When it comes to creating a brand marketing strategy, there is no one-size fits-all solution. In order for your brand to be well-received by the audiences, you need to tailor your branding approach.
In a majority of cases, well-known businesses spread awareness of their own corporate names to gain a marketing advantage. Customers typically recognise logos, slogans, packaging, or colours in connection with the firm overall. Some examples around the world include Gucci, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Dell, etc.
When it comes to a brand marketing strategy, there are countless approaches that a business can take. However, all these approaches boil down to a few styles of marketing. While some companies market the feeling that comes with using the brand such as Adidas or Nike, others simply price their products high-enough for the target audiences to feel as if they belong to a community, just as Apply does.
If you are beginning to create a brand marketing strategy, there are a few styles of branding that you should be aware of. Of course, you don’t have to confine your marketing or branding efforts to these styles. Instead you can amalgamate a few styles to create your own unique brand marketing strategy.
Let us look at some of the strategy styles that you can incorporate into your marketing approach. However, before we dive into that, let us first understand what branding and marketing is, and how they are connected.
How Is Branding & Marketing Connected?
Marketing helps you raise visibility while branding defines who you are. Marketing includes your tactical objectives, whereas branding is your strategy. You need to ask yourself a number of questions in order to identify your brand. Questions that go beyond generalisations about the sector, the services or goods provided, and include inquiries into your identity as a business and, more crucially, your identity as a brand.
Your marketing strategy’s foundation is your brand, thus branding must come first. Before you start coming up with your unique marketing approaches, tools, plans, and tactics, it is crucial to establish your brand’s identity precisely, even if you are a startup. Your brand is the cornerstone on which you will establish customer loyalty and what will keep your customers coming back for more.
Coming up with a marketing strategy that aligns with your brand can be a challenge, especially if you are new to the marketing arena. In most cases, brands take the help of a digital marketing agency to help them meet their marketing objectives. This is something that you can also consider in the first few years of your brand’s operations.
A lasting link is created through your branding. Even if your present marketing strategies are intended to engage clients, it is your continuous branding that keeps them coming back. The fact that there are businesses that provide comparable or even the exact same goods and services as you do demonstrates how strong the competition is. Your brand will keep people coming back for more and if you’re effective enough, your target audiences will prefer your brand over your competitors.
Now there is a lot that goes into creating a brand marketing strategy that makes target audiences respond to your marketing efforts and customers come back for more. We have prepared a list of brand marketing styles that your company can readily adopt.
Here are the styles of a brand marketing strategy:
Personal Branding
Instead of branding an entire company, personal branding refers to branding that is utilised for a specific individual. This kind of branding is frequently used to build a person’s reputation, personality, or body of work.
This kind of branding is frequently used by sports, politicians, thought leaders, and celebrities to portray the greatest possible image of oneself to the public.
For instance, Priyanka Chopra who is originally an Indian actress is also an entrepreneur of a haircare brand called Anomaly. In addition to that, you have presented herself as a singer, songwriter, producer and now is also associated as an author. Now, Priyankaa Chopra is not popular for a brand she represents but her products and services are recognised because of her personal branding.
Personal branding can even look like a career pathway for most because it takes years and even decades for someone to build their personal brands. But there is a great alternative to that called influencer marketing. The benefits of influencer marketing are known to many but only a few make the most of it.
Your brand marketing strategy can also incorporate influencer marketing where you tie up with influencers that share the same values, and target audiences as your brand does. Get in touch with a social media marketing agency to help you identify and approach the right influencers for your brand who can market your product or services to their followers.
Multi-Product Branding
When a business utilises one brand name for all of its items in a class, this is often referred to as family branding or corporate branding. The individual branding approach, which involves giving each product its own brand name, may be used by large corporations with a wide range of well-known items.
For instance, although Apple is the parent firm, it uses a distinct branding strategy to promote its many products, such as Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Lower advertising expenses and increased brand recognition are advantages of multiproduct branding. These advantages result from your brand name being widely used across a variety of product offerings.
The concept is to take a brand name that has become well-known in one product class and use it to promote a different product in a different product class, hoping that the brand recognition would transfer. However, the multi-product brand approach also suffers a drawback.
Private-Label Branding
Production of items by a producer for a retailer is known as private branding.
Store-branded products are a great illustration of private branding such as Reliance SMART and Jio STAR. Some retail establishments utilise private branding to outbid rivals in a certain market. If a tube of Colgate toothpaste costs around Rs. 150, SMART or STAR can produce a privately branded version to sell for Rs. 70 or Rs. 80.
