What is a brand’s identity, and why does it matter?
A common mistake from beginner marketers is confusing their business's brand image with their brand identity. I get it. They sound similar and are related concepts.
But they are not the same thing.
Brand identity is what we think our brand is, and the brand image is what customers believe our brand is.
However, our brand identity does influence how our brand image is perceived.
This article explores what a brand identity is, its importance and strategies a business can use to create its own brand identity.
Brand identity influences the brand image
Brand image is distinct from the brand identity.
A brand’s identity is its intent to cultivate a specific image in consumers’ minds. …
Investing money into Google Ads is not cheap — having a strategy will get you better results.
The first place that many people use to search for information about a product, service, or brand, is an online search — Google.
We have access to all the information we will need from the convenience of our computers or mobile phones. If a business wants customers to find them online, they must optimise their search engines' presence to find them before their competitors.
There are two ways to do this, SEO and pay-per-click ads.
Read on to learn how pay-per-click advertising works to optimise your strategy to achieve better results — more clicks and more conversions.
What Is Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising?
Pay-per-click advertising is a form of digital marketing, originally developed to create revenue for search engines. Along with organic (non-paid) search results, paid ads make up a second list of results. …
A Guide to Positioning Strategy
What is your unique way of providing value to customers?
Your market position is where your brand sits in the hearts and minds of customers.
The associations that consumers hold with the brand reflect its positioning in the market.
This week’s blog explores positioning as a marketing strategy. The relationship between positioning and other important marketing strategies are discussed, along with five common positioning strategies brands use.
“A position that takes into consideration not only a company’s own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well.” (Ries & Trout, 2001)
What Is Positioning?
Firms use positioning to create an image of their product or service in their target customers' minds.
Positioning defines how the brand’s offering is unique: how it provides a distinct benefit to customers. …
Email marketing has become a popular marketing and sales techniques across all types of businesses for one key reason: it works.
Since it rose quickly to prominence and the internet about 25 years ago, email marketing has become widely used by businesses.
Email is widely used as a marketing tool for businesses to communicate with their target market and as a relationship management tool to communicate directly with existing customers.
In 2020, a vast majority of people now used email daily to communicate with each other. Either with friends and family, work colleagues, or perhaps to sign up to receive more information about a brand or product that interests them.
What is Email Marketing?
Short for electronic mail, email is sending messages to one or more recipients, distributed by electronic means via the internet. …
A guide to using a targeted marketing strategy
Not everyone is going to be your customer. Why waste time and money marketing to people who are not in your target audience?
Often when you ask a small business owner who they are targeting as customers, their response is “Everyone”, or “Anybody interested in…”
They might refine this audience down to “homeowners” or “people who go to the gym”.
This audience is still too broad.
The problem is that not all consumers think alike, and not everyone is going to purchase your product. Because of this broad focus, marketing can miss the mark.
Instead of trying to market to everybody, targeted marketing makes your product or service as attractive as possible to specific groups of people. …
That sports team you follow? They probably would not exist without sponsors.
Do you follow a sports club?
The chances are that sponsors help them operate through providing funding or support in other ways.
The biggest sports teams in the world have sponsorship splashed across the uniforms.
Some of the events you attend probably also receive sponsorship to ensure they go ahead.
Sponsors add value to our lives.
This blog explores what sponsorship is, how it works and its benefits to businesses.
“The provision of assistance either financial or in-kind to an activity by a commercial organisation, for the purpose of achieving commercial objectives.” (Meenaghan, 1983)
What is Sponsorship?
Sponsorship involves a business relationship between two parties. One party (sponsor) supports the other (beneficiary) through funding, resources, or services. The beneficiary provides rights and associations to the other party for use and commercial advantage. …
Remember when you saw your favourite brand on your favourite TV program? No, you probably don’t.
Have you ever noticed in the big movies how often you see major brands?
More often than not, the PC or mobile phone somebody is using is an Apple or perhaps a Samsung. All the vehicles could be Fords, or there might be several BMWs.
Your favourite influencers on social media? The chances are that brands sponsor them to promote their products.
This practice is called product placement, a form of advertising but attempts to persuade in a far less obvious way than traditional advertising.
What is Product Placement?
Also known as embedded marketing, product placement is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Companies pay to have commercial content such as their brand, products or services incorporated into non-commercial content such as film, TV or other mainstream media. …
If we do not understand our customers, how do we give them what they need or want?
There are different types of customers.
Customers have different needs.
There are multiple ways to communicate with customers, and some will work better than others.
Precisely why buyer personas are essential for businesses to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing.
This week’s blog is about buyer personas and how businesses can use them to target their ideal clients or customers more effectively.
What is a buyer persona?
Personas are fictional and generalised representations of real people.
Buyer personas are fictional and generalised representations of real customers.
Buyer Personas are a relatively new topic, first discussed in the late 1990s. They have sprung to relevance with the rise of social media, where businesses now have more ability to target marketing to specific segments of the market. …
Earn money selling someone else’s products, or earn money from people marketing and selling your products
Marketing can be a costly investment for businesses. Significant investments into advertising can be an elevated risk if you do not know the return.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone else better at marketing took up that risk and funded the marketing?
You could pay them a small commission fee for each sale.
You can also earn money selling other businesses’ products, without the risk of needing to invest in a business and creating products yourself.
This process is called affiliate marketing.
This article explores affiliate marketing, how it works, and the benefits it provides.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an endorsement-based advertising strategy that earns promoters (affiliates) money when internet users act on that marketing. …
How is your brand different, and why should customers care?
As a business, we need to capture potential customers' attention as quickly as possible, by illustrating how we provide a unique solution to their needs, and why we are a better choice than competitors.
We call this statement the value proposition, and it is a crucial component to any marketing strategy.
This blog explores the value proposition and how to create one for your own business or brand/s.
What is a Value Proposition?
A value proposition is a firm’s summary statement of why customers choose their product or service.
Our promise to a group of customers communicates our primary benefit and how we uniquely deliver value. It introduces our brand to consumers by sharing what our company stands for, what we do, and why we deserve the customer’s business. …
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