy growth and strong sales. You need to be able to offer more than just a product at the right price; you need to be able to convince people that you can help them solve their problems and meet their needs.
If you want to be successful in the long run, brand marketing is essential. It can take time and effort to build a strong brand, but it will pay off in the long term. Customers who trust you won’t just buy from you once; they’ll keep coming back, and they’ll tell their friends about you as well. Strong brand marketing will help build a strong company foundation that makes it easier to present the right message to current and future customers.
The best brands are built with love, and that means putting in the effort to get to know your customers as people. The result will be a bond of trust and loyalty. If people like you, they’ll buy from you again. And if they trust you—if they think you understand them—they’ll recommend you to their friends, and buy from you again in the future. This is brand marketing at its best: if you can make people feel good about your product or service, they’ll be more than happy to keep buying.
Marketing your brand is important. If you solely focus on tactics and direct response or lead generation (retail) advertising and marketing, your brand health doesn’t strengthen and consumers buy with their hearts, not their heads.
We are emotional beings, we buy with our hearts and validate our purchases with rationale (price, etc) – this is why people buy expensive cars, because it makes them feel good. If they only needed the car for transport there wouldn’t be so many brands on the market.
Here are 3 major points to keep in mind:
1. Businesses that brand themselves well will win out over businesses that have lack lustre brands, if they provide the right value proposition (people buy from people, not a company). Consumers don’t care about the buzz words of your business, they care about feeling valued as individuals. Branding is a process of creating an emotional connection to your product or service, consumers are seeking authenticity.
2. You need to create an emotional connection with your customers by building your brand and what it stands for via story-telling. Apple has done this amazingly well over the years – there are so many stories where an Apple product has helped someone, a story about how they’re the “thinking person” brand.
3. It’s all about the brand and how you offer value to your customers – showing you care, genuinely listening, creating trust & transparency in the way you engage and interact with customers is key. If you are the face of the brand, show people the real you, that you care, that you have purpose and that you go out of your way to help.
How Does Brand Marketing Work? The Strategy Behind the Success
Much of brand marketing strategy is based on understanding the persona (or avatar) of your customer, and creating a real and valuable bond with that segment of the market. Finding out who they are, what matters most to them—both their life goals and the things that keep them up at night—and then helping them achieve those goals.
Creating a connection with your customer isn’t just about making a sale, it’s about providing something of value in the process. A brand is only as good as the people who are willing to buy from that brand, and you won’t find many loyal customers if you aren’t offering them anything worth having. This is a vitally important piece of brand marketing strategy: if you help your customers solve their problems, they’ll be loyal to you, and they’ll recommend you to other people, who will also buy from you because of that loyalty.
This means that many companies focus heavily on brand marketing: creating a real and valuable emotional connection with your target market, the people who are likely to buy from you or use your services. The best brands are built with love, and that means putting in the effort to get to know your customers as people. Listening to their problems and worries. Learning what they want most out of life. And helping them achieve those goals through your brand and product offering.
Building an emotional connection with your audience is important and can be done at the same time you are implementing marketing activity to drive leads and sales. Brand and lead generation marketing go hand in hand - one can’t be done without the other as it’s the brand marketing that attracts the customer to your company. The lead generation marketing converts them to a sale.
Making Brand Marketing Work for Your Business
Brand marketing is vital for every business, whether you’re a start-up looking for loyal customers or an established brand trying to re-ignite passion and excitement amongst your existing audience.
There are many different brand marketing strategies that you can use. You can start to share stories of your history, credentials, customers and how you help via engaging video content you can put on your website and social media channels. Video content is a great way to engage your audience in brand story-selling.
If your brand feels out of alignment of where you are taking your business, a re-brand may be required to reposition your brand to be attractive and desirable to the market you want to attract.
If you want your brand to have a more engaging personality, a new look brand, including new colours, logo and fonts, might be the way to go.
When you invest in brand marketing it helps build credibility and trust and helps you gain a competitive advantage.
Using your social media platforms is a great way to build brand engagement by sharing content that showcases your brand values, credentials, qualities and strengths. All these help in growing your customer base and sales.
There are countless ways to bring your brand to life: through emotive videos, social media content, interesting blog posts, or even a podcasts.
Here are some steps to follow when putting together a brand marketing strategy for your business:
1. Find the needs that aren’t being met by your competitors and start filling those holes in the market before someone else does. Then, make sure that you find ways to meet these needs even better than your competition—and do it with real value that lasts.
2. Learn about your customer by asking questions and listening: what problems are they trying to solve? What solutions do you offer that can help them reach their goals? Are there any aspects of their life or business where they want to improve, but don’t know how?
3. Build brand loyalty by creating real value: don’t just provide what your customers need, but also help them meet their life goals and surpass any dreams they didn’t even know they had. That’s the true power of brand marketing.
4. Find a way to build real value into every interaction with your customer by making it personal: listen to what matters most to them and make sure that it’s reflected in your brand marketing activities.
5. Remember the relationships you build with your customers: they’re the ones who are going to bring you repeat business, so don’t ignore them or take them for granted.
These steps may seem simple, but there is real power in brand marketing, in building a relationship with your customer that improves their life or business for the better. That’s why it’s so important to start with a brand marketing strategy—and implement it effectively—if you want your company to stand out from the crowd and build real value.
Conclusion
Brand marketing is the process of building a positive emotional connection with your audience. This is more than just marketing, it’s brand marketing. It needs to be engaging and aligned to where you want to take your business. Your brand marketing needs to reflect your brand values, brand personality and brand story.
To learn about brand marketing and how it can strengthen your business, check out our other blog articles on brand strategy.
We also have a range of case studies that you can look at to see how this process has worked in real-world scenarios.
Also, if you are looking for a brand marketing consultant in Perth and would like help with developing your brand, get in touch with us today. We can help you kick off your brand marketing efforts and move it forward, using the tools we’ve developed to grow businesses all over Australia.
For more information about our services, contact us today, or follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with what’s going on at Plump Marketing.