But what exactly led them here? If we were to place their products on one side of the weighing scale and branding efforts on the other, the latter would outweigh the former. This has less to do with the quality of their products and more with how they have weaved their brand into everyone’s mind. The visual and verbal identities, along with the immaculate storytelling, have helped them stand out and survive in a cramped market.

In a nutshell, they have mastered the art of brand marketing. Which does sound like a lot, but it’s really not. Allow us to simplify it for you with this blog.

Branding: Crafting A Distinct Identity

Branding is the process of carving a unique identity for your brand that will distinguish it from the brand crowd. This can be a company, product, service, entity, place, or simply a concept that needs to be marketed. Even entrepreneurs and working professionals are working on building their own personal brand.

Contrary to ancient times when branding was about farmers and craftsmen claiming their property and taking credit for their work, it has now evolved into an art. It’s about what your company values and represents to the outside world.

However, there is a common misconception that needs to be addressed. Branding is not just limited to visual identities. Sure, they do form a huge part of it, but the term ‘branding’ goes way deeper. Imagine your brand coming to life in all its glory. Your mascot talking on your behalf. Color palette that conveys emotions. Ads that frame stories. Tone of voice that forms your brand’s personality. The way you interact, not just with your audience but with the general public as well.

It’s in the overall experience someone has with your brand. The moment it becomes exceptional, consistent, and recognizable, you have it all figured out.

What Good Branding Can Do For Your Business?

A business’ branding is more important than you might think. Growing competition makes it tough to be seen, let alone remembered, which threatens your company’s existence. Customers only spend when they feel like they’re being offered an exceptional deal.

Here’s everything good brand marketing can do for you:

Build A Noticeable Image

One of the most obvious reasons for brand marketing is to build a noticeable image. Your presence should feel like a breath of fresh air amongst the jam-packed crowd of similar brands. Think of it like building a narrative around your unique value proposition. When you offer a product or service that is different from others, the way you brand it is naturally going to be a lot different. Eventually, you’ll start getting noticed for the exceptional experience you provide.

Encourage Brand Recognition

According to a report published by Forbes, a consistent color palette can improve brand recognition by 80%. Consistent brand presentation across all platforms is said to increase revenue by 23%. Surely, we are doing something right by maintaining a similar color scheme, tone, aesthetics, and communication that fit our brand’s values.

Influence Purchasing Decisions

What drives a customer to make a purchase decision? 77% of consumers purchase items based on the brand name rather than the name of the actual product.

Suppose you wish to buy a new watch. Beyond the time-telling feature, a watch always carries an emotion. And you’re most likely to be inclined towards one that represents your values—whether it’s serene timelessness, the feeling of luxury, a focus on craftsmanship, or innovation.

Support Your Marketing

Branding is said to form the heart of marketing. Your marketing and advertising efforts will feel lost without a well-crafted brand strategy. This can be better advertising your values, playing with your logo on your creatives, creating visuals that represent your brand, and getting your mascots to act out.

Form Customer Loyalty and Trust

Loyalty and trust are never easy to gain. But once you start working on the authority and credibility that come with your brand, you can initiate an emotional connection with your audience. And according to reports, 94% of consumers say that they have recommended brands that they have formed an emotional connection with.

Marketing, Advertising, Branding: They’re Not The Same

Say you come across an ad for a coffee brand with a warm, welcoming, and community-oriented aesthetic. The ad stuck out to you, and in the end, you relented and actually bought it. Turns out that it offered what it promised, resulting in a pleasant experience. Here, the aesthetics we’re talking about is the branding. The medium through which the ad was shown is advertising. And the pleasant experience, right from encountering the ad to the cup of coffee in your hand, is marketing.

So, it can be said that:

Marketing is your business’s overall promotional strategy, including research for product development, pricing, distribution, and after-sales services. The goal is to reach customers by developing concepts that will stand out in the market and promoting them through digital advertising, email marketing, social media, paid search, SEO, and other offline promotions.

