Brand promotion

Does it make sense to start promoting your brand right now? Yes, sure! If you have still put off promotion until later, you are losing greatly to other companies in your field that paid special attention to brand development.

While you were marking time, sorting out your routine for days, during breaks exchanging fire with landlords, employees and government agencies, more agile competitors were far ahead.

But, since you are reading this article now, it means you have finally found time to create and promote a brand. This is a wise decision and it will definitely bear fruit. And we, for our part, will try to give as much useful information as possible that we have received over the years of experience.

Brand and branding: what is the difference?

Competition in today's market is increasingly reminiscent of scenes from Star Wars. Today it is no longer enough to just make a good product and sit back and wait for the hype. Without creating a brand and its further promotion, there is nothing to do on the market for a long time. 

Before moving on to the practical part, let's look at the basic definitions.

A brand is the image of a company. This concept includes:

• logo;
• corporate style;
• product line;
• USP. 

In short, everything that distinguishes your brand from thousands of similar ones on the market.

Branding is a set of activities aimed at “promoting” a brand, including creation, development and scaling. Every step of brand promotion on the market is ultimately aimed at establishing, maintaining and strengthening relationships with the consumer.    

So, in order to win the favor of the audience, you need to work hard. High-quality branding does not happen overnight. You need a well-thought-out strategy created according to all the rules of modern marketing.  

Setting goals and objectives for the brand development strategy

Work on the company's image should start from the end. Think about what results you want to achieve? High-quality branding can do a lot:

• Increased brand awareness leads to improved positioning. The company compares favorably with its competitors. The logo and other branded elements instantly evoke an association with the product.
• Growing your customer base helps to increase the level of loyalty and trust in your brand from customers. People are much more willing to purchase products from a well-known brand than from an unknown manufacturer. 
• Creating a strong team, cohesive staff. It is much easier to attract smart specialists to a well-promoted company. Working for a recognized organization is considered prestigious. In addition, the brand prevents turnover, retains and cultivates loyal employees.  
• Expansion of the product line. It is much cheaper, easier and faster for a well-known brand to bring a new product or service to market than for a little-known company.    
• Trust of partners. The brand plays an important role in relationships with suppliers and contractors. A big name smooths out rough edges in issues, helps to reach more favorable agreements, and softens conditions.

All these factors ultimately lead to the most important goal of any company: increasing turnover, sales and profits. 

And this is definitely what every entrepreneur strives for. 

Preliminary analytical work

In fact, there is no universal method for brand positioning and promotion. Each niche has its own nuances. And the chips that work flawlessly in one type of activity are not worth a penny in another. 

But, regardless of the type, scale and even geography of the business, any promotion should begin with a deep marketing analysis. And you need to take this stage seriously. After all, the cleaner and more relevant the data obtained during the research turns out to be, the more accurately the target will be hit and the higher the effect of the entire event.

Competitors

The main goal of competitor analysis is not to find out pricing margins. It is necessary to “calculate” strengths and weaknesses. This will help:

• create a strong USP;
• avoid mistakes at the start;
• avoid pitfalls;
• save your budget. 

During the briefing process, our clients often claim that they know their competitors like the back of their hand. But with deeper detail, it turns out that the research never went beyond the name, prices and product line. 

Superficial elaboration gives nothing!

To develop an effective brand strategy, a deep and professional analysis is required, including the use of a tool such as a “mystery shopper.” This is the only way you will be able to understand what your competitors actually “breathe”, which will allow you to develop a really working brand positioning concept.

Target Audience

Needless to say, without market information it is impossible to move corporate branding forward even one step. It is necessary to find out at what level consumer demand is now and make at least a minimum forecast of how and in what direction it will develop.

Although the topic of target audience research has been covered far and wide, many business owners are still not sure that this issue requires serious attention. 

Correct work on the portrait of the target audience is the path to a win-win choice of promotion methods, and therefore to significant savings and reasonable investment of the advertising budget. 

