The Basics For Developing Your Brand

By definition, branding is:

The process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumer’s mind, mainly through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Thriving businesses are those with successful and effective branding. Depending on the type of business you run, you might want to consider some of these branding tips before you begin advertising. Let’s cover some of the basics:

Know your target audience

Most likely, you have a specific “target” audience you want to pursue with your product or service. Making sure you understand the needs and wants of your audience will help you develop campaigns and strategies that will reach them more effectively than by just throwing random advertisements out there. These days, creating “organic” reach is extremely important to a business’ brand. People are coming to you because of who you are (your culture, things you stand for, etc.), not just for your product/service. Trying to reach every person in every demographic can hurt your brand, almost diluting it.

People can see passion

Passion leads to long-term success, and it’s obvious when a business is passionate about its product or service. Anyone can build a successful business in the short-term. If you’re super enthusiastic about something you do, it’s only natural that the right people will want to follow you. Followers lead to word-of-mouth advertising, and positive referrals (more organic reach). When you’re passionate about something, it also makes you try a lot harder to save your business if things start to go south.

Be consistent

People come back to a business expecting the same, if not better, service that they received the previous time. Because businesses are so connected through social media, word travels fast, and it’s just as simple to find a replacement for your business if you become inconsistent.

Be distinct

Everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Oprah. What did their brands do to create the enormous empires they built in their fields? They created innovative products, ideas and ways of life. Even if you’re offering a product or service that many other businesses offer, what can you do to stand out from the crowd? Another huge brand, Netflix, dominates online streaming. What makes it different from its competitors such as Hulu, Showtime or HBO GO? Netflix continues to adapt. The company sponsors high quality, original programming. Netflix allow complete user control, focusing on what the consumer wants, and not just adding random features. The company has weeded out competitors because of the freedom and flexibility it gives consumers. At the end of the day, you can’t really beat $8 a month for unlimited streaming, either. Make sure your brand can hold its own, and find its niche.

Design basics

The first thing people see is color. It could be on your logo or the colors in your venue. They set the mood and have an affect whether you or the customer realizes it. There are a ton of color psychology theories out there where you can find the one that fits your image  best. Consider it a starting point if you have no idea where to begin. We’ll get into elements of design in a later post.

Maybe the first things you think about when you hear “brand” are cool colors, a logo or a tagline. Those are all super important to the overall aesthetics of your brand, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes planning to do before you bring your brand out into the world. This is why figuring out what you want your product or service to represent can tremendously help your future advertising campaigns. It’s much more difficult to fix a brand’s image than it is to carefully create it from scratch.

Setting Goals For Your Advertisements

If you don’t have an idea of what you want to achieve with your advertisement, it’ll be difficult to determine how successful the ad will be. Setting goals is crucial to advertising because you have to measure its effectiveness and impact in order to make changes and create new strategy. Goals can vary from increased sales, product or service awareness, to more website traffic. You can find out if you are getting a return on your investment by laying out what you hope to accomplish with your advertising campaign. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Be specific

When setting your goal, make it something measurable. To make your goals specific, use numbers. For example, let’s say you want a $300 increase in sales for the month of June, generated by your print ad in the local news magazine. The key is to be realistic: goals may not be met by one ad or over night.

2. Track Sales

Create a spreadsheet so that when you start advertising, you can gauge how your sales are improving or going downhill. Start weekly tracking about a month before your ad runs to set a starting point average. During your advertising campaign, watch how your sales fluctuate. Leave some space for a post-ad period for those who may respond to the ad in the weeks following its publication. If you’re including a coupon in your ad, use a specific code to the ad that was published.

3. Track Awareness

A major misconception about advertising is that it produces immediate results. It is possible, but the most common result of advertising is brand awareness. We’ll save explaining how to determine what your brand is for another day. But for now, keeping track of this kind of increase is important because your ad could be working without you even knowing. Also, people want to know who you are before purchasing your product or service. Keep an eye on your social media sites for increased traffic during your campaign and watch for traffic to your website. Both are obvious indicators of increased brand awareness.

By utilizing these tactics, you can draw a reasonable conclusion about whether your advertising is working or falling flat of your expectations. Instead of going in blind, be smart about how you can advertise and get the most out of it by setting specific and measurable goals.

 

 

 

The Value of Print Advertising

In today’s “digital world,” it seems as though advertisers greatly underestimate the power of print simply because they are told it is a dying field. Although many print vehicles have disappeared, that doesn’t apply to all print media and it can be relatively easy to figure out which print businesses are still thriving. Advertisers may not realize how big of an impact print advertising can still make.

Target Audience

It’s not only the quantity of a medium’s audience that is important, but also the quality of the audience and whether they have an interest in a product. Also, It’s important to consider demographics. If the audience is mostly women, particularly mothers, it’s likely that they are the most active and influential buyers in a community. Furthermore, what is the income and house value of the audience? Is it on the lower end of the spectrum, or does this audience have more disposable income to spend on a product?

Circulation

If your business is located in a particular part of a city, your most prominent audience is that within a close radius of your business. The location and the size of the circulation also play a factor in the influential of print ad. It may be more expensive to advertise in a print publication that circulates to 50,000 readers in your area than one that only circulates to half. That extra 50 percent of readers can dictate your visibility in the community and affect the exposure of your business in your operation area.

Purchaser Influence

Evidence suggests that print ads are more potent sales tools than digital ads. Gardner Business Media reports:

“A study, conducted in 2012 by Dynamic Logic on behalf of the Magazine Publishers of America, measured the total increase in purchase consideration/intent for a variety of products. The results? Television [ads] accounted for a 30% increase, online [ads] tallied 13% in increase, but, dramatically, magazines represented a 56% increase. In other words, magazines blew the other two media away in driving positive shifts in intention to buy.”

Print magazines also hold value to purchaser influence because of its long shelf life. It’s not just a fleeting moment on a web page, but a tangible item that has the potential of pass-along circulation.

Credibility

Print seems to be especially effective when correlated with a particular news source that is regarded as highly credible. A research report by the Online Publishers Association found that the credibility of a media company’s content carries over to the credibility of the advertising on their site. Consumers who are loyal to branded media sites are 50 percent more likely to purchase from advertisers on these sites. Ads that appear on a trusted newspaper or news magazine website are perceived as more credible and reputable.

These are just some of the reasons why advertisers are still recognizing and taking advantage of print advertising. Now that you know all that print advertising has to offer, consider incorporating this medium in your next advertising push.

 

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