Branding is all about selling trust in a product, service, or business by packaging it with the right perception, image, and identity. Successful businesses thrive on how much trust their brand (image/identity) can sell to customers. Business relationships are built on trust, and trust is rooted in the brand. Join us in this article as we discuss 9 Unique Branding Ideas to Consider in 2020.
For your business to stand the test of time, your customers must trust your brand. Trust wins loyal customers, and a business’s brand is responsible for selling that trust.
In today’s competitive world of marketing, more business owners have become increasingly aware of the marketing potential of branding. However, most of them do not have quality products or services on which to anchor their customer’s trust. As a result, companies that have quality products or services to offer are finding it increasingly difficult to get attention.
It is vital to take note that there already exist several brands in virtually every target market. As such, it is crucial to create a unique brand (image/identity) that is capable of selling your business’s products/services and winning over customer’s trust.
Many business owners mistake branding for advertising and marketing. Because of this misconception, a lot of promising businesses get it wrong and lose out on chunks of potential customers. However, branding is not a marketing or advertising campaign.
While advertising/marketing campaigns seek to make customers and potential customers aware of new offerings by a company, branding pursues a different purpose. Ultimately, branding aims at creating (and maintaining) the right perception.
Your customers/prospects need to have a definitive impression about your business, its products, and services. That image/perception your customers have about your business ‘is’ your brand.
There are several reasons why you must brand your business effectively. The market competition is very fierce these days, and it takes more than a few strokes to get any attention. Branding, therefore, allows your business to stand out from the crowd.
Below is a list of fire branding ideas that will give your business against the competition. Remember, it’s about selling the right perception!
Unique Branding Ideas for in 2020
1. Define Your Archetype
Carl Jung, a renowned psychologist, conceptualized the concept of Archetype Branding. This strategy was adopted by several world-leading brands, including the likes of Apple, Microsoft, etc. and has been known to yield tremendous results.
Jung’s strategy poses that, to sell a definitive perception to your target customers, you should not only seek to ‘sell’ your products/services but also sell a ‘story’ along with it.
2. Re-examine Your Brand Values and Check Lapses
It is important to have defined brand values. Also, ensure that they include authenticity, credibility, and transparency. After incorporating these values, it is essential to analyze your performance and check for weak spots regularly.
After evaluating your brand’s weaknesses, try to improve on them consistently to increase your brand value. Meanwhile, keep it transparent; customers appreciate a brand that promotes an open brand/customer relationship.
3. Re-establish Your Identity
Your brand logo is your identity and the face of your business in your niche market and abroad. A mere casual drawing with some things scribbled on the image can tarnish your branding efforts. Your potential customers may easily take your brand as unprofessional and, therefore, untrustworthy.
4. Revaluate Your Social Media Strategy
Social media plays an essential role in any business, including start-ups, small businesses, and big businesses. Through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., brands can tap into a vast stream of potential customers.
Effective branding on social media can help your company create connections and build a strong following of active-users around your products and services.
5. Invest in Creative/Compelling Brand Visual Content
Besides your brand logo, every single publication concerning your brand is an extended image of your business. They are also instrumental both for advertising and marketing campaigns. As such, you must be intentional about monitoring and putting out various kinds of definitive and compelling visual content across multiple platforms.
6. Start an Official Brand Website/Blog
Creating an official blog/website for your business is one of the best branding efforts you can offer your business. Owning an official blog early on gives you more advantages because it will quickly become popular, and new customers will easily find it.
As your business thrives, your brand will soon experience rip-offs, imitators, and spoilers both online and physically. Since you will not be able to tackle every case simultaneously, your customers must know exactly where to go for relevant brand information/education.
An official blog can serve as a medium to ensure your brand’s credibility and accountability over the previous and coming years.
7. Always Integrate Your Branding on Advertisements
Renew your advertisements frequently and make sure that all ads from your company carry the tone of your brand. Don’t just send out adverts without re-examining them. Be intentional about every single item or piece of information that represents your brand, uniquely if it carries your logo. Review every detail as if the adverts themselves were a product; hence it should be brand-standard enough to compel buying actions.
8. Integrate Your Branding Into Your Email Marketing Campaigns
There are a few emails in my mailbox I just would not delete because of how they make me feel mentally present with the brand/company that sent them. Somehow, they managed to integrate the signature style and tone of the brand in almost every detail. I almost felt as if the entire company drove over to my house to deliver the mail.
Do not leave the potentials of emailing out of your branding campaign’s strategies, be creative. Just like your advertisements, you can take advantage of emails to deliver relevant information to your customers while leaving them with lasting impressions of/from your brand.
9. Leverage Customer Care Service
Your customer care service can play a very significant role in branding your business if you use it right. Ensure that there is consistency in the way your customers/visitors are attended to, bearing in mind that branding is all about selling perception.
Try to ensure that customers leave your care service with the right impression about your business even if they still have questions. For consistency, you can consider incorporating chatbots on your care channels and also explore other avenues as well.
Branding is the cornerstone of successful businesses. Despite increasing competition, if a company can sell trust in their brand, they can win the loyalty of customers more quickly. The unique blend of modern and time-proven branding strategies explained in this article will do an excellent job of strengthening the brand potentials of both start-ups and established companies long-term.