What is Branding, and what is the difference between branding and marketing?
Wikipedia defines a brand as ‘a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition. Name brands are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands. ‘
Building up your brand means you can use it to distinguish yourself from your competitors, as well as leave a lasting impression with your customer.
Ways to Build Your Brand:
- Focus on your niche
- Have a uniformed presence across platforms
- Define your primary marketing area
- Create a social profile
- Define your audience and demographics
- Share information on both business and products
- Establish authority in your field
- Rank relevantly in search results
Competitors and an Overload of Information.
In 2020, with information and products at our fingertips with online marketplaces like Amazon and search engine giants like Google and YouTube, we as a consumer have the advantage of choices.
More often than not, we can choose where we get information from or buy a product or service. Unlike yesteryear when you would look for the service in your local area, we can now access over 80% of the world’s services and products.
As a business, your competition is not only the shop down the road, but also the businesses showing up on search results. This means you need to compete with a lot more people than before.
Your brand needs to stand out, but how can we do this with so much competition from all over the world?
Firstly, you don’t. You just need to start focusing on getting found in your PMA or primary marketing area, and showing up for your specific niche. This means getting found by your local audience when they search online, navigate on maps, and scroll through social media pages.
Having a niche, means you can focus on getting found by people looking for a specific product or service. This often reduces the competition you are dealing with online. You can have multiple niches and appeal to different audiences for different products and services.
Define your Brand.
Your brand needs to be defined. What does it offer? What areas does it service? When is it open? Why should people buy from your brand? Where can your business and products be found?
Defining your brand publicly allows both people searching and search engines like Google to know what to associate your brand with. This is important in getting the right audience for your business.
Defining your brand allows you to target the ideal audience for your product.
Branding vs Marketing.
We hear about business marketing and business branding a lot, but what is the difference.
Marketing is like asking a girl on a date. Branding is what makes her say yes!
In 2020, there are a lot of ways to get your brand in front of customers.
- Search Engine Results Pages
- Social Media Pages
- Paid Advertising on Web and Socials
- Email Marketing and Newsletters
- Your Website and Content
As a digital media consultant, I often talk about inbound marketing methods. This is where we focus on getting in front of consumers already searching for your product or service, as well as existing clients and customers.
This is often a lot less expensive than targeting a cold audience as we can target specific searches with product and service results that match.
Inbound marketing could cover your website and social media content, email marketing campaigns, blogs and articles and anything that helps get your brand in front of the ideal audience.
So if branding is about building your profile and authority in your field, marketing is the campaigns that sell your brand to consumers.
Marketing or Branding?
Businesses are spending a lot of their marketing budgets on pay per click (PPC) online advertising. With a good call to action and an even better landing page, PPC can be an effective way to get in front of consumers, although it can become extremely expensive in a competitive marketplace.
I recommend businesses create adequate search and social presence before spending on PPC. Content that shows off your business, your products and services, and points of difference, will help build authority in your field.
On search, you can focus on being listed on all major search engines and directories, having an active business and map listing, and making sure your website is optimised for search engines.
That way, when a consumer looking for your product or service online searches on a search engine page like Google, your brand will hopefully come up in multiple places due to relevance. That could be in organic search results, map listings, product pages, social media links and directory listings.
Once you are appearing in these locations, you can then start spending on additional content to boost your presence. This could include PPC campaigns, or social media advertising, but you might want to also consider online press releases, guest blog articles, video content and helpful articles that consumers can use to better use or understand your product or service.
These additional services can help you rank better online, as well as show authority in your field. This could be the difference between a consumer choosing your brand or a competitors, even if you are not out ranking them in search results!
Next Level Marketing.
If you would like to take your brand to the next level, first make sure you have the basics sorted out right.
DriveSocial can help with local area marketing campaigns, brand presence and search engine optimisation (SEO). Get in touch with Dave and the team to discuss your goals and current business situation.