The difference between marketing and branding, and how a digital marketing strategy will help assist in building your business’ identity.
What is branding?
The brand is the personality, image and identity of a business. This is recognised physically through the name, logo and visual identity, but also emotionally, through how consumers feel in relation to a particular product or service.
Delivering a product or service, in line with the brand’s identity, builds trust and helps to retain customers by connecting with your audience. People will have trust in a business that they can relate to, and this is particularly important in terms of business growth and during new product launches.
At this point, you’re probably wondering where digital marketing comes into all this?
If branding is the ‘why’, digital marketing is the ‘how’
Digital marketing, when executed alongside a strong brand marketing strategy, is an integral asset. Whether this is building your business, launching new products or services, or growing your business, a clean and concise digital marketing strategy will elevate your business to new levels of success.
Digital marketing is a short term solution when it comes to building up your online presence. It drives fast results, by immersing your brand into the market, in front of your target audience. The best way to do this is to reach potential customers on the most relevant platforms that fit in with their day to day lives.
Through concise audience research and keyword targeting, brand strategy marketing such as the likes of SEO, Paid Social and PPC Campaigns can really have a positive impact when it comes to advertising your services or products online.
SEO will improve your website’s position organically, to make sure you are showing in strong positions for natural search results. The aim of Paid Media is to proactively find your perfect audiences through the likes of Social Media Advertising or to respond to someone already looking for what you offer, on search engines through PPC.
These efforts help to deliver campaigns specifically built around your business goals, but sometimes marketing alone is not the answer.
Marketing is a short term solution, however, it’s your branding and identity that will help you to build trust, grow your customer base and retain these customers.
Branding defines trajectory, marketing defines tactics
Your business goals should line up with your vision, and company values. Having a trusted brand will build customer loyalty, and also help you to acquire new customers through feedback and reviews. Your brand is WHO you are, and will define where you want to be, but marketing will be the strategy implemented to get you there.
Using paid social advertising, we can choose what platforms we want to appear on, and really narrow these specifics down to the type of content, and what placements we want to appear in. We can also make sure that we have a share in the market space where your competitors are ranking, making sure that we are not losing out on opportunities to attract new customers.
Branding is the being, marketing is the doing
Branding will assist your marketing strategy because people will buy into WHO you are. Studies have shown that 81% of consumers stated that they need to be able to trust the brand from which they buy. So it is important to put emphasis on both your branding and values, as well as your digital marketing strategy, through a holistic approach.
Branding creates value, it allows you to create awareness of who you are, and what you are offering. It allows you to communicate to your customers the benefits of your product or services and will help you set yourself apart from your competitors. It allows you to communicate with your customers, in a relevant and meaningful way.
Marketing extracts value, it is a data-driven approach, where you are able to analyse your marketing efforts. This can help you scale your business, but also highlights any key areas that may need attention, or to divert your efforts away from.
Having a strong brand marketing strategy in place will allow you to grow. When you build up your brand, you spend countless hours perfecting the vision and making sure that your business reflects what you stand for in relation to your values and goals. However, we cannot emphasise enough the importance of having a digital marketing strategy in place that aligns with this.
Circulate Digital is an award-winning agency, with a team of experts that specialise in all avenues of digital marketing. We can help you reach your goals, provide expert advice, and deliver results in line with your goals. We offer a transparent service and will make sure that you are putting your marketing efforts into the right platforms for your business, in the most cost-effective way. If you are considering hiring an agency to help you achieve results, here are 10 reasons why you should outsource your digital marketing.
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