Brand Marketing Tips For 2022

Understand Your Target Audience

To effectively align with your customer’s world view, it is essential to understand who your target audience is. Understanding your target market thoroughly is still the single most critical thing a business owner could do to help their brand on the road to success. Most often than not, small business owners think that they know who their target market but in most cases, the net is so wide that they struggle to achieve success.

Defining your niche from your customer’s perspective will help you profile your buyers and identifying your ideal customers. Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can then focus your time, effort and money to target them surgically.

Take Dollar Shave Club, for example. When this mail-order razors-and-blades company launched its advertising in 2012, the mission was clear: target men who don’t really care about name brands and are sick of paying ridiculous prices for razors and give them a convenient and inexpensive subscription-based alternative….and let them feel cool buying it. Lo and behold, men responded, and the brand became a community of people who refer friends to Dollar Shave Club at a rate of 50,000 a month and actively engage with the brand’s other 3.7 million-plus Facebook followers.

Is your brand top of mind?

Top-of-mind awareness is defined in Marketing Metrics as “The first brand that comes to mind when a customer is asked an unprompted question about a category. The percentage of customers for whom a given brand is top of mind can be measured.”

Analyze your target market to see if your brand is top of mind. You can quickly gauge your brand’s effectiveness by reviewing your 2018 growth of engaged social followers and site visitors, checking in on your organic reach, and typing your brand name into Google Trends.  If your results are disappointing, then you need to figure out how to keep your brand fresh in your audience’s minds. Perhaps your social media campaigns are not doing their job to build brand awareness properly. Perhaps the message is not clear enough. Perhaps the brand story is not being communicated.

Are you investing in any paid advertising such as Google Adwords or Facebook adverts? Are you doing any re-marketing (which is still super relevant, by the way)? These could help boost brand awareness.

Do you have a publicity strategy?

Publicity can also be defined as the art of gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service or your company via the media. A publicity strategy is the strategic management function that helps an organization communicate, establish and maintain communication with the public.

Make sure you define your publicity goals for the new year. Compare these with the previous year’s goals to see what has changed. Then generate story ideas to create brand awareness. Check to see if there are any automation tools that will make your publicity campaigns easier to manage and more efficient.

Are your sales materials ready for the new year?

Your brand’s sales materials – such as the website, company brochures, presentations etc – are tools to move your customers forwarding the sales process. Each item has a specific role to play in the overall sales funnel and they should be created to fulfill that role in the most effective way possible. Sales materials that are not effective could end up losing your sales and customers.

How is your website doing? Is it unto date and fresh for the new year? Does the website design look stale and dated? Is your website fast and furious? Are you keeping the business blog fresh with content? The single most important update you can make to your website for 2019 is to ensure that it’s not only mobile-friendly but specifically optimized for mobile reading. Without a less-than-one-second load speed, easy-to-read text size and font, and intuitive navigation, users will click off your site without hesitation.

More and more consumers are expecting ultra-personalization and instant response on websites, so adding chatbots and other artificial intelligence elements to your website in 2019 will help you deliver that experience and stay ahead of the curve.

If you have a corporate brochure, evaluate its effectiveness. Is the message on the punt? Is the brochure design aligning with your brand message and the rest of your branding? Do you have an eco-friendly electronic version?

How are your social media channels doing? Are they all branded well? Are you depending too much on automating positing on these channels or are you sending time and effort to make them personal with lots of engagement?

Are you constantly creating white papers and ebooks to educate your target audience and further establish yourself as the subject matter expert? Long-form high-quality content is going to dominate in 2019; one 2000-word post a week takes the same effort as five 400-word posts and will be a bigger bang for your buck. Are you capturing email addresses when offering these free and valuable resources and sending relevant, non-spammy content to your new contacts?

Is your company or business profile unto date and powerful? Have you skimped on this crucial piece of sales materials and got it designed by your nephew out of high school or worse yet, crowdsourced it?

How is your brand visual imagery?

When business owners look at their brand visual imagery, they usually perceive the obvious elements such as their logo design, stationery design and perhaps a few other elements such as their social media channels and their website all of which simply have their logo slapped onto them. But it goes deeper than that.

Remember earlier this year when the pancake chain IHOP shocked the world by announcing they were changing their name to IHOb (flagrantly flipping the “P” in the logo) to focus on their burger offerings. Although it was only an extremely successful marketing stunt, it shows that people can really care about and become loyal to your logo and brand.

However, in the new year, it pays to evaluate how your brand identity is doing. Does your logo design need an update or refresh? How long have you had your current logo design? Does your brand mark still align with your brand values and message? Do you understand the real cost of a logo design?

How is your corporate identity doing? Is it consistent? How are you using your corporate colors and typography? Is it professional? How about your stationery design? Are your business cards an asset to your business? Are they creating the right kind of impression?

If you feel that you might be a bit too biased to judge your own brand, consider gathering a small focus group or consulting a professional agency to gauge your current identity and ensure it’s not dated, bland, or just plain unattractive.

