Brand marketing is an extremely important strategy, but one that often gets overlooked in favor of performance marketing. Performance marketing is more direct and has a clear, relatively immediate ROI because it is focused on conversions. Meanwhile, brand marketing is more like an undercurrent that customers may not even consciously notice as it pushes them along, focusing on building brand awareness and loyalty with consistent messaging. Done well, your business can reap the rewards for years, but you need to make sure your brand marketing strategies are going to be effective.
1. Don’t Chase Trends
Trending formats can be a great way to get in people’s feeds, but it’s not worth it if that content doesn’t fit well within your brand. Part of the power of brand marketing is in brand recognition, which is difficult to earn or maintain if you’re changing your voice or content style every time there’s a new trend on TikTok. Instead, only use trends when they align well with your brand and goals.
2. Streamline Your Imagery
As exciting as it can be to try new things and see how much you can include in a single image or frame, a streamlined visual is more likely to stick with customers. Too much of a good thing applies here, whether that’s too many colors, too much noise, or too much activity, for example. Using streamlined images helps keep your advertising clear and memorable.
3. Demonstrate Your Brand’s Value
As tempting as it can be to tell people everything about your brand, that’s not usually the best way to build an effective brand marketing strategy. Instead, show your brand in action. How is it doing good in the world? How is your team supported and empowered? What are your clients saying about you?
A great example of this is Dawn Dish Soap’s campaign about wildlife rescue use cases for their product. In addition to telling the audience that its products are safe and gentle enough to be used on wildlife, they show video footage of wildlife rescue experts using Dawn Dish Soap to clean a duck. They have also done ads talking about how their soaps help to clean wildlife that has been impacted by oil spills, showing the harm that those spills cause these animals and how Dawn helps to clean them up. They can say “We value wildlife” all day long, but showing the audience that their brand is gentle and effective in this way has created recognition and association, to the point that you may still see ducklings on their bottles at the grocery store to this day.
4. Use Neurobranding Strategies
Another way to communicate information about your brand with consumers while barely saying a word is by applying neurobranding strategies. Neurobranding leverages concepts from neuroscience, like color theory, to make sure consumers get the right messages from marketing campaigns.
For example, Liberty Mutual Insurance uses yellow in their marketing, which tends to signify fun, happy, and easy things to consumers. Because insurance is usually a fairly boring or even frustrating process, subtly communicating that Liberty makes things more fun and easy is a great way to differentiate their brand from others.
5. Keep Up with Your Audience
Even if your target audience’s demographics are the same, they will continue to change as the world around them does. For example, if you’ve always targeted teenage boys, it’s important to stay up-to-date with what they’re interested in. The musical artists, clothing styles, and hobbies that were popular with boys in that age group 10 years ago or even 10 months ago are probably not the same as what’s popular today, so if you aren’t regularly re-learning what they like, your brand may come off as behind the times. You shouldn’t redo your entire brand each year, but you may want to tweak the details in your marketing to better align with current interests.
6. Make Your Brand Visible Immediately in Ads
The average social media ad is viewed for less than 4 seconds, which doesn’t leave you with much time to get a user’s attention and share something they’ll remember. When you’re creating your content, consider this ever-shortening attention span and make sure your brand is immediately obvious from the very start of each ad with details like background colors, your logo, or a signature character.
7. Collect Customer Feedback
You don’t want to change your brand too often, but sometimes, customer feedback can help you get a better understanding of how people outside of your organization see things. You may learn new details about what your customers value most about you that could easily be integrated into your brand voice and marketing. For example, if you currently focus on how creative your team is, but you notice your customers repeatedly include notes about how fun you are to work with in their feedback, you may want to start including aspects of that fun-loving attitude in your marketing materials.
8. Focus on Long-Term Tracking
Brand marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, so it’s important to track long-term metrics as opposed to instant results. For example, someone who sees your ad may not convert right away, but do they remember seeing it when they’re asked a few days later? Meta tracks this data as brand lift and may let you know if your results aren’t in the expected range for your industry. Some other questions to consider are:
- What do users who have seen your ads think of your brand?
- Does that perception align with your long-term goals?
- How many impressions does it take for a user to remember your brand?
These types of metrics can be useful when it comes to evaluating your brand marketing efforts and whether it’s time to pivot.
9. Back Up Your Story and Claims
This is a great place for your content marketing to make an impact on your brand marketing’s success! Take the time to develop more in-depth content for people who may see an ad and want to learn more about where your brand comes from, what your values are, and how both of those things are part of the day-to-day work you do. Consumers are used to fact-checking nearly everything they see, so make sure when they’re searching for more information based on your brand marketing, they can find it from you.
For example, in Vaseline’s See My Skin campaign, they didn’t simply say they were doing something about the lack of representation in dermatology imagery. They also built a website that shares access to resources for dermatologists and consumers, including an image search feature, tips to prepare for an appointment, and a directory of dermatologists for people pursuing care.
10. Keep Building Your Story
Your story may feel complete as it is, but as you continue to grow your company, your story can grow with you! This isn’t an excuse to lose track of your roots, but rather, to continue updating your brand marketing materials with new information. This can help keep viewers engaged, as they’re getting to see new sides of your business, and give newer members of your team and customer base an opportunity to still feel like a valuable part of the history of your business.
Keep Your Brand Marketing Effective
With these tips, you can keep your brand marketing focused and effective by communicating with your audience, ensuring your brand is memorable, and evolving over time without losing the consistency that makes brand marketing so impactful. Remember that brand marketing is a long-term investment in your business, so staying consistent is key to getting dividends down the road. Now, you’re ready to apply these tips to your own brand marketing and start seeing results!
