JM Integrated Marketing
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Our Work
  • JM Blog
  • Online Course
  • Hire Us

Blog

Branding for Small Business

8/23/2022

2 Comments

 
Picture
By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.

As a small business, you might think that you already have a brand. And, although that might be true, you cannot base your branding on having a logo, some marketing, some advertising, and customers. Branding and a business’ brand identity are much more than that. Whereas branding is about having a product or service that is distinguishable from other products and services in that category or industry, brand identity consists of the visible elements of the brand like colors, logo, fonts, images, etc. It is the process of creating content and disseminating that content with the brand name, its qualities, personality, identifiable elements, and distinctiveness. 

According to MarTech, a brand strategy is “built on a platform of differentiation, where a company can use its value proposition to create competitive advantages and satisfy customer needs”. Good branding can increase sales, it increases the value of a company, it can provide employees with direction and motivation, and it can make it easier to attract new customers. 

We all know that strong branding improves recognition. Think of your favorite brand. For example, we all know Coke from the distinctive red cans and glass bottles, cursive logo, and taste. That’s because Coke is considered a central brand in the soft drinks industry. Central brands are top-of-mind for consumers and they tend to serve as reference points for comparison. 

According to a Harvard Business Review article on branding, “striking the right balance between centrality and distinctiveness is critical, because a company’s choices influence not just how the brand will be perceived, but how much of it will be sold and at what price - and, ultimately, how profitable it will be.”

Branding is important for many reasons, and as a small business owner, you should consider taking a step back and determining if you have a brand strategy. Like I said before, a logo and some marketing are not the same thing as a brand strategy. The most important goal of your strategy is brand awareness. We want a solid, established, clear, and consistent brand across platforms and channels because we want to raise brand awareness within our target audience. 

On average, it only takes 7 seconds for individuals to form an impression of a brand, and it takes 5-7 impressions to begin recognizing the company logo. And like with everything else in life, first impressions matter. They are vital to developing a loyal customer base. How is brand loyalty formed? One way is by having shared values with your target audience because this helps to increase relatability and foster stronger relationships. How does a brand become more memorable in the minds of consumers? Think of color. Colors help improve the recognition of a brand in consumers’ minds by 80% because color is one of the first things our brains perceive.
So, how can your small business develop a brand strategy to increase recognition and raise awareness about your business?

If we think from a marketing perspective first, think of these questions:
  • What is your customer’s pain point? What are they struggling with? What problem do they need fixing?
  • What solution to their problem are you offering?
  • What is the problem itself? Isolate the problem to determine if your solution is the right solution.
  • How are you conveying this problem, pain point, and solution to your audience? This is your story. This is the experience you are selling and thus the branding you are conveying.

You can continue the process by thinking about the following questions:
  • What will your brand stand for? Or what does your current brand stand for?
  • What promises is your brand making to customers or clients?
  • What personality will your brand convey throughout your marketing communications? Do you already have a brand personality? 
  • What story are you telling? This is the key. You might be wondering why I’m asking you about the story you are telling. It comes down to one thing. Your brand strategy is the combination of your story, vision, mission, and goals. 

These questions will help you get your thoughts down before you begin crafting your strategy. 

What is a brand strategy?

Now, let’s take a step back for a moment. Let’s think about your product or service. In the world we live in today, competition is in every single niche. So, if your product or service does not resonate with your target audience, then you will not succeed. This is why you need to make sure that your product or service is the right fit for your market, it is solving the problem of your target audience, and your value proposition resonates with them. Value proposition is intended to make your product or service attractive to your target audience. That’s why I keep stating that your brand strategy is not just your logo, some advertising, and some marketing. Why? Because good branding is not just visual, it also helps your business raise awareness and attract customers so that you can hit your organizational and revenue goals.

A brand strategy can be defined as a long-term plan that documents specific ideas and concepts to help keep your branding consistent, memorable, and distinct throughout your marketing communications platforms. This plan will cover your purpose, vision, mission, beliefs, core values, attitudes, target audience, value proposition, and positioning. And, it will guide your marketing communications decisions to ensure that you remain consistent, memorable, and distinct.
How to create a brand strategy?
First thing is first, you need to research and understand your customer. You can do this by analyzing the data that you might already have on your website analytics or your social media insights. You can also do this by researching your competitors. Your brand strategy will depend on your ideal customer, so it is always a good idea to define your ideal customer and create personas to guide you. I have an entire section on ideal customer personas and the customer journey on my free guide. 

