Brand Marketing Strategies, as the name implies are proven methods of promoting your products or services while promoting your brand.
There is need to understand that brand and marketing are two words with different meanings. Marketing is simply how a brand builds an awareness of its products and generates sales, while branding is how you express who your business is for and what it is all about. Branding gives a clearer picture of who you are, your company’s identity, personality, and values.
Brand marketing involves planning, researching and promoting your brand image. Brand marketing is important for brand recognition. It also gives increased visibility to the brand while improving and boosting sales. Most importantly, brand marketing helps build your brand image in your clients mind. It communicates the emotions and tells your brand story in a lasting way.
Here are basic brand marketing strategies that have been tested and proven to produce results
1. Sell a movement
This is a way in which brands craft out marketing initiatives around their visions, rather than around their products.
Selling a movement resonates more with people because it’s basically about ideas that impact society as a whole. It simply means building a brand that is capable of changing societal norms, beliefs or behaviors, while simultaneously selling products.
Movement marketing is excellent for showing consumers that your brand cares about the world. We all want to know that businesses care about the stuff we deem important.
2. Sell a Story
Capturing your audience’s attention for even 1 minute is a huge accomplishment for brands in today’s marketing world. If your brand can create an effective narrative, you’ll be able to capture your audience’s attention for longer periods of time, even make a more memorable impression, and improve brand loyalty.
Customers want to know they are making the right decision with each purchase, but deciding what’s right isn’t just about facts and figures anymore. People also make decisions based on feelings, and feelings are powerful. These feelings can be addressed through stories either fiction or nonfiction; as this helps you make a connection with the customer first, then selling a product comes secondary.
Take for example Success Afrika. We sell success and motivational stories with the aim to inform, educate, inspire and impact on Africans.
3. Sell a Lifestyle
Lifestyle marketing is about selling lifestyle to customers through a product.
Lifestyle marketing establishes a brand as a long-standing, representative part of its audience’s life. Nike is a popular example, due to how they promote stylish sportswear while encouraging an active lifestyle.
If a brand can heighten consumer’s lives, making it easier for them while also helping them feel better about their lives, then lifestyle marketing strategy might be a perfect approach.
Apple sells an expensive lifestyle. The name APPLE is associated with luxury and class. Apple has turned its smartphones into one of the most popular devices. Users of iPhone feel like they are ahead of the trend and leading the pack.
4. Sell an Emotion
Emotional marketing is the deliberate use of persuasive messages that tap into human emotion to form a deep connection with the audience toward achieving the desired result.
Following this strategy, you primarily use human emotion to make your audience notice, remember, share, and buy. Emotions play a role in almost everything we do and every decision we make as humans. When a marketing campaign captures an emotion, making consumers feel a deeper connection to the product or service the brand is selling, the purchase is 99% certain to come through
Coca-Cola sells family emotions and feelings. Remember the Share a Coke campaign by Coca-Cola?
To ensure success, all you need to do is know your audience and know which strategy would resonate most. Sometimes, one or a combination of all of these strategies would create the magic. Align these with your overall marketing goals, and your marketing efforts will be some of your most effective.
