Branding tips

Branding is an important part of business marketing…but what are you supposed to do when you’re just starting out and don’t have the capital to put behind a killer branding campaign?

The good news is that you don’t have to be a business bigwig to create branding that really sings. The Internet has especially made branding easier than ever, and marketing yourself online is now cheap and easy thanks to these tools.

I can offer a million budget branding tips, but let’s start out with these four important pieces of advice:

1. Newsletters

One thing I always say about branding is that the time you invest will always be more important than the money you spend. A consistent brand is one that works hard to create and maintain their image and personality. Sending out newsletters to an email list may not seem like the best way to brand in the short term, but the long term effects are certainly worth it.

You already have someone on the hook with your company. Even if they ignore a lot of your newsletters, it’s sometimes enough to regularly show up in a consumer’s inbox. This keeps you familiar to them, and those who do click regularly will get a taste of your consistent branding every time.

2. Customer Insights

Sometimes the best branding opportunities don’t even come from you directly. Customers you have that are happy with your services will gladly say so, and this is something you can leverage.

Whether through user generated content or testimonials, customers showcase how they feel about your brand in a positive way. This kind of human feedback creates credibility among other potential customers online. A credible brand is a brand that succeeds because they’ve proven their value to not just the customers they already have, but to the world at large.

3. Social Media

This should go without saying, but social media will always be your easiest and most inexpensive format for branding. Many associate market with social media more than they do branding, but brand identity and social media go hand in hand.

We can define marketing as purposefully trying to attract customers, while branding is something that is more subtle and subconscious. A brand is an identity, not an action – more aptly, it is the intention behind that action and what that action means. Things like personality and values can be communicated through interacting and posting on social media with a brand’s voice as the vehicle.

4. Work with Amateur Freelancers

Freelance graphic designers just starting out are looking to fill up their resumes with work in order to get bigger clients and show their areas of expertise. If you’re looking for a logo or something related to web design, amateur freelancers are out there, ready and willing to give you decent work at an incredible price.

You don’t have to spend big to get a nice, simple logo produced. It’s also possible to refurbish your branding later on down the line when you have more capital to invest.

You’ve spent a lot of time building your brand messaging stock…but is it actually doing anything for you? If you aren’t putting attention on what your target audience is and if your branding is actually reaching them. Branding and marketing can’t be created and just tossed out onto the Internet as a catch all — extra work needs to be put in to ensure that the content reaches who it will actually appeal to.

There are two obvious steps to making sure that your branding efforts aren’t in vain: deciphering who your target audience is, then using analytics to ensure that they’re being accurately reached.

Establishing Target Audiences

The first step in establishing your target audiences is to simply sit down and see what makes the most sense. What audience does it make sense for your brand to reach out to? A specific gender? Age group? Niche audience? Profession? The more specific you can be, the better.

Demographics aren’t the only area to explore, though. Sometimes you need to appeal to how someone thinks instead of who they are, and this is called a psychographic. This is marketing and branding strategies that appeal to someone on a more mental level than an obvious category. Areas like a person’s values or interests fall into this category.

Sometimes a target audience is more abstract than a specific subset of people. This means that your brand identity is more vague — it’s not like there’s a specific subset of people that Coca Cola or Walmart advertise to. While an individual ad might have a target audience in mind, the brand itself doesn’t have one set demographic.

Establishing a Brand Connection

Once you’ve established what your target demographic is, it’s time to reach out to them. Depending on who your demographics are, how you reach out to them and build that connection may drastically change. Many key demographics can be reached via social media, but which sites? Do you have a target demographic in mind that isn’t so Internet savvy, like the elderly?

Analyzing the Outcome

The best way to understand if your brand is actually connecting with an audience is to analyze the data involved with your branding and marketing to see if it’s working the way you want it to. Many social sites and blogging platforms like Twitter and WordPress have built in analytics tools that you can use for free or at a very low price. These are great resources! However, it never hurts to spend a little money on tried and true analytics software.

Analytics is how you determine if your plans are actually succeeding. Without analytics, you push branding content out into the world blind. How will you know if it’s successful? Is it failing? Is it succeeding?

The great thing about analytics is that it can get into specifics. If you do a branding overhaul and see your sales go up, your plan worked — but why? How can you execute this same plan again and again to better ensure future success? Analytics is worth paying for, and it’s worth paying very close attention to too.