What is brand building?
Brand building is all about developing and maintaining a brand. It includes activities such as creating a brand identity, developing a brand strategy, building awareness and maintaining a positive reputation.
The goal of brand building? To create a strong brand that your consumer recognizes and feels an emotional connection with. It is achieved through various marketing efforts such as advertising, content marketing, events ...
In other words, you work on your brand and build it.
What is the difference between a brand, branding and brand building?
Let's clarify the difference with an example. Suppose you are a young entrepreneur with a business in eco-friendly candles. You name your company "N-Candels."
N-Candels is your brand. Everything around this (your logo, color palette, typography ...) is your branding. All the marketing efforts you make (social madia marketing, SEO optimizations, email marketing ...) to grow your brand belong to brand building.
You don't start brand building until your brand and branding are on point.
The benefits of brand building
The biggest benefit of brand building? Building a strong relationship with your target audience. That way, you earn more per customer and put your brand in a stronger position in the market.
1. You increase brand loyalty, so customers buy more.
Customers know your brand and trust your products and services. They know what to expect from you and are satisfied with it.
2. You create more brand awareness because loyal customers talk about you to friends and family.
Word of mouth is the oldest and best form of advertising. People trust people. Especially if they have built an emotional connection with them.
Tip. In marketing terms, we call measuring your customer satisfaction the NPS (Net Promoter Score). With this you examine how likely it is that your customers would recommend you to others.
Send a small survey to your customers asking, "To what extent would you recommend [your brand] to friends/family/colleagues?
Respondents who give you a score of 9 or 10 are promoters. You can assume that these respondents would effectively recommend/ have already recommended your brand to others.
Respondents who give you a score of 7 or 8 are passives. These respondents are unlikely to recommend your brand to others, but they certainly won't recommend it to others either.
Critics are respondents who give you a score of 0 to 6. There is very little chance that these respondents would recommend your brand to others.
To calculate your final Net Promoter Score, do the following math:
Net promoter score = % Promoters - % Criticasters
The NPS itself is not expressed as a percentage, but as an absolute number. That number is between -100 and +100.
Do you have a positive NPS? Then you are already doing well. Keep investing to get this score up.
Do you have a negative NPS? Then you have work to do. Time to invest in a strong brand building strategy.
3. You make a strong impression that sets you apart from your competitors.
In a world of competition, standing out is a must. By building and working out a unique brand building strategy you will stand out from your competition. Scream for attention in a way that is appreciated by your target group.
The components of brand building
All the marketing efforts you make to promote your brand or a product are brand building.
We take back our example about N-Candels.
To promote brand awareness and loyalty, we first develop powerful branding that perfectly matches the target audience. Once this is on point, we set up social media channels. We choose Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. On these channels, we post informative content with powerful CTAs. We also set up some paid ads to get faster (test) results.
At the same time, we focus on the quality of our website. Are we getting enough visitors but not enough sales? Then we look at UI and UX of the website. What can we still improve? Testing what works is the message.
Tip: we use the powerful tool Hotjar for this.
Are we not getting enough visitors to test whether our UI and UX are on point? Then we invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and/or SEA (Search Engine Advertising).
To strengthen our loyalty, we decide to send out a monthly newsletter via e-mail. This way, we send a monthly reminder that we are still here. In addition, we set up an email flow. Depending on the number of burning hours of the candles purchased, we send a reminder that the candles are running low and that they should order a new one in time.
We also sign up for a fair. In our case, a fair for ecological home accessories. There we set up a booth completely in our branding and hand out free samples of our candles. New customers also enjoy an attractive discount if they subscribe to our newsletter.
With our remaining marketing budget, we invest in a radio spot. Twice a day at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. we play our radio spot on a radio station that suits our target group.
To summarize: we are going to do everything we can to grow our brand, promote customer satisfaction and build brand awareness.
Every brand building strategy is different. Test what works for your brand and keep those sales coming. Some brand building techniques you should definitely try:
1. Social media posts
Organic posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn,Pinterest, TikTok ...
2. Social media ads
Paid posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedInPinterest, TikTok ...
3. SEA
Paying to appear higher in search engine search results for certain keywords.
4. SEO
Optimizing your website for search engines to attract more visitors organically.
5. Advertising such as radio or TVspots
Pay to play your radio or TV spot on channelswhere your target audience is present. Cinema is another option if you have a large budget.
6. Content marketing
Put videos on YouTube, publish interesting blogs, record podcasts ...
7. E-mail marketing
Newsletters, email flows, direct mailings ...
