10 Perfect Branding Strategies to Grow Your Business
Growing any business takes time, effort, and much perseverance.
No matter how tedious it may be in the initial days, your dedication and hard work will play an essential role in shaping your firm's future.
A well-planned and feasible branding strategy can go a long way in successfully growing your business.
It is also an essential factor to be considered to get more loyal customers.
These branding strategies are implemented to give your business an identity that can quickly help recognise the target audience.
Doing so would prove beneficial as it creates your brand awareness and thereby gains mindshare.
Small business owners may dismiss branding as something that only large enterprises can afford, but the branding approach you consider must not necessarily be expensive.
Here are ten excellent strategies that can help you out to boost the growth of your business:
1 – Know Your Target Audience
A buyer persona describes the traits of your ideal customer.
It considers the person's goals, habits, problems, requirements, and other vital aspects that can help you effectively market your products or services to them.
Analysing these details can help you know your actual customers better and positively impact your business's growth.
As a result, the products you create will meet the requirements of these customers, and their chances of buying from you will increase.
If you want your products and services to appeal to your customers, you, as a business, must view them from the customers' perspective.
Also, different sets of customers will have different needs and requirements. Therefore, you must effectively modify your products to reach the various strata of the consumer base to grow your brand.
2 – Show What Makes Your Business Unique
The first and foremost branding strategy that needs any business's focus is the idea of what it stands for.
Consumers will know why they prefer your brand's products or services over others' when you present them with a unique selling point.
Next, you need to analyse what sets your brand apart from the rest of the industry.
Finally, you can highlight this uniqueness in various fields like your business's logo design, tagline, media posts, and other marketing material.
You can also display your unique aspects on your website's ‘About Us' section or social media pages. This helps create a brand identity that can help increase growth and profits.
Finding a critical differentiating factor can help your business stand out in an industry that is filled to the brim with competitors.
You can discover this differentiator by listing what your brand does well from the customer's point of view.
For example, is your product faster, cheaper, better, more value for money, or any other positive feature?
You can do so by listing your competitors' strengths and weak areas and inspecting where you do better than them. You can also use words to describe your competitive advantage and brand positioning.
3 – Develop Standards For Your Branding Strategies
To create a lasting impression on your customers, your brand has to maintain a consistent appearance, whether in the product's packaging or commercials on TV or social media.
Creating an all-encompassing brand standard drawing on the same colours, fonts, etc., can help evoke feelings and expectations in the people for your brand.
The audience will therefore associate these attributes with your brand, making it easier to identify among others.
You can apply this business strategy by creating a set of design rules that envelop the look and feel of your marketing collateral.
You must develop and maintain consistency in your business's logo, colours, and fonts that go into it, graphics, illustrations, and photographic styles.
These visuals create immediate impressions on the consumers. Maintaining consistency in these graphic elements will help them associate with your brand quicker.
4 – Rewarding Customer Loyalty
Customer retention is one of the critical factors that can help grow and expand your brand.
Research from the Harvard Business School suggested that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase the business's profits by 25% to 95%.
In addition, you can retain your business's customers by meeting the customer expectations and exceeding their expectations. This can help make your customer base more loyal to your business.
A sense of trust developed for the brand by the customer can help grow a business broadly.
For example, if a company calls its customer after a few weeks to know if the customer has received the product or service and whether he/she is happy with it, there can be a good chance that the customer will remain loyal to the products or services of that particular company, rather than looking out for a new option.
In addition, there is a high chance that these loyal customers will go back for more services from the company, thereby increasing the company's profits.
The client can also recommend the business to other people, and this, in turn, can significantly help in the growth of the business.
You can further expand your customer loyalty base by conducting customer satisfaction surveys, informational emails and messages during sales, providing early access to the latest releases, and generating loyalty programs for committed customers through apps or other media.
5 – Involve Your Customers in Brand Support and Recommendation
Coming up with fresh content on social media from time to time is necessary to keep your customers engaged. But this can sometimes be a challenging task.
An innovative yet effective way to achieve this is by involving your customers to provide content for your business.
To apply this to the modern-day strategy for your business, you can encourage customers to write reviews for your products. This approach is similar to that of word-of-mouth publicity.
You can also give options to share photographs and videos about the products. This will help future buyers to get a clear idea about the product they plan on purchasing.
These photo and video reviews can also help them decide if they had been speculating about purchasing any product.