Advertising is a subset of marketing that solely focuses on showing ads to relevant consumers in order to attract them to your business. It is generally related to paid ad campaigns that are personalized for target audiences and persuade them to take a specific action.

Branding is what a business believes in, why it exists, and what it works for. It works to form an emotional bond with customers and other audiences. The more they resonate with you, the better your chances of getting another lead or sale will be. Being an extension of advertising and marketing, branding includes various visual and verbal narratives about your business.

Elements That Make Up Your Brand’s Personality

Brand elements are the aspects of your brand that make it memorable. They present a unique look and feel to your brand, eventually building up its personality. Strategic elements that are carefully intertwined with each other form the best personality for your brand. These elements determine the way your business dresses up, talks to customers, and even packs up your orders.

Here are the ones that you should pay special attention to:

• Brand Name
• Slogans and Tagline
• Brand Logo
• Color Palette
• Typography
• Brand Tone and Voice
• Graphics and Imagery
• Brand Values and Ethics
• Brand Positioning

Remember that there’s no fixed rule that you need to follow. In fact, it’s recommended that you test these in the initial stages of your business. You can even change a few of them to match upcoming seasons and trends. For instance, mixing the Christmas colors with your brand colors during the Christmas season.

Create an Exceptional Brand Marketing Strategy

That’s the goal, right? It’s no secret that once you have a brand in hand, you will want to market it to the best of your capabilities. Here’s how you can breathe life into your brand with an exceptional brand marketing strategy.

Identify your brand marketing goals

Before anything, figure out what you want to achieve with your brand marketing efforts. From the surface, the goal looks to be brand awareness. But how would you achieve that? Few goals you can set are:

• Create marketing material and ads that convey your brand values
• Recruit brand ambassadors from your loyal customer base
• Develop brand merch and goodies

You can further convert them into SMART goals by quantifying them and making them relevant to your overall business goals. For example, your goal can be to sell out 20,000 brand t-shirts in the next two months. There’s plenty of scope for you to consider.

Create a brand story

A brand story revolves around the narratives that make up your brand, including the brand’s origin, mission, vision, and purpose. This is where you make use of all the brand elements that we mentioned.

For a compelling brand story that attracts customers, try to think of everything that can be linked to your brand identity. The visual and language elements that form the first impression of your brand, the values and ethics that underline them, and how the interaction with customers will work.

Define your brand marketing tactics

This is where you choose how you will market your brand. Think of the-

• Deliverables that need to be prepared
• Audiences that you will target
• Marketing channels that you will employ
• Ratio between organic and paid promotional content
• Trends that you wish to adopt

Remember that these should be decided based on thorough research and based on past data. If something has worked previously, it might work again.

Measure and Optimize

It rarely ever happens that the first brand marketing campaign you put out ends up well. But this shouldn’t discourage you! In fact, try to extract as much information as you can from the analytics. The more you know about what works and what doesn’t, the better you will be able to optimize. Start by checking the relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), find the gaps, and fill them up in your next campaign.

5 Examples of Iconic Brand Marketing Strategies

There are a few brands that are always at the tip of our tongue. Such brands are always backed by iconic brand marketing strategies. Let’s explore a few and see what we can learn from them.

Apple

As we all know, Apple goes beyond selling a product. It sells a lifestyle. Their brand marketing strategy focuses on emotions, paying attention to imagination, liberty, hopes, dreams, and passion. Apple likes to keep it subtle with a brand personality that is simple in design and messaging. They don’t just focus on technical specifications but on forming heartfelt connections with their customers.

Their products have a sleek, minimalist design, which is also consistent with their design ethos. Their campaigns are known for brevity, with phrases like ‘Shot on iPhone’ and ‘Privacy. That’s iPhone.’ that are aimed at making your life a little less complex.

Overall, their branding is reflected in their products, and vice versa.

