The Nashville Web Design team often gets questions about branding and marketing so clarification on the difference between the two is important. To begin, here are the definitions of each.
Branding is the appearance, tone, and image that make up a business. Generally, how the business feels to the customer. When our Nashville web group talks with business owners about branding, we’re thinking about a logo, color scheme, tone of voice or writing, options of when and where to use those colors, and perhaps even what the brand can be associated with.
Marketing is the effort used to speak to the customers who will buy or associate with the brand. Advertising, a website, and print materials like brochures or business cards use pieces of the branding to market to the target customers.
Before we can have effective marketing, there has to be some level of branding. It starts with branding. However, our Nashville web design group has seen many startup companies that we have seen start with intense branding before they have any product sales. Intense exercises with branding companies are great but these investments generally should be held until multiple millions of dollars are being generated and the business is scaling to significant heights.
The purpose of a business is to create a customer. So, before any serious branding occurs, a business needs to know its product works, that it solves a problem for a customer, and that there is a demand for it. At this point, a business can begin to refine the ideal target audience and improve its marketing.
Some basic branding should be done to create a logo and identify the colors that are being used on the website and printed materials. However, generating up to a few million dollars is possible with intense branding exercises. Of course, a marketing company, like our Nashville web design team, should be competent when creating a business’s brand assets. Selling products to the average, middle-class stay-at-home mom should use a certain tone and the color scheme may be best served as a shade of blue rather than black or red, or even pink.
Once the basic elements of the brand are dialed in, hiring a great Nashville web design marketing group to build the website is key to success. Using the right words on the website, followed by a beautiful design, and quality code is essential to getting leads and sales. Next comes advertising, all of which is marketing.
Following again with the business that sells to stay-at-home moms, you may be wondering when the process of improving the brand occurs. Going back through the intense branding exercises we talked about earlier, consider the point of the shift where making major changes to the brand would be costly. Opening a second storefront in a different town or when advertising the brand requires lots of costly printed materials. Doing construction and adding new signage may be a cost and creating it twice isn’t ideal. Dialing the brand in first might make sense.
Although considering if what is working well isn’t broken and preventing the business from scaling, this may be too early and an unnecessary expense. The best time would then be when scaling has become too difficult due to the brand being too confusing or requiring too much education. Making the logo clear to the target audience, adjusting colors or the name of the business to reduce customer confusion and lower customer acquisition costs may be beneficial.
Most marketing efforts can be done with mediocre branding. Our Nashville web design group has seen many examples of words selling with a clear marketing message. Looking across the field of businesses, one can quickly see many inferior products that are selling well. A customer does not just buy the best product on the market, even at a similar price. Branding generally has no say in this matter. Purchasing a product from a big box retailer like Target over an unknown store on Amazon is a matter of trust and authority rather than the brand. Yet if two unknowns are dueling over the sale on Amazon or Etsy, the words that most clearly address the customers’ problem will win.
When considering whether to do an intense branding exercise or begin marketing your business to your customers, identify the target audience, create a clear message, and sell, sell, sell. Come back to branding when there is a need to improve and unify the look of your organization across many fronts.
As a startup, don’t get roped into spending weeks or days on branding work that takes your time and money. People buy products that solve their problems and make their lives better. They buy pizza that tastes good and solves their hunger, scratching a certain itch that only pizza can resolve. They buy from a hardware store where the clerk understands their needs and can point to the right solution and show why. They buy computers from they trust the store where the employees understand their need for speed and disk space rather than just the latest technology. Dial that in, then make sure your brand clearly speaks to your target customer, then tweak as needed and scale.
At Bennett Web Group, we design logos and get a better understanding of how your business works with your target audience. From there, we begin with the words that actually work to sell to the customer. Positioning your customer as the hero in your story, the marketing materials should speak a narrative about how your brand helps make your customers’ lives better.
There is no limit to how large you scale with simple branding. Nike paid $50 for their logo. One could argue Pepsi paid over one million dollars for theirs but this was largely later on in their existence so they were also paying for the risk of avoiding failure. Examples of this can be found with Tropicana and Gap, who made a big branding change that flopped. One may ask if they needed the branding change to begin with, but the point is not to do branding work in a vacuum outside of your target market.