Brand promotion tools and methods

Only having high-quality analytical material in hand can you move on to the stage of selecting a promotion method. After all, each individual advertising campaign has a different impact on individual segments of the audience, taking into account its needs.

There are more than enough methods and tools for brand promotion, the main thing is to choose the right one at the start:

• advertising in the media (radio, TV, custom PR articles for the press);
• Internet promotion (website, SEO, social networks, contextual and targeted advertising);
• newsletter presentations and commercial offers;
• participation in exhibitions, seminars, conferences (positioning the company’s brand with the help of image and souvenir printing;
• sponsorship of mass and social events;
• provocative marketing.

All brand positioning activities fall into one of two groups:

1. Push is promotion carried out by influencing staff, partners and dealers.
2. Pull - promotion using methods of influencing directly on the consumer.

Ideally, create a combination of several methods, including brand promotion online and offline. But the final choice will depend on the specifics of the audience, competitors’ promotion channels and, of course, your advertising budget.  

The role of design in promoting a company's brand

It is impossible to imagine high-quality development of a brand strategy without design. It is required literally at every stage:

• logo development, naming, corporate identity, brand book;
• design of packaging, labels; 
• advertising printing concept;
• visual support for online promotion. 

Do you want the brand to take off as soon as possible? Pay maximum attention to every detail. There are no unimportant moments in design. The whole image is made up of little things. 

And in order for it to turn out as harmonious as possible, it is necessary to strive to meet a number of requirements:

• Infographic and attractive. The design should look bright, creative and modern. This can be achieved by using professional programs in combination with original ideas.
• Memorability. Every day, consumers are bombarded with hundreds of advertising offers (Internet, television, street signs, handout flyers). The brain simply sifts out about 95% of this bombardment and immediately erases it, so as not to clutter up the “RAM” with junk files.
  But the remaining five percent still manage to gain a foothold. This happens thanks to skillfully selected, easily remembered and harmoniously arranged brand design elements (logo, slogan, colors, fonts).
• Simplicity. Deep philosophy, sophisticated phrases and visual gobbledygook cause confusion among consumers. The priority is adequacy, naturalness, simple meanings and elements. Professional design solves not only the aesthetic problem of identity. It forms a person’s positive emotions towards your company.
• Versatility. The ability to adapt the developed design to trend trends significantly saves the budget. All elements must fit well into any advertising format, be understandable and relevant to any audience segment.

Who to entrust brand promotion strategy to?

Speaking on the topic of delegation of promotion, I remembered the example of an advertisement for Brooke Bond tea from the 90s. One after another, commercials came out in a similar scenario: everything falls out of hand, then we drank a cup of aromatic tea, everything became okay.

Here is just one example.

In addition to the sleepy klutz, there was also a figure skater endlessly falling onto the ice and an unlucky strongman who kept dropping the barbell. 

So, this brand advertising strategy led to the fact that consumers subconsciously began to perceive Brooke Bond as a loser tea.

It is unlikely that the manufacturer was striving for such a goal!

Later, the concept turned 180 degrees and videos began to be shot in a more positive way. 

But just imagine how much such experiments cost! 

How to avoid such mistakes and save time and money?

Positioning a brand in the market is a responsible matter. This should be done by professionals. 

After all, you wouldn’t trust a baker to repair a car, or a shoemaker to bake a holiday loaf?

Of course not.

So promotion should be entrusted to specialists, or rather, to a team that includes marketers, designers, copywriters, layout designers and all those whose skills may be required in developing brand positioning.

Building a successful strategy requires a significant amount of time, experience, knowledge and a professional technical base. It is almost impossible to do this without special training. 

History contains thousands of situations where a truly high-quality product or brand, deprived of marketing support and a brand positioning strategy, lost its position. 

And vice versa, thanks to a professional approach, legendary brands were born, the name and attributes of which have been recognized almost with their eyes closed for decades.

We hope this article will be helpful in creating your company's brand positioning. If you need the support of a strong team, we are waiting for you for a consultation. To quickly register, just follow this link.