Brand marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating, maintaining, and enhancing the value and perception of a brand in the minds of consumers.
It’s the foundation for any brand, because a winning brand marketing strategy is what grows your brand to eventually become a familiarized name in the minds of your target audience.
This gets even harder in eCommerce, especially since the competition is more challenging than ever. There are countless brands vying for consumer attention, and that’s why you need this guide today.
What Is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing is a marketing strategy for the brand as a whole. It involves creating a distinct identity for your eCommerce brand, promoting it, and maintaining strong connections with your target audience.
Take KFC, for example. We can all recognize them with as little branding as possible. Show me their tagline or color palette any time of the day and I'll instantly know it's KFC! That shows how successful their brand marketing strategy is.
Brand marketing involves 3 major components:
Brand Identity: This includes your logo, color schemes, and typography that visually represent your brand.
Brand Messaging: Taglines, slogans, and mission statements that communicate your brand's values and promise to customers.
Customer Experience: The overall experience customers have with your brand, including website design, customer service, and product quality.
Ultimately, brands do this to achieve these 5 main goals:
To stand out from the competition.
Build lasting relationships with consumers.
Foster an emotional connection with consumers.
Build trust and credibility.
Build customer loyalty and retention.
These 5 goals are requirements for the long term growth and success of a brand. Because these are what decides how a brand is perceived in the marketplace, and a positive perception helps to keep a brand sustained.
Marketing And Branding
Brands often get confused with these two terms. Although they’re closely related concepts, they both serve distinct functions within a business strategy.
Marketing involves everything a company does to promote its products or services, attract potential customers, and drive sales. The ultimate goal here is to persuade people to make a purchase.
Branding, however, is the process of creating a unique identity for a company. It includes the creation and management of a brand’s name, logo, visual elements, messaging, and overall perception in the marketplace.
In the case of branding, the main goal is to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers, to create an emotional connection with the target audience and build trust and credibility.
Benefits of eCommerce Brand Marketing
I can say eCommerce is highly competitive without a second thought. Unless you find an innovative product that no minds have ever come up with, which only happens so rarely.
Keeping this intense competition in mind, merely having an online store wouldn’t cut it. And that’s where effective brand marketing comes into play.
There are various benefits to yield from brand marketing, and a proper, well-executed strategy can aid in the sustainability of your eCommerce business.
Let’s see what the benefits are…
Recognition
Have you realized how we get familiarized with things that we see or hear every often? We may not be interested in remembering these things, but we see or hear them so often that they get etched onto the back of our minds.
Brand marketing has a similar principle. When your brand is consistently presented across different channels, it becomes familiar to potential customers. This familiarity makes it easier for them to remember your brand and distinguish it from competitors.
Just like how we’re able to distinguish KFC, Amazon, Nike, etc. There must be literally hundreds (or even thousands) of competitors for them, but we’re familiar with these brands because they’ve done a good job with branding.
Trust and Credibility
Good reputation is vital for building trust and credibility with your audience. A well-crafted brand story and consistent communication of your values can demonstrate authenticity and reliability.
And you need them since customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that they perceive as trustworthy and credible.
Customer Retention
While marketing plays a bigger role in customer acquisition, branding plays the bigger role in customer retention.
Because once a customer converts, and they have a positive experience with your brand, they are more likely to return. Brand marketing helps to foster this loyalty through consistent quality, excellent customer service, and emotional connections built over time.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
This is one of the most powerful forms of marketing, and a strong branding strategy can significantly amplify this effect.
Satisfied customers who resonate with your brand are more likely to share their positive experiences with friends and family. This organic promotion is invaluable as it comes from a trusted source and often leads to new customer acquisition.
7 Key Steps to Build an eCommerce Brand Marketing Strategy
Building an effective eCommerce brand marketing strategy requires a comprehensive approach that integrates thorough research, branding, and marketing.
It’s a pretty in-depth process, so go through these steps carefully.
1. Research & Analysis
The first step to building your eCommerce brand marketing strategy: SWOT analysis + Customer personas.
Start by doing a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) of your brand to evaluate the internal and external factors that can impact success.You need this to identify gaps in the market and areas where your brand can differentiate from competitors.
Then, you need to develop detailed customer personas that represent your ideal customers. These profiles should include:
Demographics (age, gender, income level)
Psychographics (interests, values, lifestyle)
And behaviors (buying habits, preferred channels)
2. Mission & Vision Statements
Now you need to set your mission and vision statements to define your brand:
The mission statement should convey the purpose of your brand - what you do and why you do it.
The vision statement should describe your long-term goals and the impact you aspire to make.
3. Define Brand Values
Brand values is the next step to define your brand. These are core principles that guide your brand’s actions and decisions.
These values should reflect what your brand stands for and influence how you interact with customers, employees, and partners.
4. Define Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
Identify what makes your brand unique and why customers should choose you over competitors. Your USP should highlight your distinct benefits and the specific problems your products or services solve.
This is essentially how you make your brand stand out in the market. Your USP would be that distinct benefit for your customers to choose your brand over others.
5. Develop Brand Identity
This is one of the core pillars of brand marketing, and it includes three parts:
Visual identity.
Voice and tone.
Brand story.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of them.
Visual Identity
This is the part where you should create a strong visual identity that includes:
A memorable logo.
A cohesive color palette.
And consistent typography.
These elements should reflect your brand's personality and resonate with your target audience. And you must ensure that your visual identity is consistently applied across all marketing materials and touchpoints to reinforce brand recognition.
Brand Voice & Tone
Another important step to reinforce brand recognition. Establish a consistent communication style that reflects your brand's personality.
Brand voice should align with your values and appeal to your audience. Likely, your brand’s tone could be friendly, casual, authoritative, or pretty much anything that fits well with your brand and appeals to your audience type.
Brand Story
A compelling brand story can connect with your audience on an emotional level. It should convey your journey, mission, values, and what drives your brand.
A powerful narrative can humanize your brand and create a deeper connection with customers, making them more likely to support and remain loyal to your brand.
6. Create a Marketing Plan
Now this is where we put everything we made from the above steps into practice.
For this, you need to identify your marketing channels, such as:
Social Media.
Email.
SEO & SEM.
Affiliate marketing, etc.
And everytime you market your product or service, you should make sure the content being used for marketing aligns perfectly with your mission & vision statements, brand values, and brand identity that we just created.
Doing this consistently will add to making your brand recognizable.
As a performance-driven marketing agency, we take extra time and effort in helping eCommerce brands get more sales while keeping the brand’s essence intact across all marketing efforts we invest in.
If you’re an eCommerce business that needs help with getting more sales, we can help out. Just book a FREE ad strategy call with us and we’ll see if we’re a fit.
7. Implement & Monitor
Launch your marketing campaigns with a well-coordinated effort, ensuring that all team members are aligned with your strategy. You need this consistent execution across all channels to maintain brand integrity and achieve your marketing goals.
Then, over time, make data-driven adjustments to your marketing strategy based on insights gained from your KPIs.
And don’t be afraid to continuously test different approaches, such as A/B testing for emails or ads, to determine what works best.
Conclusion
Branding is an important aspect of your brand’s overall strategy. And proper planning and execution of a well-defined brand marketing strategy will help you create a recognizable brand over time.
Just follow these steps to build your brand marketing strategy to give your eCommerce business a strong foundation for growth!
And if you need help implementing this brand marketing strategy across your marketing campaigns, we’re here to help.
Just book an ad strategy call with us for FREE today!
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