Best Practices for Successful Branding
Branding, a Wonderful Lever
Branding is like a powerful lever connected to the product, influencing sales and increasing profits. The product may be unique or have competitors with similar prices, but the branding must be unique. It reflects your values, your aesthetics, your goals, your skills, defines your audience, and impacts sales, perhaps more than the product itself.
Branding is the image formed in the consumer's mind, either consciously or subconsciously, about the promoted product, whether it has a physical form or is a service.
At the time of purchase, when the price difference between similar products is small, the pre-formed idea (branding) influences the purchase, giving an advantage to the brand that the consumer has a positive image of, by a percentage of 80%.
Understand your customers
To create products your customers, to create better ads that attract more customers, and win customers over competitors, you need to understand your customers. After all, they have generously recorded their voice to be heard on metrics, on products reviews or social media:
Analyze verified buyer reviews and look for recurring patterns of behavior and key phrases. Double read the negative comments. What can lift you up or tear you down may be hidden in these indignant paragraphs.
Social media comments is less important than ratings as you don't know if the commenters actually bought the product or their motivations, but they are still a source of information. Mainly to reveal trends. As with reviews you will look for recurring patterns of behavior and key phrases.
Specialized forums is an important source of information to discover developing market trends and discover problems about your brand or product.
Study your customers. Literally.
When I take on branding projects I look for the most important physical selling points and spend hours studying customers: why do they buy this, why don't they buy that, what do they want? what would they like? where do they have a problem? what made a positive impression on them? For digital stores, user metrics are a treasure.
Sellers are an excellent source of information. They know the customers, their needs, and even the developments in the audience depending on the season: summer, Christmas, etc. Benefit from their knowledge. Understanding customers is a constantly evolving process. The audience itself evolves and changes, needs change. Make sure he's up to date.
User testing
To produce products or services that your target group will love and create better ads that will bring in more customers, you need to evaluate and optimize your products or services before they interact with the public. By evaluating the product or service in a small sample of the actual target group addressed, it is possible to study and analyze the audience's behavior when interacting with your product.
Evaluate and optimize your products or branding before they interact with the public. Evaluating products on a small but representative group of customers allows for a deeper understanding of your audience's reactions and needs before the products even come into contact with them.
Prototype user testing, i.e. the evaluation of products or brand on a small, but representative group of customers, before the product goes into production, allows a deeper understanding of the reactions and needs of your audience before the products or services even you come into contact with it. Allowing improvements and adjustments before final production.
An ideal medium for conducting User Testing its websites that attract the product target group, mainly for non-material products: advertising, website design, packaging, logo, video or different color palette, as:
Avoid using the primary communication channel, which is the brand website, for testing to prevent any negative associations with our brand if something goes awry.
Recognizability of the brand or Brand awareness.
When people recognize and trust a brand, it leads to increased sales. . To increase the awareness of your business, focus on the quality of communication, avoiding movements that lack identity and uniqueness. These moves will not help you, instead they will tire the audience following you.
The name, logo, colors, fonts, packaging and any unique feature in the corporate identity, such as empty space in the design or a unique shape in the photos, are part of the corporate identity and shape the impression of the product on the consumer.
Mediocrity is all around us. Uniqueness, combined with quality, determines the brand's ability to stand out (brand awareness).
Branding representative of values and aesthetics
Avoid posting anything that is mediocre or doesn't align with your values and aesthetics. Your audience will notice, and their perception of your brand can shift instantly. It's challenging and costly to alter a negative opinion once it's formed compared to maintaining a positive one. Whether it is a publication on a social network, animation, video or advertisement, make sure that the content is quality, unique and represents the brand.
Each action should mirror your identity. It's essential to embed it in the minds of the public, emphasize it, uphold it, and enhance it. With each passing day and every post, you shape your corporate identity and consistently nurture it.
Designing for the medium.
Different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, television, and YouTube each have specific technical requirements that influence aesthetics. Ensuring your content aligns with the correct aspect ratio, such as 16:9 for certain platforms, is crucial as the final outcome depends on these specifications. If you share content design for 16:9 on a platform with a 1:1 ratio, you will appear indifferent or careless towards your audience, potentially impacting their perception of your brand. Prioritize quality output, even if it means creating videos or animations for fewer channels, as it directly impacts sales.
The image the customer sees
It is remarkable how frequent updates can alter the branding of an e-shop or website. When enhancing your image, ensure to work with skilled professionals who value the essence and the design system. Remember, it's not just a process; it's the image that your customers perceive.
Steadfastness or Lean on Me
Posting consistently high-quality content sends a crucial message: your business is engaged and committed to offering your audience what they enjoy. Whether it's through graphic design, animations, videos, or advertisements, each piece of content enhances your brand and clearly communicates to partners and customers that your company is dynamic, present, and reliable for the future.
Update the eshop. Steady.
The mailing list and website are the sole communication channels that belong to you, providing full control over your messaging.
Leveraging social media to assess responses to content is a clever method to receive feedback from your audience and adapt your website's outreach strategy. Utilize social media posts for content evaluation (User Testing) by setting up an account that targets your audience: identify the most engaging posts, make any required adjustments, and then share them on your primary social media account, website, or online store.
Do not use the website as a blog.
If you want to express yourself draw or write poetry. The website is the official representative of your own brand where customers will turn for purchases, for objective information, because they are interested in the content or to get ideas. Show respect for brand values and strategically target customers.
Email lists
It's not hard, it's not SPAM, and GDPR didn't end email marketing.
Create your email list and prioritize email marketing to maintain contact with your customers. While communication platforms may change or totally disappear, having your own email channel ensures a consistent way to reach your audience, independent of shifts in social media policies.
It's a difficult task, don't take it lightly. Breaking down the main list into smaller, personalized lists enhances content delivery, engaging recipients effectively. Tailoring content for specific lists enables the creation of targeted campaigns that cater precisely to each customer's preferences and needs. This approach allows for reaching your audience in a more personalized manner, boosting campaign effectiveness.
Statistics
Communication requires strategy and knowledge. Using statistics is crucial for developing communication strategies and enhancing marketing efforts. By analyzing statistical data, we gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and market trends, design website/eshops, create customer profiles, or the preparation of specialized questions and the elaboration of a communication strategy, all of them are based on analytical reports and data provided by statistics. Furthermore, strategic evolution is an ongoing process driven by data analysis. These statistics help us outline future actions, refine our strategy, and enhance our marketing efforts.
Graphic design and User Experience are elements that are inextricably linked to statistical data. The analysis of statistics allows us to shape the graphic design and user experience so that they meet the needs and preferences of our audience, improving the effectiveness of marketing.