When it comes to marketing your product, brand identity and brand image are both crucial elements in your business’s success. Building a strong brand not only helps customers to recognize and remember your products, but it also helps establish a connection with your clients. The identity you construct helps potential customers to understand your brand ethos and helps convert interested parties into regular clients. In today’s competitive marketplace, it’s more important than ever to build a brand that stands out online.
Why Brand Image and Brand Identity Make You Unforgettable
Marketing has changed drastically over the last decade or so. With the rise of social media platforms and online advertising as a genuine threat to traditional marketing, more and more brands are focusing on building a strong online presence. Perfecting your company identity is an important part of this process and is an essential aspect of creating a strong brand image.
What Is the Difference Between Brand Image and Brand Identity?
Your brand identity is a vital part of your overall brand image. While brand image refers to the way that clients and potential customers perceive your business, your identity refers to the aesthetic such as colors, fonts, and design that makes your business stand out. This could refer to a brand logo, brand media aesthetics, or brand website design.
To market your business online and to create a consistent online presence, it is very important to create an aesthetic identity. By developing a strong identity, you can showcase your company ethos and attract customers who will truly value your products. Creating a unique logo or brand aesthetic also helps you to diversify your products, services, and your marketing tactics, all under a unified identity. This helps you keep old customers while attracting new ones.
So, how do you go about building a brand that will stand out in people’s minds? And, once you’ve got something you’re happy with, how do you market it creatively and consistently online? Here are just some of the reasons why we think branding is more important than ever, and some of the ways that businesses can use their identity to maximize their impact online.
How Will Strong Branding Help Your Business?
1. Attract Customers
What do really memorable brands have in common? Chances are if you’re thinking of a highly recognizable brand, like Apple or Google, it’s something to do with their branding. Maybe it’s a unique brand logo, a crisp clean aesthetic across all of their products, or a certain tone used in all of their social media posts. Whatever the case, if the branding is strong, customers will connect certain images, phrases, or products with your company.
Utilizing marketing concepts, such as a brand logo, is a great way to build brand recognition. A brand logo is an ideal place to start as it gives people something visual that they will easily recall. This is more effective than a sentence or a written banner for the simple reason that it is easier to remember an image than a string of words.
With a well-placed, eye-catching logo, customers will be able to recall your brand after only one glance. With a sentence, customers usually need to be exposed several times to create a strong recall response. Logos are a more appropriate starting point for advertising online as, when you are marketing on social media, you rely on people scrolling past your image and stopping. Customers who see a strong brand logo are more likely to remember and to seek out your products.
2. Make Your Brand Stand Out
The ability to start and market businesses online has led to a boom in competition across a number of industries. This means that it’s more important than ever that customers recognize your brand and can pick you out of a crowd. Developing a strong brand presence is extremely important for this.
Remember, your brand marketing should also give your customers an idea of what you do. Once you’ve got your logo, try to think about some of the USPs that make your brand different from all the others and add a flavor of this to your brand marketing. By highlighting your differences from other brands, you can make sure that customers remember you over your competitors.
3. Communicate Your Brand Values
A brand logo and online aesthetic not only generate visibility for your business but are also important tools for delivering your message and your brand ethos to your customers. Your marketing content – whether this refers to your social media posts or your promotional content – should reflect your core values as a business.
For example, if you are a small, family business, try to use branding or images that convey this message to your customers. Opt for genuine images and create promotional content that focuses on how individuals function within your company or content that tells your brand story. Similarly, if your focus is on cutting-edge innovation, futuristic images and clean minimalist styles are likely the way to go.
The reason that this is effective is that using your brand content to tell a story evokes an emotional reaction in potential customers. When people feel emotionally connected to what they see, they are far more likely to remember your brand and return to use your products.
4. Encourage Online Engagement
Creating an identity around your brand has never been more important in terms of encouraging customer engagement. Modern customers don’t want to buy from faceless brands – they want to know where their products come from and where their money is going. By developing a strong brand identity, you give your company a face and a personality that customers can connect with.
This connection can come in the form of encouraging comments on your Facebook posts, to inviting customers to send in pictures of themselves using your products for your Instagram feed. These personal touches help customers feel that they have an established relationship with your brand, which is a great way to build brand loyalty.
It is also a great opportunity for you to stay one step ahead of what customers want. Notice that a certain new product is getting rave reviews in the comments or that a piece of content hasn’t received as much engagement? By promoting your brand online, you get to watch your customers’ reactions in real-time and adapt your business model as you go.
5. Signify Quality
Once you have developed a customer base, your brand signifiers – such as your logo or tagline – remain just as important. If your brand development is strong enough, these images or icons will become symbols of who you are and the quality of service that you provide. Having a strong, recognizable brand logo to support a high-quality product means that people will come to associate your brand with a certain level of service or performance: a crucial aspect for brand longevity.
In today’s fast-moving marketplace, building a strong brand identity that you can advertise online is really vital to creating a successful brand image. It can help you build a loyal customer base, establish yourself in your niche area, and increase engagement with your services. To find out more about building your business’s online presence using state-of-the-art marketing tools, check out Social Media Move today!