Improving Your Brand Marketing Campaigns

How are you standing out against your competition? This is the question that every business owner should be asking themselves, before they start their next website project.

At Northsail, we've been building a resource vault of articles (like this one), which you can use to improve your own best business practices; in addition to always completing our clients' projects on-time, on-spec, and on-budget.

If you're unsure how to really make your brand 'pop' compared to the competitors you’re going up against in your industry, it might be time to think about how you're utilizing your branded marketing strategies.

But what is brand marketing? Why are branded marketing strategies important? What's the difference between brand marketing vs product marketing?

Before we get to some useful tips for improving your branded marketing strategies, let's discuss these important elements.

Brand marketing at its core is the process through which you build a connection between your unique brand and the consumers that you're serving.

This means promoting more than just your products, services, or the experts that are on your team. It's about taking all those elements and having them work together to create a brand image that's more appealing than your competitors' is; at least, in the minds of your ideal customers.

In order to establish these marketing efforts, you need to start by gaining a deep understanding of the target audience that you're trying to reach. Otherwise, your potential plans could be doomed before you start.

If you’re not reaching the right people, you can’t possibly build the connections you need to drive consumers down your sales funnel, and in turn, build conversions. Without those things, growth and long-term profitability are virtually impossible to achieve.

After that, you have to provide them with clear proof points that directly support the things your brand claims to provide (i.e., problem-solving, ease-of-access, etc.). This way, they’ll have a clear understanding of the value you’re providing above what your competitors are offering.

In the digital age these days, potential customers care more and more about brand affinity, than ever before.

One of the biggest elements of brand affinity is providing social proof; either through customer testimonials, or using social media platforms to connect directly with your target audience and get direct feedback.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, negative feedback isn't always a bad thing. As long as it's addressed publicly on social channels, so that other social media users can see that you're not afraid to deal with issues head-on.

Bonus points if you're able to find a solution that leaves the originally frustrated customer feeling happy and satisfied. Those moments can turn a frustrated consumer into a champion for your brand.

Positive feedback essentially equates to free marketing materials that you can use in the future, so you can really never have too much of it.

So, what's the difference between brand marketing vs product marketing?

Product marketing is very narrow in its scope. It focuses on drawing attention to the specific SKU, its unique features and benefits, with the purpose of trying to increase the product sales numbers.

Brand marketing does include product marketing, but it also includes support from other marketing departments. Together it incorporates your in-store and digital marketing strategies into a single, unified plan of action.

Strong brand marketing campaigns include a variety of different types of marketing campaigns, all working in tandem. This means your social media marketing efforts, referral programs, email campaigns, and paid advertising campaigns should all contain the same messaging and marketing goals.

This way, each of their individual successes can be used to bolster the rest of the campaign.

1.) Create a Holistic Content Marketing Plan

One of the most important parts of creating a strong website is providing meaningful content for your users to enjoy.

This isn't just about your website content either. All of your marketing channels need to reflect the same ideologies and brand voice (i.e., email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, blog content, etc.).

Once you've developed a plan that has all your different marketing teams working together, you'll find your efforts lead to a much more effective marketing campaign as a whole, instead of finding success in single channels. In turn, this can help you more easily reach your overarching goals.

2.) Use Influencers to Promote Your Brand

Influencer marketing is possibly one of the newest and most exciting social media channels that’s become popular over the last several years, and you can utilize it to reach your target audience.

First, you should start by taking a look at your existing loyal customers. If you know any of them personally, it might be helpful to ask them about their favorite influencers in your industry. Do some research. Try to find influencers that are servicing the exact same (or close) type of people that you are.

Once you've reached out to a couple and have been able to reach some kind of strategic partnership, consider doing some unique advertising on both of your chosen social media platforms.

On your end, if they use video-friendly social platforms, consider collaborating with them to do some short video advertising. These can make great paid ad content for you to use later, as well.

For them, suggest that they do a guest post on your site, or actively start to participate in some planned social posts, so that your regular audience can see you've gained their support. Then, they can link or share the posts on their end to bring their network into the mix.

However you choose to do it, influencers are a great resource for product marketing campaigns that you can't afford to overlook in your branded marketing strategies.

3.) Run a Social Media Contest

Everyone loves getting something for free. We've talked about the types of prizes that can draw attention before, but it's not always about the prize, it's about how you sell the excitement of winning.

Social media users are a great option to target for these kinds of things, and social posts are easily shared from one account to another. This makes it a great way to be able to hit audience segments that may be interested in what you're offering, but fall outside your existing network of visibility.

The prize doesn't even have to be extravagant; though the bigger it is, the more easily it will draw attention. But something of high value for the consumer (not necessarily expensive for you), is usually a good choice.

Give them a mouth-watering contest to get excited about, and you'll end up with more word-of-mouth marketing from your participants to bolster your branded marketing campaigns.

4.) #GetConsumersInvolved

Hashtag campaigns are a great way to get your customer base involved in actually promoting your products alongside you.

Whether you're suggesting that they create their own hashtags to go alongside the branded ones you're using for your campaign, or you're running a photo contest and just want them to include your hashtag alongside their entry, there are lots of ways to take advantage of hashtag campaigns.

These are especially effective alongside product launch campaigns, where you're trying to use your brand marketing to draw attention to a new addition to your product line.

You might be surprised how much of a return on investment you can get by encouraging these types of user-generated content, within user's personal social media posts. It essentially doubles as an awareness campaign, because every person in each of those user's networks is going to see your hashtags.

If only a fraction clicks through for more information, that's still a huge (free) win for your branded marketing.

5.) Invest in Digital Marketing Tools

There are countless digital marketing tools out there that you could use to improve your ability to create brand marketing quickly and easily.

If you're looking to easily create useful infographics or images to go alongside your posts, Canva is a great choice. Think of it like photoshop, but with a much less steep learning curve.

If you're having trouble putting together effective, consistent email marketing campaigns, which can easily send pre-made chains of emails to specific customer demographics (while also maintaining all your branding), Mailchimp is extremely helpful. It can make the process easy to set up for months at a time, ahead of needing to send them.

These are just a couple of examples of online tools that can take some of the legwork of marketing off your shoulders.

Not only can these digital marketing tools make it easier for you to execute multiple campaigns simultaneously with less effort, their internal templates can even help provide you with new, exciting marketing ideas that you can adapt to a variety of new digital marketing channels.