How To Build Your Brand in 5 Simple Steps
With the continuous advancement of technology, consumers have an ever-increasing number of mediums through which they can interact with the world around them. Desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, billboards, newspapers and tvs are just a few of the channels through which consumers can be reached. The use of varied channels by consumers means that the best strategy for a brand to connect with them is through multichannel marketing.
Multichannel marketing uses a number of both online and offline media channels to dispense information to its target market. What’s most important with multichannel marketing, as with any other form of marketing, is consistency.
5 steps to help build a brand with consistency
1. Evaluating the Current Brand
Conducting a brand audit is the first step to establishing brand consistency. Is your brand doing a good job of communicating company culture and values internally? Are these values being projected externally through your company’s advertising and marketing channels? Does your current sales and customer support processes result in good customer experience?
The degree of alignment between marketing communication and content, as well as identifying content quality strengths and weaknesses, are detailed. By measuring your customer satisfaction and how your audience sees your brand over time, a brand audit benchmarks your success against that of your competitors.
2. Creating a strategy for brand consistency
With the results of the audit and an evaluation of the brand completed, it’s time to create a strategy for streamlining content creation and maintaining brand consistency. Creating such a strategy and producing quality content is not easily done as it requires an in-depth understanding of your target market and adhering to certain constraints such as budget and time. It is important that the content produced is current, timely, and appropriate.
Why should a business worry about consistency in the first place? Brand consistency is crucial to obtaining consumer trust, enhancing connectivity, and allowing consumers to recognize and remember it more distinctively. Consistency helps portray the brand more clearly, allowing consumers to develop associations with products, services, and the company.
3. Streamline consistent content creation
When streamlining content creation, the first step is to develop an understanding of your audience’s interests. What type of content would they like to see and are likely to respond to? How would you describe that audience? What are their pain points? Once the answers to these questions are known, it’s then recommended that different types of content be tested on various platforms to judge customer response. A brand guideline should then be created that outlines the best approaches and clear parameters to ensure the creation of suitable content.
4. Active brand presence
Winning new clients is not an easy task. As more competitors come on the scene and new marketing channels and strategies emerge, a custom approach to marketing that’s spread across multiple media platforms becomes necessary for branding. Since the start of the Great Resignation many companies have faced great difficulties with securing an in-house marketing team. The best solution for this has been found to be marketing outsourcing.
5. Monitor and measure your brand activity
The final step to maintaining brand consistency is monitoring and measuring brand activity. Accurately measuring brand activity means monitoring click through rates, traffic, conversions, social shares, among other marketing metrics to assess performance. Brand activity is key to the improvement of current marketing strategies and the development of new strategies.
Consistency can be a challenge for small businesses. With many factors to consider, small businesses often don’t have the time or resources to focus on consistency and branding. Branding is a complex job and requires the right expertise for it to be done successfully. For this reason, a great option for small companies is marketing outsourcing. Marketing outsourcing entails contracting the services of an external marketing agency to manage the marketing plans and activities of the brand. It’s an option that has many merits that should prove attractive to a small business – it includes cost effective pricing and having on-call marketing experts at your fingertips.
Author Bio:
Anna Stella is a two-time national award-winning marketing expert, academic researcher, and CEO of the global marketing outsourcing agency BBSA, Anna has 20+ years of experience within the B2B, B2C, and non-profit industries. Clients include Volkswagen AG,
the Government, NewsCorp, the European Union, RICS, and Rational AG, just to name a few.
Anna is one of the few global experts in marketing outsourcing her key achievements include winning the 2014 Institute of Directors Henley Competition and the 2012 RICS Social Media Marketing Award.
