We all need timely solutions in today’s competitive marketplace, but the pressure to drive inbound enquiries can often lead to short-term strategies that ultimately fail to deliver.
Investing in your digital presence is crucial but doing this without first challenging and interrogating your brand is a classic mistake.
Your brand is more than just a logo. It’s the core essence of who and what you are as a business.
The organisations that understand this can go on to become leaders in their field, leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps from their table.
Yet despite this, a shocking number of business fail to grasp its importance.
A recent Harvard Business Review article, for example, estimated that 95% of employees either don’t know or don’t understand their company’s brand strategy.
As this article will show, brand is the single biggest marketing advantage a company can have, separating the haves and the have-nots with a Darwinian ruthlessness.
It’s why investing in brand building offers the biggest long-term ROI and why you need to be doing it now.
1: Loyalty and personal recommendation always come first
According to a recent study by Search Engine Land, 70% of consumers cite familiarity and trust as their No1 factor when choosing a product or service.
A strong brand, aligned with your core market, can deliver a huge uplift in personal recommendations and turn customers into evangelists. That’s the most cost effective and reliable form of new business acquisition there is.
2: It avoids wasted time and costly mistakes
Having a clear, consistent, relevant and purposeful brand presence ensures that your marketing efforts and investments are always aligned to your core purpose.
It’s too easy for mistakes to be made if different stakeholders have different views about what the business is trying to achieve.
This in turn avoids confusing customers and gives them something to buy into.
3: It gives you huge advantage with Search Engines and Social Media
It’ll annoy you to know it, but the biggest brands in your market pay significantly less for each and every click they receive to their digital properties, whether that’s a website, blog or app.
The reason for this is that social media giants like Facebook and search engines like Google are primarily concerned with making money the quality of their users’ experience.
It gives brands a huge advantage, whether paying directly for clicks via social media advertising or Google Adwords (where you will literally be charged more for each click), or even getting organic clicks via SEO.
Brand Authority is so highly prized by these platforms that it is even cited as one of the core factors in their algorithms.
The simple reason for this is that a brand engenders trust, so Google and Facebook are more comfortable surfacing a trusted brand in their results and feeds respectively.
This obviously creates an uneven playing field, but that only makes it a more accurate reflection of real life.
Okay, so what do I do about it?
Regardless of whether you are an ambitious new start up or a more established business looking to grow, the time, effort and money you invest in your brand will pay the highest dividends in the short, medium and long-term.
It’ll drive more sales, keep your team focussed on the prize, and make all new business acquisition cheaper.
The sooner you start thinking and behaving like a brand, the sooner you will reap the benefits.
For more information please contact us on;
Nigel Mummery – nigel@blazemail.co.uk | 07971 674 414
