Category: Branding

You’ve put in many hours of work and late nights filled with anxiety as you’ve built your business from the ground up. You know that your business is producing a service or product that is high-quality and in-demand, but how can you make sure that your business brand stands out and attracts consumers?

Identify Your Target Audience

No matter what kind of business you’ve built, you probably can’t expect everybody to be a potential customer. Finding out exactly who is most likely to interact with your company and why it’s absolutely essential in developing a successful business. 

Personality marketing is a superb way to understand your target audience and build a brand that will attract them. Personality marketing analyzes five essential personality traits of your potential target audience to help you learn what kind of brand they are most likely to respond to.

Be Honest

It can be tempting to try to make your business into whatever your customers might want it to be, but your target audience is likely to see through this attempt. You want to adapt your branding to your target audience, but don’t abandon who you are and what you want for your business. 

Being honest and transparent in your branding makes it more likely that your target audience will trust your business, even if they do not identify entirely with every aspect of your marketing.

Keep it Simple

One of the most common pitfalls that people fall into when branding their business is making it too complicated. You have many hours to think about exactly what you want your business to portray. However, you only have seconds to make an impression on your potential customers and encourage them to make the decision to do business with you. Be direct, straightforward, and stay on message with all of your branding efforts.

Be Unique

There are thousands of brands within any given industry. Even in a relatively narrow target demographic or zip code, you may be competing with dozens or even hundreds of other brands trying to do something similar to what you’re trying to do. 

If you want to get repeat business, you need to stand out. If your branding is too similar to another company’s branding, your customers may not remember which company they saw advertising for or had a good experience with last time. That means you may lose business to your competition.

Have Fun Branding Your Business

Branding your business can have some anxiety attached, but it should also be an exciting experience. The brand you build now will hopefully go on for many years to come and may even survive you. Take time to think your branding through and know who you’re marketing to, and you will likely have a great time building highly effective branding.

Running a successful business is no walk in the park. Getting a company off the ground and spreading brand awareness takes hard work, dedication, and determination. No matter what field of business you’re in, your brand needs to stand out from competitors, resonate with your target audience, and be appealing to the eye. To help you on your journey, here are some tactics that will help you design and develop a brand that consumers will love.

Find Your Purpose

For your brand to stand out for all the right reasons, you need to establish your niche and show how you’re not like competitors. You need to determine what kinds of products or services your business offers to consumers and why you should be the go-to over rivals. If you start off without a solid plan in place, you’re more likely to fail within the first year. And with half of all startups losing momentum within the first twelve months, having a solid business plan behind you is key for success. 

Create a Striking Logo

Your brand’s logo will say a lot about your business. When consumers research your brand, your logo should be a combination of imagery and text that lets people know who you are, what you sell, and how you differentiate from everyone else. An eye-catching logo also fosters brand loyalty, helping to build a strong following. The packing is just as important as the product, which is why your logo needs to be clearly displayed to build recognition and trust among your customers. 

Know Your Target Audience

If you don’t know who your target audience is, you will have difficulty building a memorable and trustworthy brand. Whether you want Gen Z to take notice of you, or you’re after millennials, your products or services need to correlate well with your audience. Conducting market research, checking your website’s performance and using Google Analytics are just a few tactics you can perform to establish who is interested in your brand. 

Use Social Media Channels

As each year passes, the number of social media users increases. All new startups and established companies use social media as a way to build their brand and connect with their customers. Creating social media business pages on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be your first step in building brand awareness. If used correctly, social media can be a great way to boost revenue and turn potential customers into long-term followers. 

Have Patience

Success rarely happens overnight for entrepreneurs, so you need to have patience and drive to see the results you want. Developing a brand takes time and hard work, which is why you must stay motivated and try out different approaches until you create a brand that catches your audience’s eye.

All the recognizable brands we see online and in day-to-day life had to start out somewhere. If you’re launching a startup, the sole goal will be to drive as many consumers as possible to your business. All the tips above can help you create a memorable brand that will keep your operation on top.

There are several simple steps to create a professional business email address using Gmail. In the world of small business communications, emails are secure, ethical, and reliable. Naturally, a business email account boosts brand awareness, drives website visitors, and encourages helpful feedback for your company. Even more, business email communications can improve customer relationships and generate consistent leads. If you do not know where to start, there are several steps and strategies to help you navigate the process. Often, it is recommended to use Gmail, one of the top email service providers, while getting started. Read on to learn about how to create a professional business email address on Gmail. 

