In a society where there are millions of brands, consumers are bombarded with different services and products throughout the day. So, it is tough for a new emerging brand to get recognized and establish itself. That’s where business branding comes in handy. 94% of the customers(1) trust a brand if its transparent to their customers and share unique content about their products and services.
What Makes A Strong Band?
Everyone’s school of thought on business branding is different. Some might think that its just colors and themes on the website whereas, some people think its all the marketing campaigns. But if you want to know what a strong brand is, you need to consider the following factors that build it gradually.
- Brand design, that is the colors, logos, themes, packaging, typography, etc.
- Marketing campaigns.
- Storefront and store locations.
- Social media presence.
- Great customer service.
- Company and owner’s working culture.
- Slogans and taglines.
- Pricing and product or service quality.
- Overall ‘personality’ and beliefs of the brand.
Other than that, audience, targeted marketing, philosophy, awareness, message, and tone are some of the factors that contribute to the foundation of a brand.
For example, Apple has millions of consumers not because of their marketing campaigns but for their innovation, sleek-look products, and the stores’ atmosphere.
Benefits of Branding
So, how can branding help a business to grow? Here are some benefits of branding that you should know!
-
Repeated Business Opportunities
Once a business has succeeded in making an impact in the marketplace, it can start modeling other factors and put in more effort. When there are repeated business opportunities for a brand, the rest of the work becomes easier to deal with.
-
Increased Promoting Activities from Your Loyal Customers
loyal customers come a long way to promote your brand and try to uplift your brand’s presence by writing big shiny reviews in favor of your brand. The main purpose is to convince others to use your brand. When others finally use your brand on their recommendation, they feel happy about it.
-
Unbreakable Customer Trust
All customers have trust issues unless they know a brand’s product quality. However, if you have a strong brand, you would be seen as a well-established business by the consumers. Consequently, they would not second guess while shopping through your store or website. Even if you have a small business, you can compete with large enterprises with effective branding.
-
Increased Customer Loyalty
Once you have succeeded to sell the products to the consumers, they can come back again and again for more. Hence, making them loyal to your brand. Whenever a brand offers great customer services with top-notch products, customer loyalty strengthens like a concrete wall.
-
Recognition
Recognition is closely related to familiarity. If a consumer recognizes a brand’s color, theme, slogan or logo, he would choose that product over all the other products. However, your color contrast and logos for your brand must be eye-catching and appealing.
-
High Return on Investment and Increased Profits
A study indicates that branding increases profits by 25%. You can keep increasing your company’s revenues, profits and return on investment by effective branding.
-
Decreasing Advertisement Costs
Branding on big social media platforms cut down your advertisement costs. By using social media platforms, you can reach a wider base of audience without having to pay a hefty amount of money. Most of the renowned brands skip paid advertisements and marketing as well.
( Also Read: Role of Social Media in Brand Building )
-
Establish an Authoritative Brand
If your brand speaks in a personalized tone with its consumers and addresses its interests, challenges, goals and values, congratulations, you have succeeded to establish a brand that has more authority in the marketplace.
-
Stretch Out Your Brand Awareness
Branding makes it extremely easy for potential consumers to find you. Not only are they able to find you on social media sites but the messaging apps as well. Moreover, they could easily read reviews and make quick buying decisions.
-
Improve Your Company’s Value
If your brand has a personality, it’s easier to inform people about your company’s values and motives. If your brand has an aware image in the marketplace, there’s a 100% chance that millions of consumers are aware of your motives, values, and philosophy.
-
Scale Your Brand with Multiple Products
If people are familiar with your brand, you can launch other products in light of your signature products. This is the greatest benefits of branding. If you have a strong branding strategy, you can launch and introduce new services and products without spending much on their marketing.
-
Stay on Top of Your Competitors
Do your competitors already have a huge place in the market, and you want to outwork them? It might seem impossible to beat your competitors but with branding, it’s possible. If you try to establish your business as a better alternative to big names, people might give get attracted to you. However, you need to be personalized and as unique as possible.
-
Charge for Premium Quality
One of the greatest benefits of branding is that you can charge extra for high quality even if the difference between your and your competitor’s product is minimal. People like to pay more to the brand that they can own.
-
Retain Top Employees
Losing an employee is always a huge loss for the company due to the money spent on training, recruitment, etc. However, branding increases your workers’ loyalty as well. Employees are more productive is the company they work in is globally recognized.
