8 Outside the Box Strategies for Successful Brand Management It is an undeniable fact that every business big or small wants to develop itself into a popular brand. For the success of a business, it is highly imperative that...

It is an undeniable fact that every business big or small wants to develop itself into a popular brand. For the success of a business, it is highly imperative that it establishes itself as a brand name everyone recognizes. We humans anyway have a thing for brands and we remember brands more than we remember what all domains these brands work in. In simple words, we identify businesses and entrepreneurs in terms of the brand they have been able to create.

Having said that, it explains why brand management is such a key component of business strategies. Irrespective of the industry a business is a part of and regardless of what a business does, the race to become a recognizable brand is real. The question we must ask here is, "what makes a brand recognizable and identifiable for people?" What does it take for a brand to create high awareness among its target audience and then drive high sales and profitability? Needless to say, as more and more people know about a brand, the prospects of revenue and profitability will amplify.

In this blog, given the great significance of branding, we shed light on some of the most unique and worthwhile strategies for successful brand management. However before we move to these strategies, it will be a great idea to elaborate on the relevance and vitality of brand management strategies. Before you know what are the best strategies for making a success story out of your brand, you ought to know the actual merits of improved brand positioning.

The statistical insights on branding and brand management enlisted below will elucidate the significance of brand awareness for business success. On the other side of these key statistics, you will be convinced about the need for prolific brand management strategies.

A few worthwhile insights on the need for brand awareness

1. As per Renderforest, managing brand awareness is one of the top business priorities for more than 75 percent of companies across all kinds of industries. To add, 60 percent of customers have a preference for buying from a brand they are quite familiar with.
2. As cited by Forbes, the impressive presentation of a brand across multiple platforms can augment revenue generation up to 23 percent. This crucial fact explains the direct correlation between effective brand management and profitability.
3. As concluded by Circle Research, almost 80 percent of B2B marketers lay great emphasis on branding. They are of the strong view that it is almost impossible for businesses to develop and advance in the absence of brand management.
4. It has been inferred by Lyfemarketing that, with strong branding, a business can bring down its hiring expenses to almost half. Therefore, as evident, brand management can offer significant cost benefits to your business.
5. According to Bynder, more than 70 percent of brand managers assert that audience building is more critical than conversion of leads.
6. When it comes to buying a smartphone, 63 percent of consumers pay a lot of heed to the brand reputation of smartphone manufacturers. This finding by Statista speaks for the charm and prowess of branding.
7. Research from Renderforest concludes that 33 percent of shoppers have a brand name in their mind whenever they decide to go for online or offline shopping.
8. It is intriguing to note that per CrowdSpring, almost 80 percent of buyers refer to a wide range of items by brand names. This highlights the kind of connection that exists between brand names and shoppers.
9. As per Everyone Social, 90 percent of employers would quit their current jobs to work for an organization that has an enchanting brand reputation. As you can see, brand management also influences employee retention levels in an organization.
10. The findings of Career Arc state that 69 percent of employers work in tandem with their brand managers and marketers to build a charismatic employer brand.

Are you still unsure if you should pay heed to the branding of your business or not? It is crystal clear from the above trends that brand management is paramount to your strategic business objectives. Whether you look at it from the purview of revenue, profitability, or employee engagement, branding is salient to each domain of business success.

Besides, in contemporary times where competition is escalating to reach the pinnacle, you can give your business a massive competitive advantage via effective branding. You ought to optimize your brand's familiarity amid a wider audience and create strong brand relationships. The key is to streamline your focus on creating greater brand awareness.

For that, you need to devise unique, creative, and impactful brand management strategies. Remember, the competition is overwhelming and your branding tactics need to outperform others when everyone is trying to be at their creative best. This is where your imagination and your brand managers' efficiency will be put to a real test. You ought to be one step ahead of others! So, are you up for the challenge? As long as you get your brand management strategies right, you will see your business scaling new horizons.

However, it is imperative to work on the right strategies and tactics of brand management. Investing in the wrong strategies can rather create an offset for your business ambitions. So, what are the most effective and appropriate strategies for branding then? We have compiled a creative collection of the most advanced brand management strategies for you. These strategies are in coherence with the latest trends and how modern customers associate with brands. Let us glance at them one by one in the ensuing section.

Exemplary tactics for impactful brand management

Rethink your brand logo

The utility of brand logos is too underrated at times, isn't it? After all, your brand's logo is the first impression of your brand both in the physical and the digital space. In fact, a majority of people recognize brands from their logos. To substantiate, as claimed by Renderforest, among various brand identifiers, a brand's logo takes the top spot.

