Outpace Digital Marketing is opening the lid on branding. In our first installment, we discussed the importance of driving brand awareness. In the second part of our ongoing series, we will go over strategies to build your brand so that it is easily recognizable and positioned to grow your customer base.

Building your brand requires an active marketing arm, mindfulness, consistency, and the ability to be flexible in reaching your goals. This is the philosophy successful businesses – from one-person startups to large corporations – use to stay “top of mind” with their target audiences. Before we dig into the nuts and bolts strategies used to build your brand, we need to go over the particulars of the overarching philosophy.

  • Active marketing: Building a brand is not something you can set and forget. Your audience is hungry for information, and needs a regular stream to stay interested.
  • Mindfulness: In our last article, we talked about defining your audience. Your messaging needs to be mindful of the people in your audience. Is your brand speaking to the layperson? Do you want your brand to be seen as a thought leader in your industry? Are you simply just trying to stand apart? Can you incorporate the social issues that are important to you in your branding?
  • Consistency: Building a brand requires consistency in tone, frequency of information, and delivery. To a degree, your audience needs to know where to find the information and content you are producing, and how often to look for it.
  • Flexibility: Not all marketing techniques win over everyone. Even the most successful companies make missteps. Businesses need to be flexible and ready to change tack to reach their goals, whether they are to gain more traffic, drive more sales, or grow their audiences.

Building Your Brand: A Strategy for Success

Building a brand for yourself, your business, or your organization requires four key elements:

1. Getting to know your audience

Who is your audience? Looking beyond who you think is your ideal customer or who you want to attract, who is actually visiting your website, engaging with your posts, and buying your products? Profiling your audience will tell you their age, gender, income, spending habits, and even what their interest are. This will inform your marketing department’s messaging and content creation so your brand will gain traction with your audience.

2. Branded Content

Whether you are publishing blog posts, videos, podcasts, or anything else, your content needs to reflect your brand identity and philosophy. Additionally, your content needs to be published on a regular and predictable schedule to get your audience in the habit of seeking it out to read, see, and listen to what your company has to say. Consistency is key, across the board. There should always be new content for your audience to consume – much like television, no one really cares for re-runs.

3. Integrating Social Media

Social media is as necessary today as having business cards was 20 years ago. Leveraging platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others make your brand accessible and visible to the public. Using social media to share your content and even to make one-off posts will help to build your brand and make you recognizable.

4. Engagement

Perhaps the biggest revelation in building your brand is realizing that it is not a one-way street. Content, social media, demonstration videos, e-mail campaigns, and more are meaningless if you do not engage with your audience. Replying to questions, complimenting ideas, quick online conversations, even following others on social media, all have a great impact when building your brand and growing your audience. Digital marketing has torn down walls for even the biggest companies that once seemed unapproachable by their customers and followers. Engaging with people and other businesses is how businesses build their brand identities, stay at the forefront of people’s minds, and create a positive reputation.

Outpace Digital Marketing provides customized brand-building strategies for businesses and organizations of all types. We have the tools to analyze your audience’s profile, create interesting and engaging content, implement social media and e-mail marketing, and create a voice and messaging stance unique to your brand and vision. Reach out to us today to learn more.

Stay tuned for the third installment of our series on branding, coming next month.