-
Attract Potential Investors
The stronger your brand is, the more investors you would have inline. Investors always like to work with companies that are globally recognized and are credible.
-
Decreased Marketing Costs
Branding does not only reduce recruitment costs but marketing costs as well. If branding is strong, you won’t have to pay for paid advertisements and sponsored posts to increase your social media presence.
-
Attract Appreciative Customers
It might hurt but the truth is, customers can hurt you too. If your branding is weak, you can expect a bad review from an angry client whom you failed to satisfy. One of the benefits of branding is that you can attract consumers that appreciate your services and products. It might feel like losing customers, but one angry consumer can cost you 10 customers.
-
Work Within Your Strengthens
By branding, you get the opportunity of working within your strength. For instance, you can sell both, a luxury home and an ordinary condo but what’s special about your brand? That you deal in luxury homes all the time.
It means that branding helps you to work in the stronger areas.
-
Gather Great Reviews
Toiling hard for your business could pay off in the form of great reviews. Every time you work hard for your brand, you attract a bunch of loyal customers ready to give you a 10 on 10 reviews to uplift your brand online.
-
Word of Mouth Always Matters
Even though 80% of the people believe that brand recognition is the only thing that matters but your brand’s slogans and taglines could make a difference. This way, people would be drawn to your brand and would choose you because of your fruitful words and promises.
-
Influence the Influencers
Branding does not mean collaborating with influencers. It is much more about influencing them to use your product and have them satisfied with the product’s quality. influencers have a huge impact on their followers. By their words, they can sway opinions on your brand.
-
Consistent Marketing
Once you have your branding strategy right in place, you can begin to work on other areas, such as your marketing campaigns easily. You won’t have to put in much effort. Moreover, you would be able to make decisions easily based on your branding’s foundation.
-
Pay Attention to Ideal Customers
Ideal customers are the most influential ones. If you have a good branding strategy, targeting ideal customers, such as a local celebrity can prove to be a goldmine for you. Influential customers have the utmost power to change the opinions of others about your brand.
-
Enhances Confidence
Branding for your business does not only provide customers with the confidence they need but also the business owner. If you have a great branding strategy, you would have a different energy and you would work with more optimism and professionalism. If you are confident, it would be easier to grab the audience’s attention for the sake of your products and services.
Good branding is beneficial for the owner to think that he has created something appreciative and great for his customers.
-
Increases Credibility
An established business is the one that offers great customer service along with professional behavior all the time. Not only does it improve customers’ loyalty but your credibility as well. Innovative marketing, great visual content, taglines, and great customer service together make a brand credible.
-
Improves Advertisement Response Rate
People always choose the brand they know but branding is much more than brand awareness and a reputable name.
People choose the brand only and only if they are familiar with the quality, color, font, theme, and origin. Consistent branding efforts help your business to be recognized in the eyes of the audience. whenever they recognize your brand, they would most likely open the add and make the purchase right away without second thoughts.
-
Creating Foundation for Long-Term Success
Good branding leads to the long-term success of an organization. Once you have been built as a brand, its hard for your competitors to knock you off. Branding is not just a benefit for the present but an investment for your brand’s future.
( Also Read: Branding Your Business: New Media vs Traditional Media Advertising )
Branding Challenges
While branding is beneficial to every business out there, many of them have faced challenges while implementing their branding strategy. Here are some of the common challenges:
-
Treating Branding as An Asset
The pressure of coming up with short-term financial results and building social media presence tempts many companies to focus more on metrics and numbers and less on its credibility as a brand.
-
Bringing Up Breakthrough Brand Concepts
Even though bringing up exceptional ideas for the organization is necessary to fill the vision with life but many owners are not able to do so, mainly because of insufficient resources and budget.
-
Financial Challenges
Many enterprises do not have the budget to bring brilliant ideas to the marketplace. Despite having the vision, they cannot implement it.
-
Creating a Digital Branding Strategy
Digital branding is complex and dynamic. The truth is, the audience is in charge of all the digital platforms and sometimes, its difficult for the organizations to introduce new initiatives and other marketing modalities.
Final Thoughts
By reading the above benefits of branding, I am sure how necessary it is for a business’s credibility and presence. If you are a business owner looking for a chance to implement a branding strategy for company growth, make sure to cover every aspect so that you can access all the opportunities.