“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
The term “brand” is more than a logo or company name. Your brand is the perception and impression that clients or customers have of your business and the voice that defines your business as a whole. A study shows that 64% of customers in the world pursue relationships with brands based on shared values, it is vital for companies to implement and identify the right branding strategies capture the attention of customers and understand they hold important to them.
With the ever changing nature of consumer environment, social media, the rise of millennials and the importance of thought-leadership, the rules around branding are transforming more rapidly and pushing brands to go out of the box and come up with different ideas to engage with their audience in new ways.
Branding is absolutely necessary if you want to succeed in the business world. According to experts, a good brand can lead to better customer loyalty, enhanced company image, and a more relatable identity. Branding strategies are the action plans that organisation uses to differentiate their products, services, and identities from their competitors.
Related: 4 Important Keys To Develop Your Brand
Consistency
According to studies, brands that present themselves in a consistent and familiar way are up to four times more likely to experience brand visibility.
Consistency is easier to achieve than you might think. It simply means assessing everything you do and asking yourself whether it fits with the image you’re presenting to the world. A great way to improve your chances of consistency is to create some “brand guidelines”. Remember that consistency in your brand image is also essential for your internal communications plan, as it can help to reinforce your core messages and vision with your employees.
Emotional Connections
Emotion is a component that makes a good branding strategy due to the proven fact that customers are more “emotional” rather than “logical” in their buying choices than you expect, if you can find a way to connect with your customers on a deeper level, you can understand what they hold close to them and develop a more sustainable relationship with them in the long run.
Employee Empowerment
Finally, while your customers are an important factor when it comes to helping your company thrive, there’s another group of people who are frequently overlooked in the business space, and that’s your employees. Whether you’re investing in a new type of social media branding, or you’re building a brand from scratch, you need the insights and buy-in of your customers to be successful.
Integrating a brand advocacy strategy into your branding strategies could help you to create an image that’s inherently more powerful. After all, if multiple people are saying the same thing about a company, they’re far more believable than just one voice. What’s more, your marketing messages reach up to 561% more people when shared by employees.
The presence or absence of employee engagement can affect how customers perceive your brand, and how much they trust your company. While brands are beginning to recognize how important their teams can be to their branding strategies, you might not know how to tap into the true potential of your employees when it comes to social media branding. The way to explore the true potential of your employee is by Educating and Providing Guidelines, sharing the right resources and tools, Motivating and rewarding your advocates, A Better Brand Starts with Engaged Employees.
At the end of the day, branding saves you money, not costs you more. So while as a start up, the investment might seem hard to make, in the long run, your brand will prove to be invaluable.
Related: Is Maintaining Brand Awareness Important?
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