Leverage Traditional Practices and Social Media to Bolster Your Brand
Branding makes a huge difference in the success and acceptance of a product in the marketplace. The right branding practices can bring in positive visibility—even for a mediocre product—while lack of branding or incorrect branding practices can pull down the success of a well-engineered product. This is also true for services.
Social media has come to play a pivotal role in aiding branding in recent years. While social platforms have largely helped connect products with users and better build a brand, there are a few core challenges that continue to plague the overall brand-building process in this space.
Even big brands accept that small mistakes or not effectively leveraging the latest social media can adversely impact their brand-building exercise. And at a people level, social media managers often don’t get the respect they deserve for the work they do.
Social media marketing is a very dynamic activity, almost comparable to being on live product support twenty-four hours a day. As social marketing evolves, these challenges hopefully will fade away and the industry will be able to shape people with the right skills to balance the workload. But for now, the pressure is high for these marketing groups—not just internally but externally as well, from end users demanding what they want to see from the brands they are attached to.
Keeping the market in mind is becoming crucial in this whole process. At a high level, pick the top three to five elements that are core to your brand-building exercise. Anything beyond this number may make it difficult to maintain consistency and may actually dilute the brand by sending out conflicting messages to your users.
A creative advertising veteran recently gave an interesting message about “giving life to your brand” to make it successful. Whether this is through brand ambassadors, or by physically connecting your product and your users, or another route, this can go a long way in building the right brand for even a small product.
Branding is a very psychological phenomenon—with a lot of emotions tagged to it. While this may seem subjective, being transparent about your product can help you earn the status of a genuine, no-nonsense brand and give your brand the new life it needs.
Traditional branding practices combined with newer possibilities in the social media can build a successful brand for years to come. The processes may seem complex and random to work with at first, but with a clear end goal and a larger message of keeping it all simple, the two methods together can be extremely powerful in building a sustainable brand for your product.
