Branding and marketing are two concepts that are often confused, or mistakenly thought of one and the same. While the two are definitely closely related, they also have their important distinctions. If you own a business, you’ve got to be able to understand both branding and marketing, so that you can use them effectively.
So, let’s dive into the two terms and break down what each one actually means and how they differ. We’ll also cover the connection between them, and how you can use them to grow and establish a strong business.
What is Branding?
Your brand is the entirety of your business and messaging in every format. In a sense, it’s the complete personality and appearance of your organisation and everything it stands for. A strong brand identity sets you apart from the noise. Distinctiveness is the backbone of all your marketing and brand awareness work, shaping your audience’s perception of who you are. Your brand identity should be an expression of your brand strategy; bringing to life how you look, sound and feel for your audience. We create brand identities that are relevant, memorable, own-able and valuable.
Your brand marketing communicates who you are, while helping your audience to recognize you anywhere. Writing your brand story is one step, visualizing it is another. The objective of your visual identity is to create consistency everywhere your company is seen.
Any brand marketing itself should be prepared with the tools needed to communicate to their customer base effectively. Starting with where their logo fits into their overall corporate identity. Branding can be summarised as being the sum of all parts. On one hand you have feeling and emotion (brand) and on the other recognisable visuals (logo). If you were to design a new identity, you would want to consider everything from voice, like your marketing efforts, to visuals before even thinking about what your logo design will look like.
Visual Identity
Your visual identity includes stationery, collateral, signage, positioning, color system, fonts and more. Wrapping your brand story into a single logo can be a challenging task, which is why other components of visual identity are there to support it. Ultimately, the goal of visual branding is to encompass a range of branded graphic elements that tell your story, from colours to shapes to layouts, in every medium where your brand appears.
Logo Design
Logo design is a significant piece of your brand. A logo should be unique, but it must fit into every piece of marketing you do – from digital to print – it must represent your brand successfully.
The logo you choose should be a good stand in for your entire brand identity. A logo will come to mean much more than what it looks like. Things like brand tone of voice and your company’s competitive advantages will be what people think of when they see your logo.
Graphic Design
Visually interesting and relevant graphic design helps customers relate to and remember your business. A great graphic design company can create seamless designs across all your digital and physical marketing materials.
If you are looking to rebrand or launch a new visual marketing campaign, let us help!
Signs
A business will struggle to attract customers without custom signs and graphics that call attention to their services or products. A custom sign can share what your business is about, as well as your corporate culture, thanks to the image that your brand projects with the signage.
Maintaining a consistent look to the design of your signs in order to create brand awareness and make your brand stronger as time passes is essential.
Interactive Multimedia Design
Sounds fancy, but you’re likely already engaging with multimedia design daily on platforms like Flickr, YouTube, and Instagram. Essentially, it combines text, images, video and/or audio to create appealing web content.
Adding animation to your website is great way to draw attention to a design element or generally improve your website visitors’ experience. It’s everywhere you go on the internet.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is about the tools and methods you use to attract an audience to your brand and subsequently your products and/or services through high-quality messaging. Today, marketing is something that every company and organisation must implement in its growth strategy, the core of which needs to focus on the 4Ps of marketing :
- Product. What are you offering to your customers? The product should be designed to meet your target audience’s needs, motivations, and wants.
- Price. How much do you charge for your product? Price is an extremely important part of a marketing strategy. It impacts various factors, including your profit margin, target market, financial goals, and trends. It’s important to set a competitive price that reflects the product’s value and its appeal to your customer.
- Place. Your product’s strategic placement, whether through online channels or physical stores spread across different locations, should prioritize accessibility and a seamless purchasing experience for potential customers.
- Promotion. How are you communicating the value of your product to customers? This refers to using various promotional channels you can use to engage with your target audience and showcase the benefits of your product or service within the market.
While branding sets the tone and defines the experience of your business, marketing is an active approach that aims to promote your business by putting it in front of people.
Marketing is a combination of many types of techniques and tactics using the following essential strategies:
- Marketing Plan: A roadmap for achieving business objectives through the creation and execution of a comprehensive marketing strategy.
- Digital Marketing: Explore online strategies and channels to reach and engage target audiences.
- Direct Marketing: A targeted and measurable approach to reaching and influencing potential customers.
- Email Marketing: A cost-effective way to reach and engage with a large audience, proven to generate leads and sales. Email marketing is still one of the most profitable and effective techniques, just make sure to define your segments well.
- Mobile Marketing: The use of mobile platforms and applications to reach and engage target audiences, including mobile advertising, app marketing, and location-based targeting.
- Viral Marketing: A powerful way to reach a large audience and generate interest in your brand by putting out engaging and shareable content.
What Should Come First?
For the most effective results, marketing follows branding i.e. get your branding straight first. After all, branding has to be there to support your marketing efforts, in order to get the most out of it. Marketing without branding can feel empty and superficial, because there isn’t a compelling message driving the strategy. That key message comes from understanding your brand.
See, as well as promoting your services, marketing should be communicating the personality and values of your brand. You don’t just want to tell your audience what you’re selling. You want to tell them WHY they need it, and specifically why they need them from YOU.
Making Sure Branding and Marketing Work Together
Every aspect of your marketing tactics should be coordinated with your brand. This includes the tone of voice you use in your ads, whether your marketing campaigns are more serious, friendly or funny and of course the look of any visual marketing should match your branding identity with the use of your brand colours, typography and logo.
The marketing should always fit the brand. Having marketing that doesn’t quite follow your branding will send confusing messages to customers and can damage your branding.
On the other hand, if done well and consistently your branding will support your marketing to the extent that it is recognisably a part of your business, without even needing to explicitly say so. There’s a reason, for example, that most people can recognise an Apple advertisement on TV in the first few seconds, even before you see the product.
In Conclusion
I hope this has assisted in clearing any misconceptions you had about branding and marketing! These two elements are essential for business and it is so important to be able to both understand and use them in your business successfully.
If you’re at the stage of defining your brand and considering how you will market it successfully, please contact us at Naked Egg Web Design – we can put you on the right path!