Running a business today is way more challenging than it used to be even five years back. From consumer tastes to industry standards, business trends are changing all the time, requiring small as well as big brands to adapt to the changing competitive environment. Aside from focusing on quality products or services, one also needs to implement strong branding campaigns in order to survive and counter your competitors.
Branding your business under the current market scenario can be tricky, but we’re here to make it easier for you with our list of innovative branding tips. But, before that, let’s have a quick look at what branding means and how the concept has changed in recent years.
Top Innovative Branding Tips for the Go Getters
The dictionary describes branding as “the act of giving a company a particular design or symbol in order to advertise its products and services.” While this was a pretty accurate depiction of the term “branding” sometime back, it’s no longer adequate today. For many, it’s still just about the visual identity of a brand, namely its name, logo, packaging, etc. while these are still an integral part of any branding strategy, the idea has evolved enormously over the years.
Today, branding is the comprehensive process of discovering, creating, and organizing the cumulative properties and actions that shape a brand’s perception in stakeholders’ minds. The idea is to promote your business in such a way that makes it stand out from the competition. As simple as it may sound, strategizing a modern and innovative branding technique requires sound market knowledge and skills. Here are some effective ideas on how to do it.
1. Make the most of social media
Thanks to social media, our lives have become so much more happening, fun and eventful. Other than connecting people worldwide and creating a global community, it’s also a strong platform for businesses to promote themselves. It facilitates instant communication with the audience and has given birth to social media influencers who are often available for brand collaborations. From running a referral program to sharing stories on Instagram, there are so many ways to make the most of social media for your brand. Try one or more of these ideas for innovative branding.
2. Try a referral program
A referral program is a word-of-mouth branding strategy to incentivize your previous and existing customers to recommend your products or services to others. Whether it’s a giveaway, a seasonal discount, or a free product with every purchase, if the offer is good enough, people will advocate on behalf of your brand.
3. Collaborate with another brand or account
Joining hands with another business or account that matches yours but isn’t a direct competition can prove helpful. Some of the biggest benefits of brand partnerships are a bigger and broader audience, greater social buzz, added brand value, and (sometimes) shared resources. Start a joint project, or simply promote each other on your social media handles with relevant posts.
4. Use Creative Videos
Step out from your traditional static Facebook and Instagram posts and give creative videos a try. Video is not only more engaging and better at getting your message across, but you get more time and space to be creative. They are not only more interesting and engaging than static content, but also boost brand awareness and educate the audience about your products or services.
As people find your videos interesting and useful, they’ll also share them on their social media accounts, hence increasing the engagement rate and web traffic. If you find creating creative video content a little challenging, you can always take help of a professional branding agency.
5. Try Facebook Live
This is definitely the age of videos, thanks to their high engagement rate, consumer attention capacity, and improved SEO rankings. With Facebook Live Videos, users can share live streaming videos using their smartphones or other mobile devices. This feature is accessible to all Facebook users with an active profile or page. Since the audience is more interested in seeing videos, Facebook has launched an algorithm that places videos higher in the news feed, so they are visible organically.
Besides, live videos (unlike images) help consumers interact with your brand in real-time, creating a level of trust and constancy. Whereas your regular product or service videos give neat and detailed information about your business, live Facebook videos are raw and unrehearsed. They provide a personal connection and ensure better customer retention. With over 2.2 billion monthly active users and 8 billion video views every day, Facebook is definitely the best platform to go live and promote your business.
6. Get help from Messenger chatbots
When it comes to business sales, marketing, and support, client communication has to be quick. And if you’re late in getting back to your customers (no matter the reason), chances are they‘ll lose their faith and patience and move to a different brand. This is exactly where AI-powered chatbots come handy as they can automate client communication and improve the support process in a big way.
According to studies, 35 percent of customers want more businesses to use chatbots to boost their communication skills. Some of the biggest advantages of using chatbots are instant response, consistent answers, one-on-one client conversations, multilingual chat, and 24/7 availability. Use your chatbot to give your followers useful information about your company or turn it into a personal shopping assistant with personalized product/service suggestions.
7. Tap on YouTube Marketing
When it comes to digital branding, there’s a range of channels and platforms to choose from. While Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are great places to explore, having a YouTube channel is the most effective way to promote your videos and increase customer engagement. We all love watching videos. From movies and Facebook videos to subscription-based streaming shows, videos are a compelling part of our lives. With this increasing popularity of videos, it’s worth including them in your innovative branding strategy. Here are some of the biggest benefits of YouTube marketing.
Huge Traffic
With almost 30 million visitors per day and 300 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube is certainly the best platform to promote your business. Even if you aren’t creating any videos, you can still promote your content on other YouTubers’ videos.