Privately branded goods are typically thought to be of lower quality, however in some situations, this might help shops win customers. It’s crucial to realise that you cannot let your manufacturing company depend on a single customer, if you are one.
This kind of branding technique is quite common. Making a single product recognisable under the name of a larger brand is the key goal. A key component of this brand marketing strategy is the use of symbols or pictures just like it is for other brands, coupled with affordable purchase rates.
Co-Branding
Co-branding is a technique for branding that links businesses. Co-branding is essentially a marketing alliance between two or more companies. This allows companies to favourably influence one another and may lead to one of them expanding into new areas, strengthening its clientele, and raising brand recognition.
An example of co-branding includes Uber and London Dairy coming together to deliver ice-creams. An evergreen example of co-branding on a global level is the integration of Intel with Dell to offer computer technologies together.
There are many benefits of co-branding from a marketing perspective. The two companies can come together to share their marketing expenses. Then, they can diversify the platform they market through. So the content marketing agency that they use could create content for multiple platforms which can help the companies make their offerings known to multiple audiences.
Online Branding
You will need to work closely with an SEO agency if you want to ace this style of brand marketing strategy. Online branding, sometimes referred to as internet branding, is the process by which a business establishes itself as a player in the online market. This branding area includes a company’s website, blogs, social media platforms, and other online content.
One of the best examples is Amazon that also does a lot of private-labelling under the name ‘Amazon Basics.’ We all know how Amazon started and where it came from but there is a reason why Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy keep raising the stakes for its competitors. Take a simple marketing technique of PPC ads for example. Amazon’s PPC retargeted ads are quite effective and little do you know if it’s ads influenced by your online behaviour or you are influenced by the ads. It’s really a vicious cycle when it comes to Amazon’s PPC ads.
You too, can ace online re-targeted advertising if you choose to work with the right Google ads agency.
Attitude Branding
Building an image based on evoking specific emotions in people is known as attitude branding. A company’s attitude branding plan may give it a unique identity and allow it to communicate a certain lifestyle that resonates to its target market. This may be a powerful strategy for involving customers in your brand.
As an illustration, a global corporation creates and markets sports equipment. Because the company’s slogan is to “encourage clients to live a healthy lifestyle,” its branding and marketing strategies put a strong emphasis on individuals reaching their fitness objectives.
Crowd-Sourcing
Crowdsourcing is the process of gathering suggestions and other materials from users. Crowdsourcing is used by businesses for a number of things, including brand planning. Because they have a greater emotional connection to the firm and are more interested in its goods, customers and prospects who engage in the branding process help create a brand that appeals to them.
For instance, a fast-food chain may host a contest where participants can design their own chip tastes. When a customer wins, the business offers them a discount on their subsequent purchase and a free bag of chips.
A similar brand marketing strategy was run by Cadbury that encouraged customers to create and submit their own unique cadbury recipes and name it. The winners of the contest would get their own supply of Cadbury recipes in the market. For example, Mugdha & Satish Kulkarni’s’ Madbury’ shook the market when the couple came up with their unique Cadbury recipe and won the contest with a ‘Cola Flavoured Cadbury.’
Now that you know the different styles of brand content marketing, here are some best practices while starting to create your own strategy.
Focus On Uniform Visual Content
A significant portion of what your prospects and consumers remember about your brand is visual. Make sure your images are consistent with the fundamental principles and overarching brand idea. Your brand will be consistent as a result, and your customers will be able to quickly recognise it in the future when they encounter comparable graphics.
Create Conversations (Sometimes, Even Controversies)
Getting people to talk about your brand and participating in the conversation is a big component of developing a strong brand positioning. Having a strong online presence that enables you to publish and comment on the topics that are important to your company is essential for keeping the discussion going.
Sometimes controversies can bring great PR. It makes you a part of news articles, makes people aware of your brand and even gives you the chance to introduce and justify yourself. Controversies can be a great booster for your marketing. However, be absolutely sure not to be at the centre of controversies all the time as that will definitely black list you in the minds of the audiences.
Humanise Your Brand
Finding a cause to support and spreading that message to your prospects and clients is one way to make your brand more human. The easiest method to do this is to develop original solutions for the issues that your customers face by realising that these issues may be divided into three categories: philosophical, internal, and external.
You may start incorporating a narrative into your marketing communications that gives your clients value and helps them think that you have solutions to their problems once you have determined their requirements and challenges.
All the best!
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