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5 Reasons Why Unified Branding is So Important for Your Business

You want your company to be recognized no matter where a person sees it. This counts on all fronts – you want every single social network to have a unified look to them, and you want that look to borrow from your website. Branding is such a crucial aspect of marketing that you need to have for your business. If you don’t have a key theme that permeates every channel you use, you need to start now. When you’re a student you can buy homework and spend more time searching for solutions for your branding.

Here are five reasons why unified aesthetics (or branding) are important for your business:

1. Your Brand Needs its Own Personality

People don’t connect with objects, they connect with the human traits that they assign to them. Companies that have its own personality feel like a friend to a customer. They are a buddy or someone that you look up to. Whatever your brand is, create a persona that permeates throughout all your branding efforts. Your company needs to feel like someone recognizable. Have a specific voice, a specific look, and benefit from being unique.

2. You Need to Be Recognizable Wherever You Are

When you are a large brand, or even just online, you will be seen from people all over the world. You want people to be able to recognize the branding of your company, even if they cannot understand the language. It is for this very reason that McDonald’s is so successful worldwide. The same goes for other large companies like Starbucks. The unified branding means that, if anyone, anywhere, were to visit another country, they can be assured that they will find the same food and experience at any McDonald’s they come across.

3. Branding Builds Loyalty

Branding means having a look and persona that people recognize and know. As a rule, people will always use the brand that they know over a new, unknown brand. That is where the strength in branding lies. You want people to register your product as something they know and trust. Once you do that, you have a loyal customer.

4. Branding Helps You Convey Information

You can convey a lot of information about yourself, your values, and your vision through visuals. Bright, primary colors convey different information than dark natural tones. Use visual cues to tell your customers and visitors who you are without even saying a word.

5. It Will Grow Your Business

Loyal customers will provide repeat business, and happy customers will provide word-of-mouth marketing for you at no extra charge. Have your customers vouch for you, and focus on building your relationships with them to cultivate that loyalty.

Branding is everything from your website to your social networks to your marketing campaigns. Use marketing automation to couple your unified branding with tailored experiences that will increase your customer loyalty and repeat business through uniform emails. You want to be a brand that people trust and return to. To do that, you need to be recognizable on all fronts. Be familiar, be professional, and people will return.

How to Launch a skincare brand on a small budget

The local business incubator here in Auckland is called The Icehouse.  It’s an impressive place buzzing with activity.

Creative Agency Secrets was asked to prove its salt by giving some free consulting to a new organisation, DirtyMan.co.nz Perversely, it is all about keeping men clean!

Avoiding costly product launches

The team is a start-up and was looking to gain profile without too much hard cost.  Our suggestions included:

  • Painting up an old caravan to take to events
  • Asking supermarkets about promotions based not in-store ($$$) but in the car park
  • Setting up google alerts for three phrases aligned to the 3 personae of their ‘ideal customer’ profiles
  • Set up a press or media page on the website to host high resolution pack images, past coverage and background information
  • Print A5 leaflets on light card single sided and then use the back for several different purposes: a Postcard; letterbox maildrops; product information – just overprint in black when you need them

Prioritising your time and money

We time showing DirtyMan how to prioritise their decisions with regard to which promotions to spend money on and how to pick the ones that would give the best return.  They were considering a radio show sponsorship, leaflet drops to households and joint promotions with other non-competing brands.

For a startup, we think the best promotions are those that

  1. Bring a customer face to face with the brand
  2. Drive awareness to a new audience based on someone else’s data list

We recommended assessing any joint promotion based on the size and quality of the database of the other company.  And so a sports team sponsorship that has a supporting newsletter (especially an electronic one) and a Facebook fan group is probably worth more than a radio show with no mailing list.

What were the outcomes?

Here’s what Tracey Orange, the owner had to say after the briefing with Creative Agency Secrets:

Yes I did find my meeting with Rebecca useful, we have been busy talking to lots of people over the last week or so and I guess I am taking bits from everyone I speak to, and then formulating our plan from here.

After meeting Rebecca we are going to use some of her suggestions, one was to get out and meet our customers face to face and we now are looking for a cheap promo vehicle brand up and use for onsite promos and events, (if you know of any old land rovers for sale please let Mike know), she also gave me some good things to be talking to organisations we want to align with and not to be just giving stuff away but to leverage product for contacts database names and she also suggested getting hooked up with a clothing brand or similar and then the next day we spoke to someone who is going to see about hooking us up with a menswear clothing brand so fingers crossed.

Would you like access to our ideas?  Think about how to apply these to your own brand.

Get in touch and ask for a FREE 20 minute chat on the phone or Skype.