Let’s go over how to create your brand strategy: 
  1. What is your business strategy? This is the first step because you need to clearly know and understand the overall goal of your business. Your brand strategy will help you accomplish your business goals. Your brand strategy objectives need to be aligned with your business objectives. Remember, all of your brand and marketing objectives serve one purpose, to help you accomplish your overall business objectives.
  2. What is at the heart of your small business? Here, think about your purpose, vision, mission and core values. Your core values will be a driving force in helping you resonate with your target audience. 
  3. Who is your target audience? You need to identify your target audience. Think demographics and psychographics. But, also think about what makes your ideal customer act. Remember to take note of where your ideal customers spend most of their time online. 
  4. What is your positioning? How is your small business different from others in your market/industry and why should potential customers choose your products or services over the competition? To write a positioning statement, you need to be clear on what you are promising. It should be between 3-5 sentences and be realistic. You should make sure that you can deliver on what you are promising.
  5. What message are you trying to convey? Your key messages are so important because they guide all of your strategies. You need to make sure that your messages are being delivered and translate your positioning to your target audience. If you have more than one target audience, you should make sure to tailor your messages to each audience. Different points will resonate with different audiences. Make sure to develop your value proposition, your tagline, and your brand essence (brand personality, voice, and tone). For example, is your personality serious and academic or innovative, is it conservative or preppy. These are elements that will help you with conveying your message to your audience. Your tagline is a sentence, word, or short phrase that is used to summarize your market position. For example, Good for You Candles. You can also look up examples of taglines for reference.
  6. Do you have your visual system ready? Your logo, typography/fonts, photography, colors, and other visual elements. These items are not necessarily a part of your brand strategy, but they are part of your brand identity. Remember that your brand identity will help differentiate you from the competition. 
  7. And, your brand guidelines? You should have guiding principles behind your verbal and visual branding. These will help you remain consistent as well as helping new employees or freelancers be able to pick up on how they should create content for your small business.

But, how do you  implement the strategy?
  • You should create content that’s aligned with your brand. You can document your content strategy to serve as a guide for you, your employees, and freelancers or agencies.
  • You should tell your brand story at every contact point with your target audience.
  • Have an effective content distribution strategy in place. This will help you maximize the reach of your content. Repurpose when you can. Your blog posts can be Instagram and Twitter posts, and one long Instagram caption can be 2-5 Twitter posts. 
  • Master your content creation by improving your content production. Create a media library to help your team with photos, videos, and visuals that they can use to create content. Make sure to keep a list of sales, events, and key messages that you want to share to help your team.
  • Teamwork makes the dream work. So if you hire freelancers or agencies, help them out by having everything that they will need such as that content library and brand guidelines.
  • Here is a list of books that can be helpful with tips on effective branding.

​Conclusion

The key takeaways for your small business are that you need a brand strategy to guide your marketing communications, you need to understand what your brand stands for and what story you are telling, and you need to define your branding and brand identity to remain clear, consistent, and memorable. An important point about your brand strategy is that it will serve as a guide for you, that way your marketing communications work without waste. Meaning, that you are not spending money without a clear objective, purpose, or story. In order to be the most efficient, and get the most for your money, you need to make sure that your message remains clear and consistent throughout all of your platforms. 
2 Comments

Integrated Marketing Communications: Strategic and Intuitive Communication without Waste

8/1/2022

4 Comments

 
Picture
By: Johana M. Caba, M.A.

What is integrated marketing communications? According to Philip Kitchen and Inga Burgmann's Integrated Marketing Communications: Making it Work at a Strategic Level (2015), Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is an expansion of utilizing both modern and traditional marketing strategies, to optimize the communication of a consistent message conveying the company's brand to stakeholders. Like with many things in life, consistency is the key. To optimize message consistency, we must be highly collaborative and bring together people and functions who normally might not communicate with one another.

In other words, Integrated Marketing Communications, as defined by The American Association of Advertising Agencies is a marketing strategy that recognizes the value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communication disciplines, advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion, and combines them to provide clarity, consistency, and maximum communication impact. 


In order to build collaboration to deliver a single, cohesive message throughout the organization, IMC requires the integration of various functions including: 
​
  • Marketing
  • Advertising
  • Public Relations
  • Social/Digital Media
  • Design/Creative
  • ​Website Design/Development
  • Events
  • Sales 

Why is IMC becoming increasingly popular?

IMC is becoming increasingly popular because it is communication that works without waste. What do I mean by this? Integrating marketing and communications is a unique practice because it looks at the promotional mix as a whole instead of separate parts. The promotional mix is a marketing term that stands for product, place, price, and promotion. The advantages of the IMC strategy is that it makes your campaigns more intuitive. Integrating allows for a consistent message across all of your communication and marketing channels. 

How can IMC help your small business, start-up, or nonprofit?

Research-driven initiatives that are focused on delivering results against measurable objectives during specific time frames are most effective. This is why IMC will help your small business, start-up, or nonprofit succeed. Research, SMART goals and objectives, clear and consistent messaging, and building long term relationships with your target audience are essential for the success of any organization. Integrating your marketing and communications is a strategic approach to delivering your message consistently and clearly to your target audience.

