Products/Services vs brand marketing

Unless you offer a truly unique product or service, your business will always be competing with other providers of similar products or services. Given that prospects have a lot of choses, your brand is one of the places where your business can stand out.

Creating a memorable brand

The most important first steps are to:

• Know your target market
• Understand what drives their purchase decisions
• Determine the most engaging way to appear to your target

This is why branding is a process rather than a quick selection of a graphic that you and your staff like. Without a good understanding of your target, more than likely, your first attempt at branding will fall short of your expectations.

Why to get professional branding help

As mentioned above, branding is a process. It’s a strategic exercise best guided by professionals who can study and recommend an objective brand and strategy. Business owners may have strong opinions on how they want to “look” publicly but little or no understanding of how they need to be “seen” to engage their target market. So the result of an effective branding process is a marriage between how a business wants to be seen and what motivates prospects to choose their business.

The goal is to ensure that your brand connects with your target audience and that your marketing is consistent and stays on target.

A brand's identity begins with visual elements, including its logo, colors, and packaging. Then, it involves strategies to raise brand awareness, promoting how a customer recognizes and remembers your brand and its services or products.

Ultimately, brand marketing involves all levels of your business, from products to sales to communications and everything in between.

New Trends in Marketing Communications

Marketing is mostly about communication with prospects and customers. Fortunately, the explosion of new technology and communication channels is making it remarkably easy for even the smallest business to keep in touch with prospects and customers.

Advancements in Technology

The most important first steps are to:

• Personalization: Good CRM’s designed for small businesses make it increasingly easy to create more personalized marketing messages and experiences for customers and prospects.
• Video Content: We all carry almost movie-worthy camera’s in our pocket. A quick video highlighting a specific product or service is becoming a popular way to promote brands and products, especially on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
• Interactive Content: Interactive content such as contests, quizzes, polls, and surveys are being used to engage with consumers and gather valuable data about their preferences. Most social media platforms have contest and polling apps built it so it's easy to create a contest or poll.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is being used in marketing to create more personalized experiences for customers, automate tasks, and analyze data to better understand their behavior.
• Virtual and Augmented Reality: Brands are using VR and AR to create immersive experiences for their customers, allowing them to try products virtually or explore a virtual store.

An Explosion of Communication Channels

Between phone calls, website chat bots, SMS messaging, and email; customers and prospects are more in touch than ever before. Small businesses need to embrace these channels to make it easy to interact with customers. We are sure you know from your own experiences, that you are more likely to do business with someone who responds to your questions and concerns quickly. Here are ways to make it easy for prospects and customers to interact:

• Make sure a human answers your telephone during business hours. A quick response will build customer loyalty.
• Add a chat bot to your website. This makes it easy for a visitor to ask a question, get a price or clarify a service immediately. Without this information, they are likely to wander off and find another vendor who can answer them.
• Everyone has a form on their website. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t make checking the general email box a priority.
• A quick text to remind a customer of an appointment or alert them about an order is almost universally welcomed.
• FaceBook, Instagram and LinkedIn make it easy to contact a business, but like website forms, very few businesses monitor these channels.

Review the ways you can use new technology and communication channels to enhance the customer experience. This will help you retain and build stronger customer relationships.

Actionable Tip

The best way to start organizing your marketing effort is to use a Customer Relationship Management tool. In the past, a CRM was generally used by larger businesses with thousands of customers. Today, tools like Zoho’s Bigin, Hubspot, and Monday.com offer easy to use tools for very small businesses. According to Forbes, the benefits of using a CRM are to:

• Centralize customer data
• Identify and convert more leads
• Increase customer retention rates
• Make intelligent, data-driven decisions
• Automate the boring stuff
• Make more money