Get Started With G Suite

All business Gmail accounts are created through G Suite. If you don’t have an account already, this will be the first step to set up your company account. Visit G Suite and choose your plan based on your business and account preferences. Next, you will be required to fill out your business name, number of employees, alternate communication mediums, and other basic account information. By setting up your account settings in G Suite, you can begin distributing secure, ad-free, and private emails for your business. To begin the process, use G Suite to build your small business account. 

Add Required Email Accounts And Users

Now, you can add all the required accounts, addresses, and users associated with your Gmail business email. Add clear addresses for sales representatives, customer service agents, executives, and other essential personnel. Remember, you can always add more users later on if you wish to do so. Once your accounts are outlined, create secure, unique passwords for each user to access. This way, administrative users can easily access their accounts, without risking internal or external attacks. Using these accounts to improve administrative and access control, you can protect your company against cyber attacks. To start sending professional communications, consider all your crucial staff and create separate email accounts to accommodate these users.

Insert An Email Signature

Next, you should add a professional email signature to your business account. When properly designed, an email signature drives brand awareness, encourages trust, and keeps your target recipients engaged. In fact, you can use a professional, free generator to easily add a signature in Gmail in minutes. Simply insert your business contact details and branded social account. Then, design your templates and overall signature layout. To customize your signature even further, you can add a styled signoff, disclaimers, videos, or custom banners. To start sending professional communications, insert an email signature onto your Gmail account.

Secure Your Business Email Address

Strong business email addresses need to be secure against spamming, phishing, internal and external attacks. Fortunately, there are several things to do to fight business security risks across your email inbox. Start off by encrypting all email and server connections. This way, secure messages can never be intercepted or read by cyberattackers. Next, be sure to verify all communications, update software whenever available, and educate your employees on security technology. In many cases, you may even want to consider reaching out to a third party for heightened email security. For businesses of all size, taking the time to evaluate and plan for email security is a crucial step to setup your account. 

Grow Your Email Contacts

With your professional small business email account established, you now need to focus on building your contacts. Include key networking information in your signature. In addition, you can consider traditional marketing techniques, such as telemarketing, direct mail, or hosting an event. Then, follow up these activities with an email. At the same time, you can always use social media, giveaways, and online communities to entice people with your email signature. Naturally, taking the time to build your email contacts by increasing personalization, building authentic relationships, and improving your targeting. To start sending communications, use the top marketing tactics to grow your email contacts.  

There are several easy steps to create a professional business email address for your company using Gmail. To begin the process, use G Suite to build your small business account. Now, you can add all the required accounts, addresses, and users for your email account. Next, you should add a professional email signature to your business account. For businesses of all size, taking the time to evaluate and plan for email security is a crucial step to setup your account. Finally, use your email signature to grow your contacts by promoting and reinforcing engagement. Follow the steps highlighted above to learn about how to create a professional business email address on Gmail.

Not all brands are equal when it comes to connecting with customers. Some successful brands can bond with their audiences emotionally. As a result, it creates a lasting relationship between brands and their customers.

MBLM recently released its annual Brand Intimacy Study 2020, ranking the top ten most intimate brands. Amazon topped the list with a narrow lead over Disney.

For small businesses, finding customers and keep them loyal is a big challenge. However, knowing how some big brands bond with their customers to build an intimate relationship can certainly help small businesses create a loyal customer base.

Top 10 Most Intimate Brands

Every year, MBLM looks at brands based on emotion to create a list of the top 10 most intimate brands.

This time, the company surveyed consumers to know their experience with nearly 400 brands across 15 industries to prepare its list of intimate brands.

Here are the top 10 most intimated brands:

How MBLM Ranked Brand that Create Emotional Bonds With Customers

MBLM has developed its brand intimacy model over a decade. What’s more, it has validated its model through quantitative and qualitative research.

The company surveys the users of brands to asses their emotional connection with brands, characteristics of their bonds with brands, and degree of intimacy to prepare the list of top most intimate brands. Then, it assigns an intimacy quotient (1-100) to brands based on the percent of users who are intimate with brands, the characteristics of their bonds, and the intensity of their bonds.

How Customers Bond With Brands

MBLM gauges characteristics of users’ bond with the following patterns:

• Fulfillment- delivering products/services of supreme quality
• Identity- showing admired values
• Enhancement- becoming better through using products/services
• Ritual- users include brands in the day-to-day lives
• Nostalgia- users having good memories of brands
• Indulgence- creating a close relationship around moments of joy

And to assess the intensity of the intimate brand relationship, it looks at following three stages:

• Sharing- users and brands interact
• Bonding- it is users feel an attachment towards brands
• Fusing- it is when users and brands are co-identified

Here is the most intimate brand, Amazon, on the list:

Mario Natarelli, managing partner, MBLM stated, “We are thrilled to celebrate our 10th year of examining brands based on emotion. The concept of Brand Intimacy is important for marketers because emotion has been proven to drive purchase decisions, and also long-term customer bonds. Our yearly study reveals the changing landscape including which brands or industries perform best against different demographics,”

“Amazon’s rise to the top is something we forecasted for years based on the insights we’ve been gathering. The brand’s dominance and breadth of portfolio have formed both intense and essential bonds with consumers. Examining top performers like Amazon can give us clues on how others can achieve their growth and success,” he continued.