Five Tips for Marketing to the Affluent

Marketing to the affluent is different from marketing to any other group. These discriminating customers have been raised with different social values as well as exposure to some of the highest quality products the nation has to offer.

This makes for a unique group of potential consumers, one that small business owners ignore at their own risk. Luckily, you can successfully market yourself to the wealthy in your community if you keep the following five tips in mind.

1. Be involved. Many wealthy people have pet causes that they contribute a significant amount of time and money to. They identify with people and brands that also concentrate on giving back to the community.

If you share their values, especially this key one, they are very likely to patronize your business and recommend you to their peers, who most likely are affluent as well.

2. Offer opportunities to grow. Another key value of the affluent is a respect for education, including self education opportunities.

Businesses that offer literature or classes on their subject that are presented as enriching and empowering will often find that their classes are full of wealthy people, who often will then feel a loyalty to the company and go out of their way to shop there.

3. Make the effort to establish yourself. Most affluent people prefer to deal with established businesses with a proven track record. While it can be difficult for a small business to produce this, especially early on, getting your name in publications and on the local media is one way of creating an aura of expertise.

Another way to create this general feeling is by getting involved in local business organizations and even volunteering your time to local charities.

4. Market directly to them. The wealthy are less likely to choose businesses based on traditional marketing methods such as advertisements and flyers. Instead, they make their consumer decisions based on referrals from people they trust.

Getting the word out about your business can be as simple as joining business associations or clubs in affluent areas where you can ‘casually’ mention your line of work to a variety of people who are likely to have influence in wealthier spheres.

Another option is offering to give talks in your area of expertise to these organizations.

5. Offer quality. As stated above, the wealthy usually have spent their lives with access to high quality products. They known cheap or shoddy work when they see it, and certainly are not interested in these products.

Adding the extra effort it takes to offer products that will meet their higher, more discerning standards is an essential part of marketing to the affluent. One way of doing this while still maintaining an attractive price point for other shoppers is by offering a premium line with added features and benefits.

As you can see, the affluent are not really much different from other consumers; they are merely more discerning and more likely to consider their peers’ opinions over traditional marketing messages.

Armed with this knowledge, you can successfully reach out to a new market that can afford your services and products more than any other group.

Charge up Your Brand with Contests

Contests are a great sales and marketing tool. Not only because they’re good for the brand, but because they’re good for the customer.

Customers love having the chance to win those big prizes—it’s the same thrill they get when playing the lottery or gambling, but with less social stigma and guilt involved.

This is because (depending on the mechanics) they’re not just buying a paper ticket—they’re buying a product that they’re actually going to use, and a chance for greater rewards beyond that. Even if the customer doesn’t win, they’ve still gotten a neat product out of the exchange.

Brands get the better end of the deal by far. Well-run contests manage to do multiple things at once, all of which are extremely beneficial to the brand:

Promote a New Product

Successful contests can give new product lines a much-needed marketing boost. You can tailor the contest mechanics such that customers are required to either purchase or review a new product for a certain amount of points or entries. You can also have the new product as a part of your prizes, too.

If you want to involve your customers in the product creation process, you can have them compete to name the new product, much like Doritos and Starbucks have done. This is a great way of engaging the community and driving interest before the product is even formally launched.

Reward Loyal Customers

Contests are a great way to recognize and celebrate loyal customers. You could, for example, reward the customer who has the best story about how the product changed their lives.

Or you could judge photos of the product in action. Customers won’t hesitate to tell people about a product they love and they are smart about it. Throw a prize on top of it, and you’ll be drowning in customer appreciation.

Attract Fresh Interest

A non-customer cannot become a repeat customer unless they try the product in the first place. Purchase- or review-based contest mechanics help break down a person’s initial resistance to trying out new things.

This is because their attention is focused on the prize; the new product is a necessary step to winning, so they don’t think as much about purchasing it.

Increased Brand Presence

The more people enter a contest and start talking about it, the faster and farther your brand name will travel. You’ll be able to grow your brand’s presence by word of mouth alone as people recruit more of their friends to participate, especially if your contest counts “shares” and referrals as points.

This is even better than traditional advertising, because you are doing relatively little of the actual work. You set the machine in motion, but it’s the participants themselves that are promoting your brand for you.

Gather Customer Data

This is perhaps one of the most valuable benefits to doing a contest. If you can gather sign-up information during the contest, you will be able to build a fresh database full of accurate, up-to-date data on your customers and their behaviors.

And these customers have already demonstrated an interest in your brand by joining the contest, so they’re going to be warm leads.

Have you held a contest recently? What benefits did you get? What feedback have you gotten from your customers regarding the event?

Conclusion

Hope this little primer on brand marketing tips for the new year helps you get started. Start with a brand audit and then decide on what needs to be done.

Pay attention to your branding. Spending time, effort and money on sales campaigns with out looking at fundamentals would lead to an opportunity cost. If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to reach out to me.