To create a solid brand, you will need to:
Define yourself.
A brand represents your company’s “personality,” and as such you should have a general idea of what its attributes will be even before you start up. This is the foundation of any brand strategy. The goal is to make your brand relevant and generate awareness. Review your business plan and extract the elements of your product or service that distinguish you from your competition. Check out Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com, an online exchange that offers free tools and information on a wide variety of branding issues, including how to create a brand and develop brand awareness.
Create your image.
Your logo and color palette are the visual components of your branding and will appear on all your promotional material. A logo should quickly and efficiently communicate what your business is about. Keep it simple and align it with your brand’s attributes. LogoWorks specializes in creating custom logos for small businesses at an affordable price. Base your brand on your customers’ needs. Don’t know what those are? Ask your customers.
Get the word out.
Use online and offline channels to get the word out about your brand. Tried and tested methods include the use of promotional items. Branders.com has an extensive catalog of promotional items to help brand your business. Pass along items to customers or hand them out at community events or seminars. Online, you should consider using Twitter, Facebook and blogs to reinforce your brand’s values and attributes. Take a look at Zappos.com, which has earned a lot of praise for its use of the Internet to develop and publicize its brand.
Be consistent.
As you can probably tell, building a brand means managing multiple endeavors simultaneously. That underscores the importance of staying consistent. Whether you’re dealing with the use of your logo on brochures or how your sales staff pitches your product or service, make sure your brand’s message stays in sync. Create a summary statement or “elevator pitch” of your brand: a 30-second synopsis of what it stands for. Make sure your entire staff is aware of it.
Tips and Warnings
The best brands tend to appeal to a person’s natural need and emotions for involvement. Strive for simplicity. Too much information confuses your brand message. Don’t just stress quality and service. Everybody does that. Really figure out what is unique about your product and what sets you apart. Avoid trying to be overly “cool” or in-the-moment. That’s too hard to sustain. The brand must be relevant, but long term. The secret to successful brands is not only creating them, but also managing them well.
Everywhere you look, there’s advertising. But is any of it effective? And are advertisers maximizing the space they have to reach people?
In a world that’s becoming increasingly congested with digital messages, it’s simultaneously becoming more difficult for brands to expose themselves to their target markets in engaging and meaningful ways.
Everywhere you look, there’s advertising. But is any of it effective? And are advertisers maximizing the space they have to reach people?
For the most part, the answers to these questions are “no” and “no.” However, there are exceptions.
In the last time, we’ve seen a number of companies, both in the technology and advertising fields, develop new tools and strategies for rising above the noise and enhancing meaningful brand-consumer engagement.
Balancing Clever and Meaningful
There’s a big difference between clever ad placement and meaningful ad placement. Just because a company is targeting customers in a never-before-seen way, doesn’t mean it will be effective or profitable.
Take the following instance as an example.
In 2005, a Utah woman accepted $15,000 from GoldenPalace.com in return for permanently tattooing the casino’s name on her forehead.
And while Golden Palace’s investment may have brought an initial surge of traffic to its website, mainly from curious people wanting to learn more about the backstory, the long-term value is pretty low.
It may get attention, but this is one unconventional marketing form that won’t take off.
There are plenty of other bizarre stories like this one. There’s the groom that sold ad space on his wedding tie; the man that launched a business based on wearing different branded t-shirts every day of the year; and the movie producer who famously used a homeless man as ad space, but these aren’t anything more than sensational tactics designed to create momentary buzz around an idea or product.
While these certainly represent clever use of advertising space, they are anything but meaningful.
Clever and Meaningful Use of Ad Space
However, there are companies that have been able to produce meaningful engagement with clever placement.
We’re witnessing a couple of highly relevant examples.
1. New Outdoor Digital Marketing Boards
The first one that comes to mind is the Miami Heat’s addition of the Xfinity East Plaza at the American Airline Arena, which brilliantly features digital marketing boards from a company called Nanolumens.
These marketing boards allow the Heat to advertise on ordinary pillars that would have otherwise been blanketed with canvases, or altogether underutilized.
It’s really an incredible piece of technology and shows how companies are creating and contriving ad space where there formerly was none.
But they aren’t just creating unique ad space as a PR stunt, which was undeniably the primary focus behind the previous strange examples.
There’s actual value to be extracted from this strategy. By delivering content through previously underutilized space, the Heat organization, its network of advertisers, and the fans are all able to benefit.
2. Hot Air Balloons
For years, customers have been exposed to the famous Goodyear Blimp. If a major sporting event is taking place, you can bet the blimp is flying high above the venue.
And while it’s an extremely effective advertising medium for Goodyear, you don’t see many other companies investing in the same strategy.
The primary reason is that a blimp costs millions of dollars to construct.
Well, over the past few years, marketers have discovered ways to bypass this exuberant cost while simultaneously leveraging ad space that was previously underutilized.
They are doing so by purchasing banners and corporate advertisements on hot air balloons.
While it’s not exactly a groundbreaking advertising tactic, companies have sparingly used hot air balloons for decades, it’s growing in popularity thanks to the subsequent growth of social sharing.
As social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have exploded onto the scene, the ability to quickly share images with friends and peers has emerged.
This means the real value of hot air balloon advertising takes place when the image gets recorded and shared hundreds or thousands of times over.
3. Smartphone Lock Screen
How many times do you open up your lock screen on your smartphone each day to check the time, read a text, or send an email? If you’re like the average user, you access your lock screen between 30 and 50 times per day.
A study from far 2013 suggests the number could be as high as 110 times per day for the average user.
Regardless, this makes it one of the most frequent habitual activities you participate in.
Startup, Slidejoy, noticed this trend and saw what nobody else did, underutilized advertising space. The app, which has received more than $1.2 million in funding, allows brands to deliver advertisements directly to a user’s lock screen. In return, the user can earn roughly $5 to $6 per month.
In the world of adblockers, this could be the answer brands are looking for to tap into the lucrative world of mobile advertising.
Creating Ad Space Out of Nothing
As the advertising world becomes noisier and noisier, it’s becoming that much more important for brands to leverage good opportunities for consumer engagement.
Simply paying for the same old PPC ads and physical billboards won’t work for every brand.
At the same time, the increased noise means the value of ad space is rising. As a result, venues and individuals are looking for ways to create ad space where none previously existed.
This produces an additional revenue stream and grabs the customer’s attention better than other oversaturated approaches.
In the future we will be look for more creative use of ad space, both in physical and digital marketing.
In particular, look for the rise of wearable marketing. If wearable devices continue to rise in popularity as many market experts predict, then it naturally follows that advertisers will seek out ways to leverage ad space in this niche.
We aren’t quite there, but then again, you never know who will be the first to try something new.
About the author
Kennith Fletcher has five years as a digital marketing strategist, has experience a tech, social media and environmental addict. Kennith has worked with many local businesses as well as large enterprise organizations and companies. Now he continues to work with Essay 4 Students and establish SEO and SEM campaigns across all verticals.
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