8. Events and fairs
Set up your own booth at an event or trade show where your target audience is present.
Create your brand building strategy
Reflect on your current business strategy
- What sales techniques are you currently using?
- What brand building efforts are you currently engaged in?
- What marketing channels are you currently using?
Define your brand
- Define your target audience: does your targetaudience belong to Gen Z? Or is it generation X?
- Think about how you make the customerexperience exceptional. What is your USP?
- Position your brand in the market todifferentiate yourself from the competition.:
- Come up with a name, logo and slogan
- Treat your brand as a person with its ownidentity (brand archetypes)
- Devise a unique selling strategy
- Establish your brand's core values
- Define your tone-of-voice
- Create a unique personality for your brand
Develop your content marketing strategy
- Define the purpose of your brand
- Capture your brand identity
- Develop a powerful content marketing strategy
Work on your brand pillars
- Have a website created that is technically perfect, visually appealing and converts.
- Build your marketing toolkit
- Put a sales page on your website with all your services and products
- Create an e-brochure about your business
- Publish videos such as case studies
Analyze your competition
- What are your competitors doing and most importantly, how can you do it better?
Analyze and adapt your strategy
The dream, of course, is to develop a timeless [brand strategy], but that is almost impossible. The market changes daily. Think about trends, new social media channels, changes in your target audience ...
- Analyze what works and what doesn't
- Check if your target group still has the same interests
- Make adjustments where necessary
What tools do you need for brand building?
- Hubspot
- Mailchimp
- Convertkit
- Flodesk
- GetDrip
- Video branding tools
- Visual branding tools
- Content marketing tools
- Branding tools for Social Media Management
- Branding tools to measure your efforts
Brand building for social media
Social media is a very powerful marketing strategy. Especially if you work with channels where your target audience is present. Also, social media is often free, you just need to create an account and you can get started.
- Define your goals, mission, vision and values and align them with your target audience to tell your story on social media
- Develop your brand identity with visual brand elements and a consistent voice
Tips for brand building on social media
- Create a community feeling and offer and free educational resource
- Collaborate with influencers
- Use video content
- Show what your brand looks like behind the scenes
- Use polls to learn more about your target audience
- Repurpose high-performing content across channels
Brand building for digital marketing
By doing brand building through digital marketing channels, you connect with your customers online. The biggest advantage of brand building in digital marketing is that you control who sees your efforts.
It is often more cost-effective than other marketing channels and quickly increases brand awareness and recognition.
Last but not least, digital marketing is easily measurable, allowing you to analyze your efforts immediately. Is something still going wrong? Then you can easily adjust it.
Brand building for offline marketing
You can also do brand building offline. Think of the typical offline marketing efforts such as flyers, posters, events, fairs ... often offline brand building is done using digital marketing. They match and reinforce each other perfectly.
- Take photos of your events and share them on social media or your website
- Share your flyers and posters through your social media channels or use them for advertisements
Professional brand building by Bonito studio
The Bonito approach
Want to start growing your brand together? Then we start with an introductory meeting. In this conversation, we get to know you, your brand, your company, your values, your personal, your preferences, your dislikes .... This is how we discover what you stand for.
In this conversation we also discuss your short-, medium- and long-term goals. That way we know what you are going for.
After our conversation, we put our creativity to work. We conduct a competitive analysis, organize a big brainstorm and work out a mood board to determine which way to go.
Once we have worked out 2 or 3 powerful strategies, we invite you back for a meeting. Together we discuss our ideas and connect the dots.
Then it's time for the real work. We work out your logo, color palettes, typography and applications and provide you with mock-ups and samples. After that, it's time to work out your brand-building strategy.
Example of the Bonito approach
A while ago, a client called us. He is a chef and wants to open a store with small delicacies such as jams, tomato sauce, dips ...
During our introductory meeting, he provided us with all the necessary information. What he wants, what his preferences are, what colours he likes, what elements he considers important ...
We got to know him, his target audience and competition. We know what they do and how they do it.
Based on the information from our introductory meeting, we worked out a mood board.
We discussed the mood board with the client and incorporated his feedback. Then we delivered the 2nd version:
We implemented the last adjustments and finalized the branding.
Only when the branding is completely on point, we start working on the brand building strategy.
How much does brand building cost?
The cost of brand building depends on several factors. First, how far along is your brand? On which channels are you already present? This makes it difficult to put a general price on it. Because your goals also play an important role.
Feel free to contact us for a digital coffee and we will discuss your wishes, goals and what we can do for you.