Branding is extremely important in Digital Marketing: without a face and a voice, who will trust your word? Worse still: who will buy from your brand?
No one takes advice from someone they don’t trust — even if the advice is great!
Just as no one believes in the ability of a product or service to make life easier when offered by an unknown company — no matter how true the promise is!
Selling in this post-digital era of the Internet goes far beyond exchanging a solution for money — the act of buying means investing:
- In ideals;
- In culture;
- And in the identity of a business!
Choosing your product or service over those offered by your competitors is a political act on the part of your customers: a way for them to express who they are and what they believe in through what your brand represents!
My name is Gaurav Rajput, I am the CEO here at Enjoy Minder, and this text brings together all the Branding concepts and practices for you to achieve true success when selling online!
What is Branding?
People are not stupid: there are so many businesses on the Internet trying to sell, sell and sell, that the only way to defend yourself from these predators is to trust only the words of well-known brands!
It doesn’t matter how functional and full of qualities a product or service is — people aren’t just looking at that when they decide to do business.
What these people are looking for is a connection: someone they trust who tells them that the decision they made makes sense and that everything will work out in the end!
It is clear that choosing to buy or ignore a product or service is not a rational decision — it is as emotional as:
- Choosing a football team;
- Support for a political party;
- Or even a person’s religion.
The difference between your brand and the examples I gave above is that, while the football team, political party and religion are some of the practically immutable elements in a person’s personality, your company has plenty of room to convince someone to buy from you instead of your competitors!
Such persuasion is achieved through Branding in a Digital Marketing strategy — a way of exposing through design and communication:
- The values;
- The identity;
- And your business message!
Everything will become clearer in the next paragraphs.
Key Elements of Branding
When I spoke of design and communication as a way to expose the purpose and personality of your brand, I meant that the main function of Branding is to manipulate how your business is seen by the ideal audience.
How your potential consumers see your company goes far beyond a pretty logo or a highly functional offering!
What your ideal customers are waiting to see is your positioning in the market.
This is curious because consumers barely know what the “market” is!
What they certainly know—and what the human brain does instinctively even with inanimate objects like teddy bears or favorite coffee mugs—is to assign a character value to what they see.
Character is the basis of a personality: the raw material that shapes the way of acting, the way of speaking and the qualities that make a person recognizable in a crowd of people.
That’s why you need to be proactive and think about your business’s Branding as a priority!
If you don’t clearly define your brand’s character (and its personality in people’s minds as a result), you’ll leave your business at the mercy of:
- From people’s hasty (and wrong) judgments about what your product or service is capable of achieving;
- From the dominance of your competitors by the authority you would like to maintain in your market;
- Or complete anonymity among the many options of more striking or attractive personalities who are fighting for the attention of the ideal audience that should be yours!
To build a character that is impossible to misinterpret — to create a voice that is impossible to ignore and a face that is easily recognizable regardless of the brands that surround you — I will present six key elements to nurturing public trust through Branding.
Just keep in mind that Branding is used:
- From the psychology of your ideal audience, to understanding what your audience faces, desires or fears and thus creating a connection with them;
- The purpose of your brand as the basis for building the character and personality that it will represent to the public;
- And design as the face of your business: a visual and easy-to-recognize representation that encapsulates everything your brand stands for.
I’ll break these elements down in detail below!
Brand identity
Brand identity is the personality of your business beyond the visual identity, involving:
- The way your business communicates through social media , advertisements and other types of content (whether more or less casual or formal, for example);
- The way you respond to people’s queries through customer service;
- And the words you use, jargon or other striking details that when seen by the public, make it obvious that it is your business that is being spoken about — and no one else!
Brand identity needs to be consistent across all your customers’ touchpoints: from blog text to the type of image chosen to promote a product or service.
Visual identity
Much more than the logo, visual identity concerns the design of your business’s brand manual.
Depending on how you want your company to be perceived (through brand identity, whether more youthful or sober, for example), your design will use different:
- Colors;
- Letters (typography);
- And complementary symbols to represent the spirit of your company!
In the case of a brand in the B2B (business to business) sector, it is common to see a lot of blue, right-angled typography and a strong appeal to rationalization through technological symbols.
For a company that deals directly with consumers, warm colors, curved typography and humanized symbols tend to work much better!
Message and purpose
What provides the basis for developing an effective brand identity is the purpose of your business: what legacy does it want to leave for the world?
To answer a daunting question like this, you need to go back to your company’s roots to define:
- The mission (the result your brand wants to bring to the public);
- The vision (the future that your company would like to make a reality for itself and others through the services and products it offers);
- And the values (which behaviors it values and which it doesn’t accept — in other words, it’s the “culture” by which it exists).
Also known as MVV!
With a mission, a vision and values defined, the next step to creating a solid identity is to integrate these elements into:
And a purpose that moves you (“Transforming people’s lives by making the best coffee in the world and doing business that contributes positively to the environment”, also by the coffee giant).
Communication
Creating your brand’s mission, vision and values is part of a business plan that is done behind the scenes, but which has a direct effect on how the public sees your business .
It is from the narrative of your purpose that your company will have a guide to maintain standardization in terms of:
- To the treatment of customers;
- To personalize communications with people;
- In the style of your advertising actions;
- And the reactions to the topics your company will be involved with on different channels (such as social media).
Authenticity is fundamental when we talk about personality — and, in communication, this factor could not be different!
Originality comes from your expertise mixed with the way you speak to your ideal audience: you bring people what they need, but with practical experience related to your niche that only your brand has!
That’s where your positioning makes all the difference!
Market positioning
Being the market leader involves more than accumulating the highest percentage of sales in your niche.