You can also recommend that the customers share the use cases for your products.
Informative shares and reposting visual information on social media platforms can also help spread the word about your products and, therefore, your brand among many consumers.
You can also organise contests or reward programs for video, photo, description writing, or caption writing inputs to increase your brand's online presence on web platforms.
To maximise this effect, you can create a hashtag for your brand or its specific product.
You can encourage your audience to use these hashtags when they post about your business. This can help your business build authority on social media.
Leveraging this form of user-generated content can ease the burden on your shoulders but still achieve the required advertising and promotions for your products.
6 – Using Influencers for Marketing Your Business
A brand's visibility and engagement with its customers are vital to improving its status, and the best way to achieve this is through influencer marketing.
It involves approaching a prominent social media personality to endorse your business by informing his/her followers about your product, the benefits it offers, and more.
Since these social media influencers tend to have a huge fan base, they often are considered role models.
As a result, their followers will be more likely to notice the brand's products that they are talking about or posting photos, videos, etc., on their page.
You can define your social media influencers based on the relevance and outreach that they can provide.
Using this strategy, your brand can reach out to a larger audience and hence you can expect an improvement in sales.
You can connect with these influencers through their content and conversations on social media. You can reach out to their business operations to inform them about the commodities you want to endorse.
To boost your sales further, you could ask the influencers to share promotional discount codes and feature backlinks to your product's profile.
7 – Pay Attention to Advertising and Marketing
Business promotion and content marketing play a significant role in brand-building.
If these strategies are pulled off correctly, you can bring in a high amount of organic traffic to your business by making your brand noticeable for the consumers.
You can advertise your products on social media, television, newspapers, or other forms of communication media.
It helps create brand awareness and recognition that is vital to improve sales. The ads can be in the form of print media, infographics, videos, and more.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a critical necessity to make the online presence of your business more effective.
You can develop content for your products so that the search engines can pick them up quickly when someone is looking for a product.
To optimise your product content, use the most searched keywords regarding the particular product, meta descriptions, and subheadings.
8 – Interlink Your Account on Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool in today's generation to grow your business.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are popular platforms that you can use to create your brand presence.
Options like YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many more can help you reach a targeted group of people who could benefit from your products or services.
These platforms can allow you to reach a broader consumer base, and you have the chance to inform them all about your brand.
Interlinking your profiles on all these platforms can help expand your business's social media presence and garner more customers.
When sending out emails to your subscribers, include links to all your social media accounts. By doing so, your customers will be familiarised with your brand, and there is a better chance of it being memorable when they browse through various online social platforms.
Similarly, your social media page on Instagram should include links to your, say, Facebook or Twitter handles and your official website. This provides a call to action to those people who are interested in your product.
They can easily find out more information regarding the particular product with a simple click. This increases the chance of them buying from your brand and contributing to its development.
9 – Use Cross Promotional Techniques
Cross promoting is an excellent means to gain greater exposure.
It can help your brand get a credible introduction to a newer audience without the need for additional investment.
To apply this tact, you can consider techniques like co-producing content through newsletters. For example, a hotel and a taxi agency can collaborate to put up content about the tourist attractions and significant activities of a place to draw customers to both businesses.
You can also use this cross-promotional strategy on social media pages.
You can integrate your firm's email with social media platforms to maintain relationships with customers and retain them for your business.
You can choose from social influencers, non-profit organisations, local businesses, and institutions outside your niche to reach out to partners.
Another idea is to co-sponsor events with the business partner for social causes or general meetups and conferences. People who attend such events can end up becoming potential customers to both businesses.
10 – Engage in Active Listening
Listen to what your customers are saying about you. Create a work environment that allows employees to engage with your customers and have organic conversations. This can significantly help connect with your clients and adds value to the relationship established.
Listen to their complaints or regarding any of your products or services. You can be open to such customer responses and provide them with efficient solutions to make things better.
You can address these issues via your official website, social media pages, emails, or phone. Doing so will help your customer develop trust in your company, and it will not hamper the chances of them approaching you in the future.
Bottom Line
Branding strategies are essential for any business, be it a large enterprise or a small company.
Utilising the effective branding strategies mentioned in the article can help boost the growth of your business in different areas.
The approaches you take towards implementing these branding strategies can build brand awareness and exposure.
It also helps build a community for your business that can aid in its growth and success.