What is Branding?
Google favors brands over other businesses in its Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Branding is not just limited to the visual components of a business. But, it is a way for your consumers and clients to know what to expect from your business. Branding is largely the story you want to tell the world about your business.
Good branding can lead to masterpieces like the tech company Apple. Consistent messaging from your brand will instill confidence and build trust in people. Brand development is wide and covers many areas. These include advertising, customer service, social media, visuals, and more.
Fundamental Elements of a Brand
Choosing a Logo
Although, not the only important element, your logo is still very important in the branding of your business. As statistics say, it takes only 10 seconds to form a first impression of a brand’s logo. This tells you that it is important to spend a fair amount of time and effort designing the logo. Every business is different and so the logo design for them would be different too. There are some guidelines that I follow when designing a logo.
– Balance: Keeping the weight of the graphics and colors equal on both sides makes your logo balanced.
– Size: Make sure that the logo looks good in various sizes and a variety of mediums.
– Avoid too many details: When it comes to logos, make them simple and clean with strong lines and letters.
Style Guide
Your style guide is defined by the mission statement, buyer persona, color palette, and editorial style.
– Mission Statement: The mission statement of your business acts as a navigation tool for the style guide. A mission statement ensures that any piece of content that is produced, is working towards a goal. The mission statement will act as a guide on content like blogs, paid ads, graphics, taglines, and more.
– Buyer Persona: I talk in-depth about buyer persona and target demographics here. These are fictional portfolios of your ideal customer. The buyer persona will stipulate for whom the content gets produced. All the pieces of content need to be looked at from the eyes of your target audience.
– Color Palette: A color palette is the group of colors that the brand uses as a guide to all the visual content. This content includes the logo, website, social media posts, flyers, and others. Having consistency in the look and feel is an important part of branding.
– Editorial Style: Nowadays, an editorial style guide is the bread and butter of an authoritative brand. This component of your brand style guide can have strong implications for your PR team, as well as the people who write articles, scripts, blog posts, and website copy for your company.
Business Name
When it comes to naming your brand, there is no one fixed guideline that you can follow. The only thing to remember when choosing the brand name is that you fully embrace it. Your products, marketing material, and public relations will all be based on the name.
– Trademark: It is important to own the name of your company legally.
– Own up to the name: Embrace the brand name. put it on every marketing material you produce. Make sure that your marketing is based on your brand name.
What is Social Media Marketing?
If you are active on social media, you are losing out. Your social media is crucial in building a good brand reputation. Having a social media presence allows consumers to connect with your brand at a personal level.
When starting with social media marketing, diversity is key. You need to spend your marketing efforts on at least three to five different social channels. Every social media channel attracts a different audience. You should repurpose your content to fit with that platform’s audiences.
5 Golden Rules
Metrics that matter
Social Media tends to tie you up in metrics that don’t matter. For example, if you own a local boutique shop, you will get more out of a small local following rather than having a lot of people follow you but could never visit your store. Instead of focusing on stats that do not matter, start focusing on those that do. The number of followers of the number of likes will not make you money, the important number is the demographic of those followers and likes. Depending on the type of business you have, you might just be focusing on local traffic, or maybe you sell men’s grooming products and are only focused on people accordingly.
Analyze your work
Having a constant eye on the statistics is very important in getting the best out of your social media game. You need to understand your audience and see what works, which posts get more engagement, and which post gets more views. Without measuring the analytics, you are just a man throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. To develop a strategy, you need to understand your audience and for that, you need to look at the analytics. You need to know and understand what kinds of posts do better and double down on them.
Stick to a brand image
Your social media is your modern-day business card. Having consistency in the style of your posts gives a sense of confidence to your followers, and you develop a brand identity. Anything that you put on the internet should have a unique brand character. Your social media posts should have consistency between them, your brand identity is why people will come back for more of your content. To develop a loyal following you need to make sure that anything you post should accommodate your unique brand style, your posts should be recognizable for people.
Customer Service
Social Media is increasingly becoming the platform where people are taking their complaints about your products or services. If you can capture those complaints and remedy them before they blow up, you will have a leg up from your competition.
Post Consistency
Every social media platform favors consistency. But in a small business, social media is treated as “whenever I have time”. To remedy that, you can schedule posts on a weekly or monthly basis. It will help you with consistency.
Content Ideas for different social media platforms
Every Social Media Platform is different and constantly evolving.
– Paid video Ads
– Video content
– Reels
– Stories
– IGTV
– Long-Form Articles
– Polls
– At least 1 original Pin
– 10 to 12 pins every day
– Long-Form Articles
– Gifs and Videos
– Polls
– Gifs and Videos
Role of Social Media in Branding
Public Relations
- Constant communication with the audience
- Personalization of the messaging
- Show the Audience that you care
Building personal brands
- Engage with your audience
- Share your mission
- Get feedback
- Listen and implement
How to always have new content ideas
Searching for new content ideas is tough. Posting so much will leave you without good content ideas. To always have a constant supply of ideas is to search for keywords related to your industry on the platforms listed below.
Conclusion
This blog will help you understand branding, social media, and how social media helps in branding. If you want to have your brand handled by a professional marketer, you can contact me at (647)573-6644 or fill up the contact form.
Which social media platform is best for branding?
In my personal opinion to build a brand TikTok, Instagram and Linkedin are the best platforms for branding a new business. Although Facebook has a lot more people on its platform, its focus on paid ads hinders organic growth.
Which social media is used for personal branding?
To promote your personal blog or business, it is always better to have multiple streams. You would want to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
What is the best social media for marketing?
Facebook has the largest market share of users as opposed to other social media platforms. The growth of Instagram and TickTock gives business owners an interesting opportunity to market their business.