Being a leader is about how your company differentiates itself from those that offer similar things to the same audience you serve.
It is from this differentiation that your authenticity is born — and it is from this authenticity that the public chooses to approach (and buy from) you, taking your sales to new heights!
This is what branding is: integrity and coherence clearly expressed for everyone to see what your company does best — and what is impossible for the competition to copy!
Customer experience as an integral part
If it hasn’t become obvious by now, your audience’s perception of your brand is the core of Branding!
The more satisfied people are with what they see about your business, the more proactive they will be in trying to let you win them over!
The only way to do this is by building powerful Branding into your Digital Marketing strategy — but such a strategy needs to focus not only on what you have to say, but on what your customer expects to hear: that “everything will work out in the end.”
Put another way, the customer expects their own success from the tools, ideologies and attitudes that only your brand can offer them!
This is what we call Customer Success in Digital Marketing: a way to ensure that the customer leaves this interaction with your company satisfied.
By focusing on Customer Success, your brand’s character will be complete because all points of contact with your audience will be permeated by:
- Trust;
- Authority;
- And recognition.
Isn’t that what we expect from a leader?!
Branding x Performance
Pay close attention to this part of the text because it can increase your business’s sales potential by 60% — and I’m not exaggerating!
When I was invited to speak at the 2023 CMO Summit, I wanted to emphasize that companies are not taking advantage of even half of the profit possibilities that they could reap if they invested not only in strategies that yield immediate results (such as Paid Media), but also in building a long-term identity of value for the brand.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the text, people are not stupid: they know when a company simply wants to sell!
Some of these people — about 10% of potential buyers in the market, according to renowned sales expert Chet Holmes — expect exactly that: a quality product or service, presented directly through an ad that makes the transactional value of this exchange (my money for your offer) obvious.
But if we also take into account the other 30% of people who certainly won’t close a deal, what will this company (advertising a product to the 10% interested only in an exchange) do with the remaining 60% of people who are waiting for an emotional connection to buy from them?
She ignores that 60%!
This error arises from a common separation in companies: the division between performance and sales.
Those who invest in Branding in a Digital Marketing strategy do the opposite: they unify performance with sales, capturing the remaining 60% of potential customers!
In practice, what Branding does is generate demand by satisfying the public’s desire for connection, awakening in them the need to buy from this brand that speaks the same language as they do!
This method is different from demand capture: the act of simply taking a product or service to those who already know what they are looking for — and who have no interest in buying anything beyond that.
Don’t make the same mistake as these companies: Branding (building your brand’s image and presence) and sales performance should not be separate components of success.
Branding and performance are complementary in a complete Digital Marketing strategy : each with its own moment to generate profit, capturing 100% of the people willing to spend money on the Internet!
Tips for an efficient Branding strategy
Study the topic well
The first thing you need to do to develop successful Branding in your Digital Marketing strategy is to learn about the topic — so just by being here you’re off to a good start!
As you can see halfway through this text, answering “what is Branding” without talking about psychology, design and narrative is leaving out a lot of important information.
I recommend that you read at least three books for this reason: they are complete and offer everything you need to know in easy-to-understand language!
My book recommendations on Branding are as follows:
- “Building Strong Brands” by David Aaker;
- “The Hero and the Outlaw” by Margaret Mark;
- “Storybrand: Create Clear Messages and Capture Customers’ Attention” by Donald Miller;
- And “On Branding: 20 Principles That Decide Brand Success” also by David Aaker.
Establish a unique value proposition
The next step is to identify: what makes your brand different from all the others?
By knowing the benefits that only your business, your services or your products can offer your customers, you will know precisely what value your company will represent in their lives!
Once you have identified your value, you can communicate it through your unique value proposition: a compelling way to sell your product by focusing on the type of success your customer will find with you!
Understand (and delight) your target audience
Knowing the wants, needs and preferences of your ideal audience will give you the words, means and even inspiration you need to cultivate through communication:
- Loyalty;
- The confidence;
- And the connection your customer expects to feel to close business with you!
Knowing in depth who the person is that you are trying to provide a solution to through your offers will also help you serve them in an excellent way — something that makes all the difference in the automated Internet market!
Be prepared to adapt
The business world changes with every new method or technology, so be prepared to adapt !
Adjusting your branding strategy is important to continue converting new curious people into buyers and to keep satisfied those customers who insist on buying from you instead of turning to your competitors.
I recommend once again paying attention to your mission, vision, values and narratives: they will allow you to maintain the essence of your brand even when the environment in which it operates changes radically.
Your Branding — and your Marketing strategies — will be increasingly successful because of this!
What if you were a brand?
“What if you were a brand” is not just the title of another great book about Branding and Digital Marketing!
It’s also a genuine question for you to understand the weight that your business’s identity has in the lives of your ideal customers.
And if you were a brand: what kind of ideals would you be proud to represent?
As you learned in this text, to arrive at a complete answer capable of transforming strangers into buyers, you would have to:
- Understand that Branding is not just a Digital Marketing strategy;
- But rather the personality and character that your ideal audience sees in your brand;
- Based on the mission, purpose and values it values;
- Which are expressed through personalized communication;
- And also the use of design to create visual identities;
- Able to make your business highly recognizable;
- Which builds confidence which brings new (and more) sales!
If your answer to the question “what if you were a brand” is “the one that sells the most!”, I have a bunch of other free guides like this one on the Enjoy Minder blog — most of them written personally by me, in an attempt to share what I’ve learned in these 16 years as the leader of the largest Inbound Marketing agency in Brazil!
Keep learning on the Enjoy Minder blog to dominate the audience that should be yours alone!
Good profits — 100% of them, I hope!