Duolingo

Duolingo, the language learning app, has lately been in the spotlight for its quirky brand marketing. From witty social media interactions to humorous app notifications, the app sets a playful tone through its branding across all channels. With brief yet funny ad copies like ‘Date Late? Learn French.’ to ‘Bus Stopped? Learn Italian.’ one can say that they have an ad for every situation. Moreover, with inclusivity being one of their many brand personalities, you can see their ads in many languages, urging you to do your lessons.

Carrying a wide cast of animated characters, they ensure that learning a language is never boring. And one thing you’ll find in common across all their promotion material is their mascot Duo, a lively green owl who is always there to motivate the learners.

Netflix

Everybody can recognize Netflix’s iconic red and black logo, which resembles a film strip. It’s really hard to miss it when it’s shown at the beginning of all movies and web series with a ta-dum sound in the background. Netflix’s brand marketing revolves around the promise of delivering personalized content from its vast library of movies, TV shows, and original productions with categories like ‘Top Picks for..’ and ‘Because you watched.’

They have also developed a reputation for original content. From Netflix Originals to exclusive interviews with the cast, they truly give a sense of prestige to their audience.

Nike

Nike has been in the brand marketing game for as long as you can think of. However, their brand strategy rarely ever mentions their products. Their tagline, ‘Just do it,’ along with a heavy focus on emotional storytelling, connects individuals globally. With ads highlighting their missions and vision, they bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete. Ad campaigns like ‘Unlimited You’ and ‘Find Your Greatness’ will give you a better look into their emotional appeals.

Another thing they have always focused on is building an inclusive community. Straightforward hashtags like #justdoit and #nikewomen have made it easy for them to build a loyal social fanbase.

Airbnb

‘Belong Anywhere’ is a statement that truly captures the essence of Airbnb’s brand mission. Their focus comes down to belonging, with it being more about the people and less about the places.

Their logo forms the heart of the brand identity, with it being a creative combination of people, places, love, and Airbnb itself. It’s easy to draw and has been molded into various creatives plenty of times. Instead of showing dreary room listings, their ads capture real people and moments that make travel experiences special. Their brand marketing has been at the forefront with stories that encapsulate inclusiveness, whether in the form of race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Conclusion

A good brand has everything—name, fame, and, most importantly, the trust of its customers. With a living and breathing identity that has never existed before, it is able to escape the brand crowd and stand its ground. Although brand marketing can seem a little intimidating at first, especially when you’re just starting out, it’s extremely worth your time and effort.

In the end, it’s all about studying your business and customers, working with guided strategies, and taking inspiration from the big brands. By creating brand elements that reflect who you are, you’ll have a memorable brand capable of leaving lasting impressions.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the different forms of branding?

Branding can take many forms, including personal branding, retail branding, e-commerce branding, geographic branding, and product or service branding.

Why are brand elements important?

Brand elements are the cornerstone of your brand marketing strategy. They ensure consistency and uniqueness for your business across all platforms.

What is the difference between brand and product marketing?

Brand marketing promotes your brand or business as a whole, with a focus on its identity. Meanwhile, product marketing promotes a single product by highlighting its features and benefits.

How can I carry out brand marketing?

Your brand strategy can be delivered through various channels such as website, social media, advertising, and physical presence.

Why should I study big brands?

By studying big brands, you can take inspiration from the strategies they use and learn from their mistakes.

What Is Advertising, Specifically Digital Advertising?

First of all, let’s get an idea about marketing, specifically digital marketing. In simple words, marketing refers to encouraging and persuading people to buy your products or avail your services. Marketing involves advertising, branding, and planning strategies for the promotion of your products. Marketing requires various skills, such as communication, convincing, research, trend analysis, and forecasting.

Now you have an idea about what marketing is. Now let me ask you something – “What do you think is digital advertising?” Before telling you the answer, let’s tell you that sometimes it’s finer to use the words marketing and advertising interchangeably, although advertising is a part of marketing.

