Branding is huge when it comes to running your own business. This is the way that prospective customers will notice your business, hopefully recognizing it for years to come. Though in some cases people define a brand as simply being an identifying symbol, mark, logo, name, word, and/or sentence for a business, it’s much more than that. When you brand your business you are doing more than just giving it a fancy logo. Your brand is your identity.
It’s found in everything about your company. Your companies style of customer service, company uniforms, business cards, and even how you market and advertise your business. This is the “vibe” that people associate with your company and can determine how they react to the products/services which you’re offering. Companies in the United States spent approximately 240.7 billion dollars in branding/advertising services in 2019 alone. This shows how important branding has become for most businesses across. To help entrepreneurs with branding, here are five ideas that can be used to boost brand sales.
1. Google Search Ads
One way to help build your brand is to take your branding to the online arena. Visitors online encounter approximately 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day while surfing the internet. As the usage of the internet increases with every passing year (as of October of 2020 there are 4.6 billion internet users), the chances of getting your brand in front of people increases.
One way of doing that is to create Google Search Ads for your business. Google gets over 3.5 billion searches each day. This provides businesses a powerful tool for spreading their brand to these same users on a daily, if not minute by minute basis. Google Ads is a form of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, which has fast become a form of marketing that businesses across the world partake in.
If you’re a business that is seeking a way to grow its brand, this is a good way to do so. For instance, say you’re seeking to raise the brand profile of the Selling Power digital magazine. Taking steps to set yourself up for a Google Search Ads campaign can go a long way in helping to spread the brand of your magazine to prospective readers.
With PPC advertising, advertisers will pay a fee every time one of their ads is clicked by a prospective user. Though the growth for such a form of marketing seems to be less organic, it’s still a great way to grow sales, and create customer leads. Google Search ads are a solid digital method for boosting your brand sales in the long run.
2. Customer Definition
When you go into any type of business, you’ll want to find ways to increase your chances of being successful. One way of doing this is to know who your customers are. Without acknowledging this, there’s a good chance that your new business venture will be destined for failure. When you determine who your audience is, this helps you to better plan for how to build/direct your business. Fine-tune your customer focus to a laser point and this will help you to not spend money indiscriminately.
This can have a big effect on how you brand. Let’s say that you are catering to a more corporate demographic. For example, you’re a company that provides OKR processing duties to a variety of different corporate-focused businesses. When you brand your product, you aren’t going to market it in such a fashion that it doesn’t speak to the customer base you’re shooting for. You’re branding in such a case is going to be more business-oriented, and conservative in its presentation.
Take into consideration the culture of the customer base you’re shooting for servicing. You also look at what they want from you as the provider, in addition to taking stock of what they need. In this case, it’s being provided with B2B software that helps keep work for hire and distributed teams connected. Once a customer sees that you are “speaking their language” with your branding this can help to boost the sales of your brand in the future.
3. Competitive Advantage
As you seek ways to spread your brand to potential customers to increase sales, establish what makes your brand better than others in your field. You want to define for customers why they should buy your product or hire you for your services. How do they benefit from aligning themselves with you? What do you bring to the table which other companies don’t? Your brand can reflect your competitive advantage.
Think of a fast-food chain like Culver’s. One of the things which set them apart from every other fast food restaurant out there is their excellent customer service. People associate Culver’s with receiving the best service possible, and this has become their brand in a way. This has given Culver’s a competitive advantage over a host of other well known fast-food restaurants when it comes to their own customer service.
Now let’s say you are a company that specializes in product video production. Your competitive advantage is that you give customers a personalized experience in video production, versus larger companies where you might be seen as a speck in the larger framework of their business. Your personalized assistance can be your own competitive advantage as compared to other companies, and acts which can help your brand grow, and lead to sales in the future.
4. Facebook Advertising
Facebook is one of the largest and most influential social media platforms out there. Each month there are approximately over 2.19 billion users using the service, so it would do well to take a chance on their marketing platform to grow your brand. You have no shortage of users to choose from on Facebook when it comes to finding people who simply want your product.
Let’s say you’re a non-profit organization like the Fair Labor Association, which is trying to raise awareness about your brand. One way of finding potential donors, volunteers, and backers is through online marketing. This allows you to tell the story of your organization to potential supporters, while also making it more of a personal experience. Steps needed when you create a Facebook Ad include choosing your objective, selecting your audience, setting your budget, and then measuring/managing your ad. Once you take these steps you are that much closer to boosting your brand sales.
5. Pricing
Item/service pricing is also the best way to increase sales. You’ll first want to do research into your field’s market to ensure that you are setting the right price. If you’re offering a high-priced item or service, provide your customer with the highest quality product or service. Even if the pricing is lower, still do your best to offer the best service to your customers. Applying great customer service with a well-researched pricing model can help you build your brand sales in the long run.
