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Any business must have a strong brand. Branding equals recognition. While recognition means being a key stakeholder on the market.
Every startup dreams about transforming into a big corporation with a big name. That’s why new-born startups start chasing the building of their brand.
You can hear experts talk about this concept across different conferences. They discuss the importance of branding for small, medium, and big companies.
But what does “branding” actually mean?
What benefits can it give your business?
Does it help crush your competitors and dominate the niche?
All these questions might sound intriguing. Likely, you will get clear answers in this post.
Shall we begin?
The Concept of “Branding”
“Branding” as a concept has different meanings for everyone. Some experts believe that “brand” is all about the company’s logo with the specific colors and fonts included. The other people prefer to add their personal motto that would identify a company’s brand.
So many men, so many minds.
However, if you want to understand the concept of branding, you should know what it consists of. Let’s review a few main building blocks of branding:
- Company culture
- Motto
- Branding style (logo, colors, etc.)
- Company philosophy
- Quality of the service (product)
- Pricing policy
- Customer support
- Website
- Marketing strategy
- Social media presence
- Emotions the brand triggers
If your first thought was that brand-building revolves around investing tons of money – you are wrong. Yes, you will have to invest some money when your company is at the stage of a startup. But if you don’t add a sort of creativity, your brand is doomed to failure. To avoid such situations, you can go for the most authentic gohighlevel review.
To put it in a nutshell, “branding” reflects what people say about your company (product) and what they think about it.
A Few Words About a Strong Brand
Obviously, any “strong” brand consists of all the above-mentioned building blocks like you can find at branding agency San Francisco. It is the brand’s uniqueness, audience awareness, a specific philosophy behind the brand. What’s more important, the brand must offer a quality product that would satisfy your target audience’s needs.
A strong brand solves the issues people have. It knows a buyer persona from the inside.
For example, a world-wide known fast-food company McDonald’s is one of the representatives of the company with a strong brand. McDonald’s has all the necessary attributes that help the company position itself like a strong brand.
- Low prices
- Logo
- Customer experience
- Ronald McDonald
- Specific entitlement of the products
The secret behind creating a strong brand is in combining many aspects of branding and making them work to reach the same goal.
The Benefits of Branding
Finally, you’ve reached out to the main question of this post – what are the benefits of branding?
Here are nine benefits of branding you should be aware of:
Awareness of your brand is the number one branding benefit. Don’t neglect it for all costs.
When people do the shopping and notice something related to your brand – colors, logo, motto, whatever else – this circumstance triggers their mind. And they close their eyes on other brands except to your one.
Why?
Because they have heard about your brand a hundred times. Your potential customers stumbled upon the ads, read the feedback, and talked to other people who are completely satisfied with your product. Your brand is familiar to people who surround you.
Just like Corona Extra used the idea of adding a slice of lime inside the beer’s bottleneck. Hence, when someone wants to buy a bottle of beer, this person notices this visual element among other beer illustrations and decides to choose Corona.
Use different ways to create a buzz around your brand. Think about the perception people use to consume the information. People absorb the biggest portion of information with their eyes. Therefore, work in that way. Improvise, try various visual elements in the practice, like videographics that could help you spread the word about your product more creatively.
A strong marketing strategy focuses on increasing the revenue a company gets by selling the product. If your product doesn’t have branding it will lead to a low percentage of sales.
Consequently, branding and marketing go hand-in-hand.
For example, the brand of your company has its philosophy, logo, and motto. From the marketing perspective, the company has already gained some popularity in the world. More and more branches (customers) appeared across different countries. And your next step is to show the company’s growth by using data visualization.
What does it mean?
You can create a map of the world styled on your brand where you mark all countries where your company has customers. What’s more important, you can mark those countries with your branded logo.
There is nothing hard in creating such a map. Just make sure you follow your branding style and use a map maker tool.
Despite the fact, it might seem less impressive but it has a significantly important meaning in terms of marketing and brand positioning.
If you are familiar with a marketing funnel, you know that it consists of five stages – awareness, interest, consideration, conversion, and retention.
A good brand helps you move your customers down the funnel to the final stage – retention. Retention means transforming your customers into “loyal” followers of your brand.
Is there a secret formula that could help you get loyal customers?
Sure.
There are no specific ingredients included. Just a combination of a product that solves the issues people have and an engaging brand. That’s all.
Another branding benefit is the credibility your company gains with the industry. When your brand becomes a new powerful player on the market, the other competitive companies start to reckon with it.
To earn credibility you should take care of your customers. Thus, make sure your company can provide people with outstanding customer support.
- More new product updates with the help of brand equity
If you could build a well-known brand, it would be much easier to introduce new product updates to people.
Let’s review some examples of how branding helps in spreading the word about product releases.
Twix has introduced a new product release of a salty caramel taste on screen. You can miss this video advertising but it doesn’t mean that you would shy away from buying this chocolate bar.
The same happens when Apple releases another model of the iPhone. Huge fans of this brand want to buy this brand-new model just because it is a branded product.
To sum up, having a strong brand helps launch something new.
- Build business connections
“First of all, a business with a strong brand is always clearly visible. It leads to attracting influencers within the niche, talented marketers, designers, or whatever. You won’t have any difficulties in
hiring a freelancer on the fly.
Plus, you will get a solid number of business propositions that would be beneficial for your company. Hence, cooperate, promote, and power up your brand.“
- Don’t forget about practicing shared values
Branding benefits are not limited to growing your business and increasing income. It is tightly connected with building long-term relationships with the customers as well.
Think about the future generations that would be loyal to your brand forever.
Let’s take for example the well-known company Nestle. They decided to launch Maggi Masala-ae-Magic, a micronutrient-reinforced spice product. This product is reduced in price for low-income consumers in India. It costs three rupees only.
As a result, it turned into a massive income for Nestle. The company has sold over 138 million servings of Maggi Masala-ae-Magic by reaching the most remote and affected areas of India.
Apply this practice in your branding and you will benefit from it.
- Branding saves your time and money
It has been already stated that branding is not just investing money but more about creativity and thinking out-of-the-box. However, startup companies will have to spend their money on building their brand anyway.
The most important thing is to control your money expenses. Remember that if you prefer saving money and avoid investing in brand development, you will have to devote more of your time to working on branding by yourself.
Unfortunately, if you are not a guru of branding, you won’t be able to create a strong brand without the help of true professionals.
At the first stage of brand development, you will have to invest a solid amount of money. Money expenses include creating logo design, marketing strategy, advertisement, website development, SEO. It costs tons of money.
However, if you consider these spendings in a long-term game, you will benefit eventually.
- Branding gives you confidence
Branding can give confidence to both the owner of the company and the company’s customers. All the efforts put into branding will reward a business owner with growing the army of loyal customers. The customers will have a product they trust and that can solve their issues.
Branding is for everyone. Branding follows a “win-win” model all the time.
To Sum Up
Good branding provides businesses with a lot more benefits than it seems at first. As you noticed in this post, branding is not just making your company look great.
Branding is a dynamic set of strategies that embraces all concepts of business. The purpose of the brand is to get your business engine started. And work on a regular basis with the upcoming positive results.
Focus on your company branding. Invest money. Choose the best branding experts to work with. Make the world happier and yourself richer.
Author’s bio:
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Specialist at Visme. When not at work, he likes to spend his time with family, read books on science-fiction, practice playing the bass, and visit the gym.