So, let’s give you a brief idea about digital advertising – when you promote your products or services using digital platforms and technologies, then it is referred to as digital advertising. It incorporates various online techniques and strategies, such as search engine optimization, voice optimization, and paid advertising. In digital advertising, the web is used to promote products and services.

Cause For Shifting From Traditional Advertising To Digital Advertising

Before proceeding further, let’s understand why we are witnessing a great shift from traditional to digital advertising. Digital marketing trends have become really popular over the last couple of years. The reason for this is pretty simple – Technology has evolved rapidly lately, and it continues to grow at a fast pace. Due to this, a large proportion of businesses and their audiences have been joining the web at a pretty fast pace, too.

Thus, businesses that use digital marketing and advertising continue to thrive, while those that completely depend upon traditional marketing techniques, such as banners, television, and print media, lag behind.

If you own a business, you should keep one thing in mind in order to make it successful: You have to embrace advertising technology because, in this era, you cannot reach vast audiences if you do not use technology for advertising.

Digital Advertising Trends To Focus On To Grow Your Business

Digital advertising is a constantly changing industry, and one can do many things to succeed in it. If a person is knowledgeable about upcoming trends, then it is easier to dominate any field. The same goes for the digital marketing industry. If one does proper research about digital advertising trends and keeps gaining knowledge about them, then he/she can thrive in this industry.

So, let’s discuss various digital advertising trends that are going to dominate in 2024:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This has, perhaps, been the most popular digital advertising trend. SEO will probably remain the most popular trend or always. Let’s understand how search engines work. They detect the high-ranking and relevant keywords in your content. If you have used high-ranking keywords that are also relevant to your content while maintaining its readability, then SEO will assign your content a high rank.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been growing rapidly, and in order to stay in the game, you need to invest in training programs for AI so that your team can learn to use AI for a much better growth of the business. AI has been creating its place in almost every business. The most important thing is that AI has become very important in digital advertising, and advertising is a necessary part of every business.

Let us explain why AI has become so important for business promotion. AI can perform various processes in less time than human beings. These processes include analyzing industry trends, responding to audiences efficiently, and devising marketing strategies. Thus, at present, it is vital to have knowledge of AI.

Social Media Marketing/Promotion

Social media has become really prevalent these days. Most people have accounts on social media, and therefore, businesses need to promote themselves on social media platforms such as Instagram, Meta, Reddit, and X. This dominance of social media is only going to increase in the future. So, businesses should start investing in social media marketing if they are not doing it already. Use engaging posts and digital ads to promote your business.

Effective Email Marketing

Let’s understand what email marketing is. It is a kind of digital advertising that involves the promotion of services and products through the use of emails. Email marketing has been a highly effective promotion strategy for a long time, and it will continue to be so for a long period of time. Thus, in order to attract people to your business, you should create engaging emails.

This can be done by making your emails interactive by including various CTA (call-to-action) buttons such as “Call Us” or “Avail This Offer.” You should also use a highly attractive subject because that is the first thing users notice. Also, you should try to make your emails more personalized because people like them that way. This can be done by including information about their recent activities on the web.

Video Marketing

The studies show that most people easily engage with video content and understand it more easily than textual content. So, in order to dominate the digital marketing domain, you must create highly engaging videos. One more thing to keep in mind is that in the present time, people are used to watching short-form content like reels, which has resulted in a decreased attention span of the masses.

So, if you can convey your promotional message in these short videos (around 1 minute), then it’s much better and beneficial. Although the human mind is more perceptive to videos and images, texts are also important, and they, too, are used for the promotion of services and products. But again, texts that you use for promotional purposes should be short and easily comprehensible.

Influencer Marketing

The craze for social media and social media influencers has gone through the roof. Therefore, you should hire an influencer to promote your products and services. This craze for social media will not disappear soon, so you should make the most of social media. You should keep in mind a couple of points while hiring a social media influencer to promote your business. These points are:

1. The influencer should have a proper knowledge of the products or services that you provide.
2. The influencer that you decide to hire must have a decent to good following so that your content can reach a vast audience.