Having said that, you might want to recreate your brand's logo keeping in mind a few things. It is intriguing that the color scheme of a logo has a massive role to play in making a brand more presentable. To validate, as per Design Buddy, 33 percent of the leading global brands have the color blue in their logos. Does blue feature in your company's logo as well? To add, even Forbes has a highly interesting insight to offer on logos.

Forbes recommends that using an identical color palette on your brand's logo, products, company website, and other creatives can optimize brand recognition by 80 percent. Brand recognition implies the ease with which customers can identify a brand through its logo and products. Having said that, color is a quintessential dimension of brand awareness.

Therefore, if you think there is a scope for reimagining your brand logo in correlation with the above insights, you should go for it. After all, your logo is the most vital element of your brand's identity. Given that, if you can improvise on it, why not? If Facebook can overhaul its entire identity to be known as Meta, rethinking your logo is still a simpler task!

Cultivate innovation in customer service

A company's proficiency in customer service is one of the key highlights of its brand reputation. Will you want to associate with brands that are known for substandard customer service? Of course, you would not! Both employers and brand managers need to acknowledge the colossal imperativeness of customer service in contemporary times. Efficiency in customer service is a key differentiating factor between thriving businesses and dooming businesses.

Having said that, you ought to realize that a brand is only as strong as its goodwill among customers. Speaking for the purview of brand goodwill, service is of paramount significance for customers. In fact, customers are also willing to pay a premium price for brands that offer excellent customer service. To substantiate, Nextiva concludes, Americans pay a 17 percent price premium to buy from brands that are known for credible customer service. Do you see how powerful the notion of excellent customer service is?

Probing further, Nextiva also cites that 70 percent of consumers have committed prolonged support to brands that deliver excellently on their service expectations. Therefore, the need of the hour is to drive constant innovation in customer service to improve brand positioning. The incorporation of customer self-service channels can be one of the most advanced innovations. State-of-the-art customer self-service portals can boost customer retention and brand reputation in an incredible way.

Customer self-service channels enable customers to resolve their service requests or queries on their own. To explain, with the help of chatbots, customer tutorials, virtual assistants, and guided instructions, customers will no longer have to depend on service executives. Isn't that an amazing thing? If a brand can offer such empowerment and self-sufficiency to customers, needless to say, its positioning will improve in a dramatic way. In fact, a large proportion of US consumers prefer automation in self-service.

To continue, as per Microsoft, more than 30 percent of US consumers find chatbot interactions very effective in dealing with their service requests on their own. In the near future, automated customer self-service portals will be a big thing. The sooner you integrate these innovations the better it will be for your brand's goodwill and popularity among consumers. If you can win the trust of customers with great service, they will upscale your branding on their own!

Market your brand with strong content

Bill Gates once said, "content is the king" and the implications of his words are indeed coming true. As every brand looks to create a tantalizing digital presence, content has become the most crucial competitive advantage a business can have in the digital space. People are in awe of great, informative, and refreshing content is a fact that would remain eternal. Every branding campaign depends on the quality and uniqueness of content presented to people. This is where content marketing tactics come into the picture.

Not only the branding of your business but multifarious dimensions of business success directly depend on the effectiveness of your content marketing strategies. Even an impressive generation of leads for higher sales requires superior content.

In order to amplify the online visibility and recognition of your brand, you need to incorporate actionable content marketing strategies. You have to be on the top of your content game to captivate the interest of web users and create an organic brand audience. Some of the key content marketing strategies for improving brand visibility are mentioned subsequently.

• Intelligible use of SEO techniques: The incorporation of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for optimizing your content can play a massive role in your brand's development. SEO ensures that your content ranks well on search engines for searches specific to keywords contained in your content. In this digital age, SEO strategies have become indispensable for every business looking to bolster its online presence.
• Audience Segmentation: Segmenting your audience into generations or preferences and then creating specific content for each segment can be a great strategy. It is imperative that you understand your audience well and segment it in a meticulous way. Not every segment of your target audience will be attracted to the same content. You will have to work on parallel content strategies for each segment.
• Versatility in content: You ought to keep your content creation strategies versatile enough to entice audiences of all kinds of content preferences. You need to pay equal focus on creating blogs, podcasts, video content, infographics, and other forms of content. As per Hubspot, 54 percent of people look forward to regular video content from brands they follow. To add, BrandBuddah claims that brands that are regular with their blog posting are able to generate 67 percent more leads. On similar lines, each vertical of digital content has its own significance in influencing the positioning of a brand.
• Maintaining uniqueness in content: Internet users are not much interested in repetitive content or anything that fails to offer new perspectives. Users are more interested in brands that create fresh and unique content for their readers or viewers. Having said that, be it a blog or video that you are using for branding, it has to offer something new. To add, as per Contently, 61 percent of people are attracted more to brands that offer unique content. Needless to say, besides being unique, the content also needs to be of superlative quality.
• Smart use of user-generated content: Yet another smart tactic for a successful great content marketing strategy is to leverage the content generated by users. You ought to encourage your customers to curate content for your brand. With content created by your users, you can offer greater personalization to other users reading the content. Also, user-generated content comes with SEO advantages and the privilege of expanding your outreach on social media. Moreover, your brand can seem more authentic when you share content generated by your users on social media.

