6 Ways to Improve Your Brand Marketing
To build a strong brand, you cannot just make empty claims without first earning your customers’ trust. | Photo by Joshua Ness on Unsplash
When competition is overwhelming, differentiating your brand can be a challenge. If you’re aware of different techniques for brand marketing, that can certainly help.
You might consider, finding an underserved niche for your content, launching your affiliate program, or making use of storytelling techniques. And since you want to reach the most optimal results, you should use all effective techniques available.
It’s not surprising that most marketers consider content creation the most effective SEO technique. But even a content-driven strategy has its challenges. How to make sure that your brand remains relevant, and what does it take to establish yourself as a thought leader?
You need a continuous flow of unique content that engages your target group. To build a strong brand, you cannot just make empty claims without first earning your customers’ trust.
Here are some techniques to boost your brand marketing:
Establish yourself as an expert in your niche
As a marketer, you can’t simply focus on increasing sales. Or otherwise, you’re doomed to scare some potential customers away. Your goal is to establish yourself as an expert. Once you reach that goal, it follows naturally that you start to attract traffic. Before, however, you need to gather enough knowledge about your desired niche.
As a niche expert, you can share your knowledge and engage in discussions with your audience. The most convenient way to do that is through your own blog.
While social media channels, too, are useful for building brand awareness and engaging customers, blogs enable you to share more in-depth content and develop your reputation as an expert. When your blog has plenty of meaningful content, people are drawn to it through organic search.
Ideally, you should try to build a community around your blog. A loyal community comes in handy when you want to, for example, slip in promotional links to your products. But keep in mind that people don’t appreciate pure promotion. That’s why product placements must always serve a function. You’re offering a solution to a problem.
Analyze your target segments and be consistent
Delve into the demographics of your market and avoid creating overly general target segments. Focus on a specific market but don’t exclude those segments that don’t fit into your desired categories. The purpose of targeting is to help you allocate your budget to a segment that is more likely to convert into customers.
You can start by analyzing your existing customers first. Look for shared traits and see how profitable each segment is to you. Perhaps you manage to identify an underserved niche that has been ignored by others. Examine your product portfolio and figure out which customers would benefit from which product. You can then move on to the demographic characteristics.
Apply the results of this analysis to your brand narrative. It should highlight the benefits that your products can deliver to your customers. This is what comprises the core value of your brand. First, introduce your brand by describing who you are, what makes your brand unique, and what values do you have.
Keep in mind, however, that your brand stories need to be consistent and rooted in the reality of your brand. Consistency is the key to a successful brand narrative and one of the top seven characteristics of successful brands. Avoid confusing your audience.
Launch your affiliate program
To leverage the value of the loyal community you have built for your brand, you can employ a marketing model based on paying for performance. This model is called affiliate marketing. Instead of paying up front and then calculating the return on your investment, in your affiliate program you only pay for actual sales.
To get started with your affiliate program, you first need to choose the right platform and outline the rules between you and your brand affiliates. Decide the appropriate level of commission your affiliates get when they refer customers to your products.
Given this, it’s crucial that you manage to attract the right partners who can bring enough sales. Then you need to manage the process by establishing and scaling relationships with a myriad of marketers that drive traffic and sales for your brand.
Here is a collection of high-paying affiliate programs that you may want to check for reference:
Leverage user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is an efficient marketing strategy that is particularly popular with millennials. Reviews are a good example of UGC that influences purchase decisions. Almost all, or 97% of millennials read online reviews before making a purchase and 89% of them trust those reviews. Millennials are also eager to engage with brands on social media but are more skeptical of traditional advertising. Brands, therefore, have a strong incentive to integrate UGC as part of their brand stories.
With this in mind, you can try to leverage content from influencers. It’s more compelling because influencers are relatable and have earned a level of trust. In fact, 92% of marketers who used influencer marketing in 2017 found it to be effective. This makes user-generated content from influencers ideal for brand marketing.
UGC provides authenticity for your brand. It contributes to your community building efforts, making your customers feel like they’re part of an online community. Attitudes are easier to influence by content that is relatable and from a trusted source.
Tell stories to deliver your brand message
Brand storytelling is the art of communicating your brand message in the form of a captivating story. It has the potential to make your brand marketing more effective.
Storytelling is an ancient concept that has been around ever since we developed the ability to speak, long before our recorded history. And we cannot say that it’s a new phenomenon in marketing, either.
The practice of telling stories through advertising was already invented by ancient civilizations. In the early days, it was the ancient Greeks and Egyptians who wrote their sales messages on papyrus. Now, we do the same on social media. Same technique, different medium.
We create stories to make our marketing content more memorable and easier for people to digest. Make storytelling an effective part of your brand strategy and try it out on different channels such as your blog, landing pages, social media and email newsletters.
Take advantage of data
The special appeal of data cannot be overestimated in marketing. Often, words alone are not enough to catch our full attention. When the use of data is combined with personalization, it can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend.
Data can provide a deeper understanding of your audience and add credibility. You can also employ data-driven brand narratives on any of your marketing channels. They are suitable for cross-marketing campaigns.
Even with data, always keep your target group in mind. Your brand content needs to resonate with people, so use data that you think can add value for your audience.
With these techniques, you will boost your brand marketing efforts and increase your overall marketing ROI. The essence of brand marketing lies in knowing your customers. Once you possess this knowledge, you must learn to engage your audience. If implemented properly,
these techniques become powerful marketing tools that will convert your audience into loyal customers.
Guest writer Johannes Rastas is a Junior Affiliate Marketing Manager at Supermetrics - the leading reporting automation tool for PPC, SEO, social and web analytics. Passionate about marketing, statistics and content, he’s also actively looking for new affiliates for their Supermetrics Affiliate Program.