What Is Branding And Why Is It Important For Your Business?

What's a brand?

A brand is the characteristic, or collection of characteristics, that sets an organisation apart from others. A brand is usually made up of a name, tagline, logo or symbol, design, a brand's voice, etc. It also refers to the total experience that customers have while engaging with the company - whether that is as a customer, a client, a social media fan, or just a passerby.

What is branding?

Branding is the process of researching, developing, and applying a distinguishing characteristic or set of characteristics to your organisation, so consumers begin to associate your brand with your products or services.

For example, Coca-Cola's trademark is one of the most recognised logos and colour stories worldwide. The classic red-and-white letters, bright artwork, and signature fonts have endured for more than a century.

Having stood the test of time, Coca-Cola's branding is proof that consistency, success, and efficient branding are powerful, something consumers have grown to appreciate.

That is, branding is an iterative process that requires getting inside your prospects' hearts as well as the heart of your business. This is important for many reasons -- and we cover those below.

The Importance of Branding

Your brand is perhaps one of the most important assets your organisation has. It gives your organisation a personality, makes your company memorable, drives consumers to buy from you, supports your brand marketing and advertising, and gives your employees a sense of pride.

Branding may be a crucial element for consumers in making their purchasing decisions. In fact, one study by Capgemini found users who felt connected with the brand spent double as much as those who did not.

Branding gives your company a powerful identity that extends beyond your products or services. It gives consumers something to relate to. A strong brand makes your company memorable. It is your business face, helping consumers differentiate between your company in all media branding.

Branding supports your efforts in intangible marketing and advertising. It helps your promotions pack an extra punch, adding consumer awareness and influence.

Branding Terms to Know

Brand Awareness

Brand recognition refers to how familiar the general public and your target market or audience are with your brand. High brand awareness results in brands being called "trending", "buzzworthy", or "popular". Brand awareness is important because consumers cannot think about buying from your brand unless they are familiar with it.

Brand Extension

Brand extension is when companies "expand" their brands by developing new products in new industries and markets. Think of a Honda lawn mower, or a Martha Stewart bed. Brand extensions enable companies (or individuals) to use their brand recognition and brand equity to generate multiple streams of revenue and diversify their product lines.

Brand Identity

Brand identity is the identity of your company and the promises that you make to customers. It is what you want your customers to walk away with when interacting with your brand. Your brand's identity is usually made up of your values, the way that you communicate about your products or services, and the feelings that people will have after engaging with it.

Conclusion

In really simple terms, the product is what you are selling, the brand is the visual identity or perceived image of the product you are selling, and the brand is a strategy for creating this image. That is why your branding strategy and branding management plan are so important.

I hope that this post has helped you get a better understanding of what a brand means. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to make this article better, feel free to share your thoughts by getting in touch.

Branding Agency To Support Small Businesses

At Red Kite SEO, we are a specialist Digital Marketing Agency, located in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom. We help small business owners to boost their websites so they can rank on Google. Services we offer are Digital Marketing, SEO, Web Design and Paid Ads (PPC).

We help by setting up the foundations to build online brand recognition and affinity for a local business. Our promise is to help clients rank above others in their industries and in the locations they serve. For honest advice and to speak to us about your site, please contact us!

What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. To put this in a slightly simpler way, SEO means taking a piece of content on the internet and optimising it to get it displayed near the top of the page by a search engine such as Google when someone searches for something.

The world of search engine optimisation is complicated and constantly changing, but the basics are easy to grasp, and even a little SEO training and knowledge can go a long way.

Search engine optimisation is the science and process of improving your site so that it is more visible when people are searching for products or services. It is a crucial marketing task that makes a site or a business visible online.

How does SEO work?

Major search engines like Bing use bots to scan pages across the internet, going from one site to another, gathering information on these web pages, and placing it into an index. Think of the index like a giant library, where the librarians can pull out the book (or web page) that helps you find what exactly you are looking for at that moment.

Next, algorithms parse pages within the index, taking into account hundreds of engine rankings factors, or signals, to determine which pages should show up in search results for any given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every book in the library, and she can tell you exactly which book has the answer to your query.

Our SEO success factors could be considered proxies for aspects of user experience. This is how search engines assess how much of a site or webpage is capable of giving searchers what they are looking for.

Unlike paid search ads, you cannot pay search engines to rank highly in organic search, meaning SEO tool experts need to do their job. That is where we come in.

What is Effective Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engines use sophisticated algorithms that have a lot of different requirements in order to rank sites. To have higher rankings, a website must have many things, including:

Good content: This means content needs to be original and must provide value for readers. It should also be updated frequently - search engines penalise online content that has been stagnant for months (and, also, why would people visit your website if there is never anything new on it?). The best SEO companies understand how important content is, and they provide clients with quality content, along with related photos and videos.

The right keywords, as well as the right number of keywords. A common SEO technique in building websites used to be taking as many relevant keywords as possible (and also a few that were not as relevant) and stuffing it as much into the text as you could. Now, search engines punish that kind of "keyword stuffing".