Content marketing is the way forward and if you can gain a competitive edge here, your brand will thrive in an exemplary way. You ought to have the best minds and content creators on your team to take your brand to the next level. The truth is that no branding strategy can succeed without great content that people love to come across. What will people relate to in your brand if not the content? You need content to bridge the gap between your brand and the internet. No wonder all brands are spending exorbitant amounts of money on their content marketing.

Maintain consistency across platforms

One strategic flaw that some brand managers tend to make at times is to break the cycle of consistency. When you are trying to present your brand as an industry leader, you have to be proactive in its marketing. Besides, you also need to be consistent in the presentation of your brand across various platforms. The most consistent your brand managers are with their branding strategies the greater will be the impact.

In fact, this consistency becomes even more important for small businesses. This is for the simple reason that small businesses need to build brand recognition in a persistent manner when taking the big corporation head on. To further emphasize, 60 percent of millennial consumers anticipate consistency from brands across channels(Renderforest). So, if you are posting Reels on Instagram or writing blogs for your brand, people want you to be consistent with that.

These are only to name a few examples of how brands build awareness across different platforms. You ought to identify the platforms that are the most suitable for your brand and then have some incessant tactics going. The idea is to engage as many people as you can across different platforms. The greater the number of people or customers you engage in a constant manner the more extensive will be the brand awareness. After all, consistency always pays off, isn't it?

Optimize brand authority through social media

Prolific brand managers will not perceive brand awareness as the final destination of their pursuit. They would want to take it one step ahead and rather focus on creating brand authority. Your brand does not have to be merely recognizable but it has to be authoritative to attract great attention. For succeeding in creating such authority, social media gives you an effulgent spectrum of opportunities. From potential customers living in metropolitan cities to a suburban audience, social media gives you an enormous outreach.

It would not be incorrect to say that social media has emerged as the Mecca of marketing and branding. As per The Manifest, more than 73 percent of small businesses are already allocating funds to social media marketing as a key highlight of their branding strategy. To add, as per Forbes, more than 65 percent of buyers make a purchase decision after viewing a branded video on social media.

Moreover, Oberlo infers that 54 percent of the global social media users leverage these platforms to search for new products and services. Social media is indeed one of the most inexpensive ways for promoting your brand.

As you can see, there is every reason why you need to build brand authority on social media. Given below are some of the ways in which you can create greater brand awareness and authority with social media.

• Influencer marketing: You can enhance the credibility and authority of your brand in a prodigious way by having social media influencers market your brand. When famous influencers talk about your brand and products, your brand gets a wider outreach. Remember, social media influencers are celebrities in the digital space, and their influence can be a great resource for a brand.
• Continuous engagement: As mentioned above, you need to engage people on your social media handles in a consistent way to create brand authority. From polls to stories to questions and answers, there are multifaceted ways to engage your social media audience. This can be a great way of building a genuine audience for your brand that associates with your products and services.
• Hire social media managers: To streamline your social media engagement strategies, hiring social media managers can be a good bet. In this way, you will have specialists working in a systematic way to optimize the social media presence of your brand. You can even hire interns for the same roles and responsibilities. All you need are people who know the ins and outs of social media thoroughly.
• Call to action buttons: Have Call To Action buttons on your social media handles to enjoy a greater brand authority. It is all about how convenient you can make it for people interested in your social media profiles. In case people want to contact your business or buy directly from social media, the CTA buttons will be a fascinating feature for them.
• Live streaming: Like Apple live streams the launch of its new electronics on social media, you can also leverage the live streaming feature of social media. You can host live events on social media to entice social media users and engage them in an effective way. In this way, they will be able to connect with your brand in a more holistic way.

To add, it is interesting to learn that consumers are 80 percent more likely to trust a business if its senior executives post on social media often. This insight from CEO Hangout can provide an explanation for why the likes of Elon Musk and Bezos remain so active on social media. Needless to say, people's trust in a brand is an indispensable fundamental of a brand's reputation.

