Branding and marketing sound very different from one another. Branding represents the company’s image, while marketing is the vehicle that puts your company in front of your consumers. However, the two are heavily intertwined, and one can’t happen without the other.
What is Marketing?
When you market your company, you aim to drive sales, create greater brand awareness, and catch your consumer’s eye. Companies use many channels for marketing their brand, including:
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Email marketing
- Pay per click advertising (PPC)
- Content marketing
Ultimately, your marketing approach will rely on your branding. Marketers have to consider which audiences they are targeting and how their branding will affect their campaigns and content.
Marketing changes constantly. New methods and approaches are continually being created, and social media and SEO ranking factors shift rapidly, forcing marketers to think on their feet to keep up.
What is Branding?
Some people define branding as a marketing practice that shapes your brand. Your overall brand represents what your company is about, your morals and ethos, and what makes you stand out from the crowd. Various elements of branding include:
- Your logo
- Tagline
- Your colour palette
- Fonts
However, branding also questions elements such as communication style, company culture, and inspiration. These elements all pull together to create a cohesive story about your company and what you do.
Branding comes before marketing – without brand and style guidelines to shape your marketing content, your marketing would be ineffective and confusing. Where your branding is concerned, your principles will last for many years, guiding how your company is marketed and what approaches are taken.
Your brand should consider your target audience to create a unique personality that your potential customers will find attractive. If you’re a company with products for young people, your brand needs to be youthful and playful. Your brand personality then adds to your brand aesthetic and defines how your logo, colour palette, and tagline should look.
Branding vs Marketing
Branding and marketing have a symbiotic relationship, and one can’t exist without the other. Your branding drives your marketing, and your marketing drives your branding and makes your company recognisable for your customers. Having a solid brand will lead to strong marketing.
Your marketing grabs the attention of potential customers, but your branding is what makes them stick around. Branding is used to create trust and convey a message to your audience, and marketing is used to spread that message to a broader audience.
A key area of overlap between branding and marketing is in the imagery used for your marketing strategy. Your logo, colours, and tagline can be used to great effect within marketing, cementing your image and reinforcing your brand identity to consumers new and old. Your marketing can then use your branding to create a story about your company and set a tone for potential customers.
Brand Marketing
Brand marketing is where the overlap between branding and marketing becomes even more pronounced. This form of marketing primarily focuses on the brand itself and uses branding to establish the company as a trustworthy, highly regarded business.
Brand marketing is a long-term marketing campaign that takes time to develop. It increases the authenticity and trust of a brand and can lead to many rewards in the future. Customers need to take time to get to know the brand, so investing in steady brand marketing allows your brand personality and voice to shine through.
A successful brand marketing campaign runs in a similar vein to a traditional marketing strategy. Many channels can be used, including social media, paid ads, and content marketing. The aim is to create positive customer experiences and design a memorable brand identity that your audience will remember.
Social media is the most important vessel for brand marketing. Not only can brands create posts and curate feeds to push their brand identity into the spotlight, but they can also interact with their customers and boost their brand image. 71% of people state that they are more likely to recommend a specific brand to their family and friends after a positive experience on social media. The simple act of replying to and liking comments can go a long way to establishing brand voice and trust with customers.
Expertise, Authority, and Trust
Creating expertise, authority, and trust (often abbreviated to EAT) is one of the cornerstones of marketing and branding. Trusting a brand is key for many consumers and establishing these concepts as part of your brand can help in your marketing techniques and prove to your audience that your company is the best option for them.
You can work on boosting your EAT to increase your reputation as a brand:
- Expertise – establish your brand as an expert by creating high-quality content centred around your topic of expertise.
- Authority – increase your authority in your field by hiring experts for professional content or advice.
- Trust – trust can be bolstered by encouraging customers to leave reviews of your site or their experience, exhibiting your credentials, and keeping your content consistently accurate and up to date.
Not only is EAT a great addition to your branding, but it is also excellent for SEO purposes. If Google can tell that your content is trustworthy and relevant to consumers, it will bump your web pages up the ranks, allowing more people to find you.
Both your branding and marketing can build on your EAT. Creating quality blog posts, posting about your customer reviews, and showing how other experts contribute to your website or work shows customers that your company takes itself seriously and is a source of authority for the products or services they are looking for.
Conclusion
Marketing and branding are two sides of the same coin. Before implementing a successful marketing strategy, branding must come first and should define what the company stands for and offers. Once armed with the branding material, the marketing team can create unique content to get the attention of potential customers.
However, the goal of both branding and marketing is the same: to attract customers and make them stay.