Live Streaming

Do you know that live streaming has become one of the most popular ways to promote a business’s products and services? These days, businesses use live streaming to connect with the audience and explain the benefits and features of their products. By doing this, they persuade the people to become their clients/buyers.

In fact, some businesses, such as fitness companies or educational companies, provide one or two live sessions as demos. There are various digital platforms where you can conduct these live sessions, or you can conduct these on your website if you have one.

Paid Advertising

SEO provides you with organic traffic, and once you get this traffic, your business can enjoy it for a really long period, maybe forever, if you can stay relevant with your content. But you can use paid advertising to get traffic to your website instantly. In paid advertising, an advertiser pays a fee to the publisher for running his/her ads. Advertisers bid for the ad space on the publisher’s website. Using digital ads for marketing is a highly effective strategy, and you can leverage this tactic to get the best results.

App Marketing

Another popular digital advertising trend is creating an app for your business. You should create your business app in an effective way so that people would want to explore each and every corner of your app and get attracted to its background and fronted features. Use languages like HTML to create the frontend features. Use proper coding for the development of the backend features as well because they are necessary for the working of your website.

Voice Search

Voice search has become really popular in the last few years, and its popularity is probably going to increase in the future. Voice search allows users to search for the things that they’re looking for with just the help of their voice. This way of searching for content is very appealing and optimized, and it takes less time than typing. The voice search method also provides more accurate results. Due to these advantages, the voice search method is very popular.

Ideal Ads Platform For The Advertising Of Your Online Business

There are several ad networks that can help you enhance the popularity of your online business and increase your revenue. However, there is a digital ads platform that can help you effectively skyrocket your business’s growth. It is none other than 7Search PPC. There are several reasons supporting this, such as:

User-Friendly Interface

Our ad network has a user-friendly interface, which makes it pretty easy to manage your ad campaigns. We know that most users are not programmers, and they want to explore and operate websites easily.

Various Ad formats

7Search PPC offers various ad formats, so you can use any of them according to your needs. These ad formats are – text ads, in-page push ads, banner ads, popunder ads, and native ads.

Analytics Tools

Our ad network also provides you with analytics tools for tracking the progress of your ad campaigns. This analysis is necessary as it lets you take the required action for the betterment of your ad campaigns.

Highly Advanced Security System

We use a three-layered advanced security system because we understand the importance of the security of your data and information. A blend of imaginative in-house and third-party fraud detection systems provides you with an exceptional experience.

Real-Time Monitoring

We provide you the facility to monitor the progress of your ad campaigns live. This lets you implement the required actions immediately.

Customer Support

Our ad network also provides you the facility to contact us anytime during the day if you face any difficulty. This means we are available to help you 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Conclusion

In conclusion, digital advertising has been dominating the promotion and marketing scene for quite some time, and its influence is only going to increase in the future, so you should learn the practice of digital advertising because that is the only way to survive in this cut-throat competition. Also, digital advertising is much better than traditional advertising because it is highly cost-efficient and enhances your brand’s popularity way more than traditional advertising. Follow the strategies discussed in this blog, and you will enjoy the success of your business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is meant by digital advertising?

Ans. Digital advertising refers to the methods that are used to advertise your business or company.

What are some popular examples of traditional advertising?

Ans. Some popular examples of traditional advertising are TV commercials, banners, and hoardings.

What are some benefits of digital advertising?

Ans. Some benefits of digital are cost efficiency, high brand visibility, and increased sales.

What are some strategies in digital advertising that can help you grow your business quickly?

Ans. Some strategies in digital advertising to grow your business are search engine optimization, social media marketing, use of artificial intelligence, and voice search facility.

What are some benefits that are provided by 7Search PPC?

Ans. Some of the benefits that are provided by 7Search PPC are analytics tools, real-time monitoring, a user-friendly interface, and powerful ad formats.