​As communicators, marketers, and business owners, we need to be highly collaborative and bring together people and functions that historically don’t communicate, from marketing to advertising, PR, social/digital media, graphic design, website design/development, event production, and sales. These various groups, departments, or individuals must build collaboration to deliver a single, cohesive message throughout the entire organization. 

The History of IMC

Let’s dive a little deeper into IMC. According to Avocet Communications: IMC is “A term coined in 1989, Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) began as a need to focus advertising efforts across several different promotional methods. By integrating communications across multiple marketing platforms, businesses discovered that each individual brand message was actually reinforcing the others. The need arose as a result of businesses realizing there were other more efficient and cost-effective ways to reach customers. Focusing advertising efforts in more ways became necessary for the growth of the business, but some quickly realized that consistency and integration between those efforts was just as important.”

Many big name brands and organizations have developed IMC campaigns throughout the years. Think about your favorite brand and how they share a consistent message on their websites, on social media, on their ads, through their marketing like email marketing, on TV ads, and even through influencer marketing. There are many successful IMC campaigns that you can start to recognize once you learn more. And, of course, you can do this too, it just takes planning, research, execution, and evaluation. 

Case Studies: Successful IMC Campaigns

An example of a successful IMC campaign is the Old Spice: Smell Like a Man campaign. This campaign integrated great videos, social media, ads, and everything in between with great copywriting that held your attention and sold you the product. This campaign was research-driven in that it was developed based on one key insight, that 60% of body wash purchases are made by women. So, they developed a campaign in which women were the target market by having a shirtless, good looking man, riding a horse on a beach at sunset. Although it is a product for men, the campaign targeted women as research showed that over 60% of body wash purchases were made by women. The imagery, content, videos and everything focused on the key message of smelling like a man and what that looked like through the screen. The imagery helps us associate a scent with the brand even if we don’t know what that scent is, through the power of the mind we can picture what that smell is based on what the ads are portraying.

Another example is the Always: #LikeAGirl campaign which promoted a cause rather than a product. This campaign wasn’t designed to sell you a product, which is evident through the consistent messaging across platforms with videos that worked and a hashtag to tie everything together. The videos didn't focus on “selling a product." Instead, through the #LikeAGirl hashtag, the campaign sparked a debate centering around gender equality on social media. The consistent message that was clear and evident throughout the various platforms from images, to digital, to videos and commercials even during the Super Bowl was that girls are strong, smart, and powerful. We as women, know that we are capable of anything and everything and we will succeed, and this message came out through this campaign. 

A third example is the Levi Strauss: Ready to Work campaign which focused on documentaries about rebuilding efforts in a rundown steel town across multiple media sources which made the campaign an integrated marketing gem. It was real and raw which struck a chord within consumers but most importantly it delivered a clear and consistent message across platforms from video ads, to social media, digital ads, and more. 

Conclusion

These case studies are great examples that clearly show you how IMC campaigns can be highly successful and intuitive. They demonstrate exactly why IMC is the new gold standard of marketing communications. Like I mentioned earlier, the key to IMC is consistency because consistency will help you optimize the message you are trying to convey.


Learn More about IMC

I created an online course focusing on IMC for small business, start-ups, nonprofits, creators, and any individual or organization that wants to learn more about marketing communications. In my IMC online course, you can learn the process of planning your own IMC strategy for your business and products. The learning objectives of my course are:
  • To understand the definition of IMC and how it is used to increase brand awareness, generate sales, improve brand image, etc.
  • To understand the IMC process of seamlessly and effectively integrating various modes of marketing communication to achieve brand goals.
  • To understand how budgets affect IMC efforts.
  • To understand the power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing and how to use it to achieve brand objectives.
  • To create an IMC plan for your business, brand, or organization.

Let's work together to learn and create a plan for your brand or organization. Click here to register for the course.

4 Comments

    Categories

    All
    Content Marketing
    Graphic Design
    Marketing Communications
    Public Relations
    Social Media Marketing
    Social Media Tips

    RSS Feed

    Disclaimer: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, Adobe Affiliate Program, and in the Canva Affiliate Program, these are affiliate advertising programs designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com, Canva.com and affiliated sites.

    Picture
    Get the Free Guide

    Privacy Policy
    Affiliate Disclosure
    Terms and Conditions
    ​

    ©️ Johana M. Caba,
    Marlene I. Urena and
    JM Integrated Marketing. 2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site's author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Johana M. Caba, Marlene I. Urena and/or JM Integrated Marketing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

    Try Canva Pro Today

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Our Work
  • JM Blog
  • Online Course
  • Hire Us