Quality backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites, which lead back to your company's site. But those backlinks need to be of "quality," otherwise, they are not going to help your SEO rankings at all (or they could even hurt your search rankings in negative ways). This means backlinks should be on sites that are relevant and ranking well on their own, among other things.

These are only some of the things considered in ranking sites. However, the biggest thing that you need to take into consideration when you are building your site is organic SEO. The idea behind it is to build the website to be ranked high due to high quality -- it has to be good, no tricks or tricks some SEO companies may try. The search engine optimisation company that you choose needs to try and provide you with high-quality sites, keeping in mind these algorithms.

Benefits & importance of SEO

People are searching for all sorts of things, whether vaguely related or closely related to your business. These are all opportunities to engage with those people, answer their questions, solve their problems, and be a trusted resource to them.

More website traffic: When your site is optimised for search engines, it gets more traffic which equates to increased brand awareness, as well as…

More customers: To get your website optimised, you need to target keywords - search terms that potential customers/visitors are searching - meaning that you get more relevant traffic.

Better reputation: Ranking high in Google gives your business instant credibility. If Google trusts you, people will trust you.

Higher ROI: You are investing money in your site, as well as in a digital marketing campaign, which leads to pages on your site. A top-performing website enhances the fruits of these campaigns, making the investment worthwhile.

Get Your Free Website Consultation

At Red Kite SEO, we offer a free Website SEO Review, which is a basic website audit that will help take care of your digital business. We will take a look at your digital strategy, as well as any potential website improvements to help with your online presence. Get in touch with us.

Digital Marketing Service

How Can Digital Marketing Agencies Help in the Growth of Your Business?

Digital marketing, also called Internet marketing, is branding that uses the Internet and other forms of digital communications to reach prospective customers.

Few businesses can afford the cost of salaries, let alone the risks associated with hiring someone with no experience in the field to handle this critical task. Fortunately, there are plenty of great agencies out there who can handle the job for you for a fraction of the price.

What Kinds of Services Do Digital Marketing Companies Provide?

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is always on top of the list for any digital marketing agency services. That is because it impacts all of your online digital marketing strategies. SEO is crucial for making sure that your site shows up in the search engines. Without effective SEO, potential customers might never see any of your digital marketing efforts.

That is because search engines have the power to pick and choose what websites show up when people do an online search. They make that decision according to sophisticated algorithms, which weigh multiple criteria in order to decide whether or not your site is something the searcher is looking for.

In simpler terms, SEO means optimising all of your content on the web to make it easy to find by those search engines. For instance, if you are selling socks, you want the search engines to show your site first when people type socks into their search bars.

2. Search Engine Marketing

While SEM and SEO are both based around keywords, this is where the similarities end. SEM strategies are about paying search engines to get your site in front of customers. It is very much like PPC Advertising.

With SEM, you pick keywords that relate to your products and services, then build ads around those keywords. These are the familiar types of ads that you see when doing an online search.

To place your ads in these top spots, you will have to bid for the keywords that you have chosen. Every time someone types in a search term, search engines decide what ads to display for them. They do so through the use of complex formulas related to how much you have bid on the keyword and your ads quality score.

3. Website Strategy

Your site is the online storefront of your business. As such, it is the most critical component of your online marketing efforts. There are many things on your site that could hurt your SEO and online credibility.

H1 tags, images, loading speeds, and useful links are just some things that can give your website a boost. A good digital agency will thoroughly analyse your website and make sure that each and every facet is working for you.

One of the most important goals of any website is boosting sales. A digital marketing company can help to make sure customers are guided smoothly towards buying your goods and services.

4. Social Media Marketing Services

Social media marketing is all about improving your online presence across social media platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to Pinterest.

We create social media campaigns that will help your business grow and attract followers. To succeed on social media, you must have an in-depth understanding of every online platform that you are using. Different social media networks attract different audiences, so you may want to target your outreach towards a specific customer base that aligns with the goals of your business.

There are around 3 billion social media channels and users around the world, which is an enormous audience for your goods and services. Social media and content marketing plans involve raising your brand's visibility by sharing content and engaging with this audience.

5. Email Outreach

Email marketing is one of the oldest strategies in digital marketing, but it is still one of the best ways to get leads.

Managing your email contact list, email personalization, and targeted product offers are all essential parts of email marketing. It is also time-consuming and complicated.

A digital marketing agency has the skills to easily manage all of those aspects. They will help you build an email list, devise compelling campaigns that generate conversions, and create efficient email campaigns.

6. Re-Targeting

Retargeting gives you a second chance at people who visited your site but then left without buying something.

You put a small bit of code on your site, which drops a cookie onto the computers of anyone who visits your site. Every time they surf the Web, that cookie triggers your retargeting provider to show you ads.

This is a great way to remind prospects of your products or services, and it may draw them back to your website when they are ready to spend money.