The term branding gets tossed around a lot in the world of advertising. If you run a business and work or have worked with advertising agencies, at some point, you’ve heard something along the lines of, “Your business really needs more branding!”. At Cannonball Digital, we believe that branding can be beneficial for your business or brand. Full disclaimer that messaging and distribution are the ingredients that are the most impactful to a successful branding campaign.
The best advertising campaigns connect your brand to the right audience at the right time.
Branding isn’t something you do once and a while. It shouldn’t be a “nice to have” – it should be a “need to do” part of your marketing mix. Branding should be built as the foundation for everything you do.
Branding should represent what you believe in — your values & purpose.
Know what’s important to your customers and prospects. Not everyone is actively searching for your product or service, but they are actively listening and learning.
What Makes a Great Branding Campaign?
Crafting a branding message can be tough. Someone worked hard to build a business. You’re proud of what you’ve accomplished, the employees who help bring the vision forward, and your clients for the opportunity to do business with you.
Figuring out how to articulate all of that isn’t always easy, or fun. We’ll break down a few ways to get you started. Our team likes Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework because it thinks of the audience first, what they need, how you can help them, and generates fresh ideas that can lead to a consistent branding campaign.
Your values – what do you believe in, what’s your story
Your people – what do they love about your company? What words or phrases do they use to describe what it’s like to work there?
What do you offer that makes their life better…
- Time
- Convenience
- Relief
- Education
Sourced from the book, Cashvertising, humans are biologically programmed for 8 primary desires. How does your brand relate to what your audience really wants?
- Survival & enjoyment of life
- Enjoyment of food & beverage
- Freedom from Fear, Pain, Danger
- Companionship
- Comfortable living conditions
- To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses
- Care & protection of loved ones
- Social approval
Build a brand that you believe in AND your customers can connect with.
If you want to go further, Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing structure is fantastic. As referenced in the article, his jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?
“Most organizations are already organized around product categories or customer categories,” Christensen says, “and therefore people only see opportunities within this little frame that they’ve stuck you in.
So you have to think inside of a category as opposed to getting out. You’ve just got to make the decision to divorce yourself from the constraints that are arbitrarily created by the design of the old org chart.”
Additional Ideas to Get Started
Not all brands have budgets to conduct market research, focus groups or intensive studies that dive deep into creating a branding campaign. Those are all helpful and do produce great results when done correctly. There are a few ways to get started and build a foundation:
- Google Business Profile reviews – what are common themes and words being use? Drop your GBP into ChatGBT with the prompt to review all reviews, good and bad, and summarize into categories based on the most common themes.
- Call your customers – nothing works better than a real conversation with someone that’s chosen your brand. Ask them good questions and you’ll be shocked but the great nuggets that can inform a branding campaign.
- Email surveys – simple, short emails with a survey on top questions you want to answer. Make sure to have a system to retrieve and review!
Types of Content
Create, chop up and distribute. Content doesn’t work when it’s a one-size-fits-all strategy. The best content is created and distributed in different forms to connect with your audience on how they want to absorb information.
- Blogs – traditional blogs still work as long as you’re adding value, answering questions and showing how to make your audience’s life better
- Case Studies – showcase the great work you’ve done to build credibility with future buyers
- Testimonials – use the power of word of mouth from current clients to connect with future clients
- Whitepapers – checklist, how-to’s, what you need to know about
- Organic posts – break up your blog content into different posts. IE: The Top 5 Things You Need to Know About Digital Advertising can be 5 separate posts
- Podcasts – record your podcast, upload to YouTube and other channels and then add to your website. These are great for organic posts, too!
- Short and long-form videos
- Client interviews
Distribution of Your Brand
What do we mean by distribution? We’re talking media channels.
We help with paid search (PPC), social media, programmatic platforms, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), branding and much more.
Targeting still matters.
Read more on the best distribution channels and strategies.
The Positive Impact Branding Has on Your Sales Team
Branding does help your salespeople with cold calling, follow up and closing deals.
Create awareness with future buyers before it’s too late.
When it’s time to make a decision we help your brand get on top of buyers list
Start educating future buyers before they have a problem. When they need your product or service we help them think of you first
We help businesses create more demand for their brand and grow their sales pipeline. Looking for more leads, we can do that, too. Want to increase brand awareness so more people search for your business, now we’re really ready to talk!
Measuring Branding Campaigns
Branding can be tough to measure, hard to prove and frankly frustrating to justify to business owners, board members or marketing teams. We’ve defined a handful of areas that are helpful to measure the success of a good branding campaign. At Cannonball Digital, we live in a world surrounded by data, tracking systems and measurable campaigns that truly drive businesses forward.
- Increase in Branded Traffic
- Organic Website Traffic Growth
- Social Engagement Growth
- More Followers on Social Channels
- More Customer Reviews
- Share of Voice for Your Industry Increases
- Increase in Sales Pipeline
- More Sales
Let’s Get Started
Our team dives deep (Cannonball pun) into all the components to identify opportunities for strategy and success. With that said, not everything is measurable! For example, you post on Instagram about a new product you’re rolling out. Engagement looks decent.
You even have a few comments. But, you’re not sure if you should continue spending time and money posting because the data says that engagement is just okay. But we know people are seeing the post and thinking about the post.
They’re acquainted with your brand and intrigued by what you do. They visit your website multiple times but never call, fill out a form, chat with you. By all means, this looks like a waste of time. But then 1 person shows up, buys the product and you have no idea how or why they chose you.