Higher Google Ranking
Did you notice that videos appear more frequently on Google search results that other types of content? This is because videos have a higher engagement rate than text posts or images alone. For higher SEO rankings, use only quality content on your website and create videos using this content for YouTube. This way, you’ll gain backlinks to your website, meaning your brand will be more visible on Google search results.
Pro tip: Collaborate with other related brands (not competitors) to embed your videos on their websites.
Create Your Email List
One of the top advantages of YouTube advertising is that you can create your email list using this platform. There are several software available for embedding your sign-up form into YouTube videos. Here, a video is paused for a few seconds so the viewer can enter their details and subscribe to your list. This is an excellent way to build your email list and provide quality content to your prospective customers at the same time.
8. Stick to minimalist designs
Forget about days when brand logos, banners and pamphlets had to be vibrant and use fancy lettering. From Puma to KFC, almost all famous brands are adopting clean, simple designs for their print as well as digital promotions. Following their footsteps, even startups are swearing by a minimalistic brand image that appeals to a large audience. It allows you to portray your products/services to the audience without going over-the-top. Minimalism refers to using only the basic design elements and a simple sans-serif typography with a color palette of less than three colors.
For example, Burger King has adopted a more minimalistic approach in their rebranding strategy. While the previous logo was louder and more colorful, the revised version uses only two colors (red and orange) with a simple design.
9. Make a Twitter Moment
Twitter Moments is a special tool that lets you create slideshows (namely “Moments”) using different tweets. This feature is primarily used for narrating stories, circulating news, or compiling favorite Tweets. In case of branding, use testimonial tweets from your customers or add links to blogs about your products/services for an added dose of trust and influence. Also, if you’re conducting an event or attending a seminar, create a Twitter Moment to show your followers what’s happening there. This will arouse their interest and help them connect better with your brand.
For example, you can create a demo video about your products/services and save it through Twitter Moments so it’s easily visible to those who visit your profile. Remember to include answers to the frequently asked questions about your brand or product and also include some client testimonials.
10. Start a TikTok challenge
Launched in 2018, TikTok is a popular social networking site where users can share and edit videos. Some of the most popular video content forms on this platform include short comedy clips, lip-synching videos, and trending parodies. Once you create and post a video, you can add relevant title, description, and hashtags that help optimize it and make it more visible via search.
The social platform has embraced hashtags in its “Challenges” feature that encourages users to take part in trending contests. When you participate in a challenge and post a relevant video, it gets featured to the followers of the challenge, doubling the chances of your video being shared. TikTok challenges are a sort of invitation for users to post their own videos pertaining to your brand. These kinds of authentic, user-generated videos boost your business’s credibility, and help you draw more promising customers to your brand.
11. Promote content using a listicle video
Listicles are articles consisting of a bulleted or numbered list, typically based on a central theme. The name ‘Listicles” is a combination of the words “list” and “article.” Here, video listicles refer to videos featuring the list in a slideshow format, accompanied by fun music in the backdrop. While this branding format may have got old and tiring for many, it’s still worthwhile to include them in your business’ digital marketing strategy.
Turn your regular post into a listicle video for better social exposure, and then add it to the top of your blog section. Popular search engines like Google rank pages with embedded videos higher in search results than those without, so you get two benefits out of a single branding strategy. Since these videos are typically short, the viewers will know that they don’t need to invest a lot of time, thus encouraging them to click on the videos and perhaps even share them.
12. Get a branded hashtag emoji
Although this idea isn’t meant for everyone, and is a little expensive, the results are definitely impressive. When you’re making a big announcement or launching something big, you want to get people talking about it. Getting a branded emoji pop up in your posts, particularly in combination with your chosen hashtag is an excellent branding technique. There is almost a 10% increase in consumer attention for ads when custom branded emojis are added to them. When paired with a promotional video, consumer interest and emotional connection increases by six times.
13. Make the most of TikTok ads
The ad feature on TikTok is a somewhat new one, which means there aren’t many ads on the platform yet. Fewer advertisements mean less viewer annoyance and less chance of TikTok users clicking “skip ad”. One surefire benefit of this type of branding is that users are more likely to go by the opinion of a person they like and follow over a regular brand endorsement. Another reason why TikTok influencer advertising works is that this platform is known for featuring only natural, authentic content.
Just as everything evolves with time and changing surroundings, business branding ideas have also undergone a sea evolution. The marketing tricks that used to work wonders even a few years back might have lost their effectiveness today. The reason behind this is the changing consumer tastes and evolving technology. It goes without saying; you need to constantly upgrade your branding techniques based on the latest market trends and tech developments.
Business Development Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Media and Digital marketing sector, Passionate about innovation and bringing the future into new business solutions.