Key Takeaways for Small Businesses

Intimate brands, as the survey states, outperform Fortune 500. So, small businesses should make efforts to turn out as intimate businesses. And there is only one way to do it – to make a bond with consumers.

Following are some tips for small business to build emotional bonds with customers:

• Never adopt a one-size-fits-all approach
• Always treat your customers as people, not just as money transactions
• Embrace the speed and simplicity of social media to reach out to customers
• Show your appreciation to your customers

Last but not least, you should strive to offer top-class products/services.

About the Survey

MBLM and Praxis Research Partners surveyed 6,200 consumers across the United States, Mexico, and the United Arab Amirates to evaluate brands. The main objective of the survey was to know how customers bond to brands. You can click here to know more about Brand Intimacy Study 2020.

These Brands Build Emotional Bonds with Customers – Can Yours? [Smallbiztrends]

Article by Laura McLoughlin, Glaze Digital

Competitive brand analysis is a method of identifying your direct competitors and ascertaining their marketing strategies while pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses. This may sound like quite a grind, but with the wonders of Facebook, it is a relatively straightforward task! 

Facebook has been with us for a while now but it still remains the first point of contact for marketers aiming to extract audience data and valuable insights. So the aim of this guide is to explain the key elements you need to research in relation to your competitors’ tactics on Facebook and how you can use these to analyse your competitors brand performance.

The four key elements of Facebook marketing are:

Engagement

Engagement is an action someone takes on your Facebook Page or one of your posts, the most common being likes, comments, and shares, but it can also include checking in to your location or tagging your business in a post. These actions matters because they can help extend organic reach. Engagement helps boost your placing in a users news feed by the Facebook algorithm plus likes/shares expose your posts to your audience’s extended network.

Reach: Reach is the number of people that content is seen by on Facebook. This can be by either organic or paid efforts. You can see an overview of the reach by going to your page insights, and if you want more details, you can click on the Reach tab.

Average engagement rate per post: This metric represents the sum of likes, comments and shares on a specific post divided by the number of total posts divided by 100.

Page growth: Although is considered a vanity metric, it shows you how far your content can reach audiences on Facebook, and it helps you create custom audiences for ads campaigns.

There are many tools available that allow you to input this information and produce a report, but as an entrepreneur and small business owner, you may be operating on a limited budget, so for now, tracking the data manually is perfectly suitable.

Here are the key factors to analyse when trying to understand a competitor’s Facebook content strategy:

What type of posts are they publishing?

Figure out the nature of posts they usually share and how is it working well for their brand image.

Which media are they using the most?

What is the ratio of text, photos, videos and links in the content they are sharing on their fan page? If one content format is performing better, take a note of it.

What time do they usually post?

Most brands share content during peak traffic hours. See if that’s the case or they post at regular intervals outside of peak hours.

How frequently are they posting?

Do they share content more than once a day or is it just a few times a week? This tells you how active they are on Facebook.

Which posts receive the most engagement?

It’s not uncommon for digital marketers to run engagement ads on Facebook to “boost” their posts and gather look-alike audiences. This is why it becomes important to check what’s the ratio of their boosted posts vs non-boosted posts and which ones perform better for their audience (and why).

The key points to measure in Facebook engagement, are how well the fans are interacting with the posts your competitors share on their fan page are likes, shares, and comments. If the number of times a post has been shared is high, it’s quite likely that their audience is loving what they post and likes to share it with their friends.

Even though comments are not a direct factor to demonstrate the likeability of a piece of content, it’s still an important factor to consider if the brand does interact with their audience on a regular basis. It also tells how involved the fans are with the brand’s image and fan page and how comfortable they are in sharing their comments with the public. If the brand is paying attention to what their fans are saying, they are most likely working with a sound social media strategy.

So, once you notice their traits and behaviours on their fan page, you can almost replicate that for your audience if you are in the same niche.

As an entrepreneur and business owner it is essential to figure out what other businesses in your niche are doing on social media, it can help you not just brainstorm ideas for your own social content, but it can also give you an insight into the current habits of the audience your business needs to target. It is the most essential step in defining your overall digital marketing strategy, as it can help avoid making the same mistakes your competition may be making putting you ahead of the game.