There is no more important principle in mixed media marketing than the protection of your brand. Branding is another name for the experience that customers have with your company – period. Whether it’s face to face, by mail or digitally, any contact your company has with a user is a chance to strengthen your brand. If it’s not grasped with both hands and used to its full advantage a chance to solidify your brand is lost and if you’re not developing your brand, you’re weakening it.
Key Brand Factors
Customers: Your customers leave a digital footprint. The way they browse, shop, contact or interact allows you to build up a profile of their shopping behaviour. It is vital to determine HOW your customers search, WHAT they search, WHAT they use to search, WHEN they search, WHICH apps they use, how often and when. This information can help you develop your brand, and keep you at the top of the industry.
It is becoming more common for customers to use a multi channelled approach to engage with companies so your brand has to encompass all channels in a mixed media marketing campaign to ride the branding river.
Online/Offline: The experience for your customers’ needs to be the same whether online of offline. The brand development should be the focus of all your strategies. How do they search for your company? How accessible is the company? How available? What is your landing page like? These all need to compare with a store greeting or sale. Only 18% of companies in a recent survey said they were seriously committed to providing the best user experience for their customers online. Experts in Calgary branding say that for many, going live online is a new venture and often underestimated or under managed so many branding opportunities are missed at a crucial time. Start with a plan to guide your customers seamlessly from looking to your store to purchasing your product using our brand to give it conformity.
Identity: Your brand needs a strong identity. Everything leads to brand. Think of it as a uniform. Whether its the way your company looks or the way you handle customers situations, your brand should be consistent. The mere mention of your name should conjure up positive feelings as well as mental images if you have a strong identity and a strong work ethic.
A strong identity is necessary to make your brand stand out in a crowded market place. Your brand identity needs to include such things as intelligent SEO and content marketing to get noticed, and then gain strength with each interaction with your chosen demographic. Your customer needs to ride the brand river all the way to sale city.
Product: Digital media, its consumption, various formats and interactivity has given brands exciting opportunities to show, sell, share and deliver its products online. In branding processes, products are considered in terms of their key messaging and top level display in line with the brand image and positioning of the company. If a brand is positioned as having unique or ‘competitor busting’ attributes then what digital media allows is the opportunity to show this like never before with features such as:
- Video content
- Interactive personalisation tools
- Sharing facilities via social media
- ‘Try this on’ features
- Augmented reality via mobile
- Real time configuration based on user inputs
People: How people in an organisation understand and deliver the brand promises are central to making the brand work. How they look, talk, write and their nature and approach are all part of the brand delivery process. This often takes time to educate, train, monitor and recruit the right people.
Online, people still remain an important element to the brand on a number of levels. Customers may seek comfort online by seeing, hearing and reading about key members of the management or customer service team. Customers may wish to check the history and credibility of the management team or find out more about a person they met to check on credibility.
Brand development is vital to the growth of every company and not to be underestimated. The use of mixed media marketing is a key in developing a brand this is robust, admired and successful. Make a plan. Take advice. Work hard. And use the magic of Calgary branding to make a success of your company.
Talk to a person