Reinforce your core values in your branding campaigns

In recent years, there have been some major overhauls in people's preferences of brands and businesses. To elaborate, people are now more interested in brands that exhibit strong values of the greater good. This is where brand managers need to tweak their branding tactics and align each campaign to strong values. If your brand has to create a worthwhile dominance, your core values have to be at the surface.

To illustrate, customers would pay up to 50 percent more on products to buy from your brand if your brand is known to have a positive impact on the world (Customer Thermometer). To add, as cited by Fundera, 82 percent of buyers stay loyal to brands that share their core values publicly.

Customers are now realizing the need for brands that can look beyond their profits. They are happy to support brands that are working for the greater good and adding optimism to the world. Transparency and sustainability are two basic values that people expect from a brand. It is noteworthy that a large proportion of customers now feel influenced by the notion of environmental conscience.

Having said that, they perceive brands caring for the environment in a positive light. As inferred by Capgemini, 79 percent of consumers are now more interested in brands that embrace sustainable business practices. The bottom line is that you have to position your brand in a way it ticks all the boxes right on the checklist of contemporary consumers. For that, your values have to be at the forefront of your brand awareness campaigns.

In case you have not yet incorporated values like sustainability into your business, you may have to change a few things. The more visible your values are the greater will be the visibility and recognition your brand will get. Values indeed hold great merit even in this fast-paced world.

Engage in emotional brand storytelling

Brand storytelling is the neo mantra of success for creating a strong buzz around your brand. With emotional storytelling, you can foster great relatability with your audience and present your brand as the one that represents a common emotion. In fact, a lot of brands are now laying great emphasis on storytelling marketing given the high ROI it has to offer.

In accordance with MarketSmiths, brand stories incite great interest among people. It further cites that 15 percent of people make an immediate decision to buy from a brand if they like its story. Besides, 44 percent of them will share the story and 55 percent will think of buying from the brand in the future. Isn't that an amazing way to magnify the proposition of your brand?

After all, we are all humans made of emotions and flesh. If you can foster emotional connections with your target audience through scintillating brand storytelling, your branding campaigns are bound to attain colossal success.

You would be amused to know that 95 percent of people would like to recommend an emotionally engaging brand to others. This credible statistic from Gensler validates the power of emotional storytelling.

Also, a lot of marketers are of the view that storytelling marketing is the future of marketing. It presents a brand as being authentic and in coherence with the general emotions of people. Moreover, you can reinforce your brand's story in multifaceted ways ranging from social media stories to advertising themes. It offers you a vast scope of ways in which you can appeal to the emotions of people to influence their loyalty and buying decisions. People are in awe of original, meaningful, and relatable content served to them in the form of warm stories.

Invest in employee experience

It is not the furniture in the workplace that represents a brand but the people working for it. Having said that, we ought to acknowledge the simple fact that a brand is synonymous with its people. To explain, when employees of an organization relish positive workplace experiences, a brand becomes stronger. Employee experience is hence one of the most pivotal pillars of creating an enchanting employer brand.

Remember, you also need to brand your business to candidates looking for employment opportunities and to investors as well. Creating brand awareness among target customers is no doubt imperative but that is not what brand management is all about. The perception of brand management has to be wider and considerate of the need for creating a strong employer brand. For that, you need to invest in the experience of your employees as well as the candidates applying to your organization.

The more important question is, "how can you foster positive and relishing employee experiences?" Well, the simple success mantra of delivering positive employee experiences is to understand their expectations and deliver on them if you can. Some of the genuine expectations that employees have from their employers are listed below.

• Employee recognition
• Empathy
• Learning and development opportunities
• Career advancement prospects
• Wellness support
• Positive and safe workplace culture
• Mutual respect and inclusion

Even if you look at it from the purview of creating a strong brand reputation among consumers, investing in employee experience is still quintessential. Employees will work with active engagement and enthusiasm when their own experiences are pleasant. When your employees are happy, they will be able to offer more cordial service to customers and add more value to customers' experiences.

Can you expect dissatisfied or unhappy employees to make similar contributions to a brand's success? Will they be happy to be a part of your brand's journey? You need all of them on the same page, after all, to present your brand in a positive light!

To encase, creating brand awareness, brand recognition and brand authority are the key objectives of brand management. Further, now that the digital space is more dominant, your branding strategies have to be more aligned to creating awareness and recognition in the digital space including social media. Ultimately, the success of branding is subject to how creative brand managers can be in their work. It is going to take out-of-the-box perspectives to excel amid colossal competition. Each of the above strategies will have a decisive role to play in taking your branding game to the next level. The end results are of course subject to your execution.

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