Approaching Branding
Looking for great tips on branding? When it comes to Internet marketing, how well your prospects or customers perceives your brand is everything!
With more than $100 billion in annual sales and more than 50 percent marked increased in net sales during the previous year, Apple is without a doubt the most valuable and envied brand in the world. While you may not exactly have the goal to build a brand rivaling that of Apple itself, there is much that we in the web marketing business can learn from them particularly when it comes to establishing our brand as well as the products or services that we offer.
Effectively approaching branding
How good is your product or service?
Now take the time to seriously ask yourself – are the products or services that you offer some of the best in the market? Are you as committed to quality, results and reliability or are you one of those who merely settle for what is good enough? Well Apple certainly didn’t and neither should you if you want to succeed with your branding efforts in web marketing. Always strive to produce or offer the best possible product or service for your customers.
Do you care enough?
Successful brands such as that of Apple don’t get the admiration and reputation that they have today (and actually keep it) without genuine focus and dedication to the needs of their customers. Apple has been exemplary in this regards and you probably can attest to this yourself if you’ve spent some time using their products or services and visited their stores.
It’s not surprising then that they manage to attract thousands of people over the years that are simply eager to check out what they have to offer.
Now if you are serious about being successful in your branding efforts online, here are a couple of things that you ought to keep in mind as you go about SEO and online marketing campaigns in general:
- Strive to provide a personalized and friendly welcome for your customers and prospects
- Exhaust all effort to better understand the needs of your customers – politely ask probing questions
- Listening to the problems or concerns of your customers and present solutions, not excuses.
- Ending all interactions with your prospects or customers with a pleasant farewell and bid them to return should they need further assistance
Businesses that have a keen focus on the needs of their customers and prospects are clearly more likely to succeed in their internet marketing efforts than others that don’t.
Being Pretty enough
Now we all have to face it – beautiful girls and handsome guys always tend to garner more attention. The same thing can practically be said about branding and web marketing which extends to websites, products and presentations and so on.
Among the notable characteristics of Apple which has made it a very successful brand today is their design aesthetics. Check out their products, websites, stores, packaging materials and operating systems – you’ll find that they are all in many ways more aesthetically pleasing than similar others in the market.
Now the question you need to ask yourself – is your web marketing effort substantially focused towards aesthetics as well? If the answer is no then you are certainly missing out in terms of opportunities that could possibly put you ahead of your competitors!
Spreading yourself too much
Coming to terms with the things that shouldn’t be done is every bit as important as knowing exactly what needs to be done. The great and recently deceased Steve Jobs – Apple’s founder and former CEO certainly took that to heart when he organized a development conference in 1997 talking and addressing questions in front of a large audience.
Shortly after, Steve systematically reduced the company’s range of products to just 4 product lines – the iPhone, iTouch, Macbook and iPad which are all simply some of the best in their respective market today.
Now this kind of focus is certainly not easy to implement but can nevertheless prove crucial to success in branding, web marketing and SEO. It involves among other things, discipline and a deep sense of commitment to providing only the very best for your customers. Don’t be swayed by current trends, competition and one’s own desire to cover as many things as possible thinking that they’ll rake in more profits that way.
Less can be more and the key take away here is that you will never truly succeed in your branding until you keep yourself focused in what is truly important for your customers.
Sometimes you have to take risks
As one of the most popular brands of today, people find that admiring Apple’s products and services is just as easy as criticizing it.
For one thing, the brand charges almost twice as that of their nearest competitors and many would describe Steve Jobs as a total eccentric. But the man certainly had a pair – he knew what he wanted and took on big risks simply because he was looking to do something different. He was not only out to make things better but to create something different and turn it into the best that it could possibly be.
Jobs trusted his intuition and see it as something that’s even more powerful than sheer intellect. In its meteoric rise to the top, it challenged nearly every norm in the business and showed the world what they could do by thinking differently. This is fairly evident in their products, advertising campaigns, operating systems that practically reinvented their respective industries.
Now all that certainly took a lot of guts. Ask yourself – when did you last challenge the norm? Went left when everybody else was going right? Just as it is with conventional marketing, SEO and online marketing is all about standing out and you simply can’t hope to do that if you are doing the same thing as everybody else
Breaking promises
When it comes down to it, branding is simply a promise that you are making to your customers. Customers greatly factor such a promise in their purchasing decision which is mostly based on their emotions or how they feel about a particular brand of product or service.
A lot of people now days are more than happy to pay a premium on Apple products and services and for good reason – when Apple first unveiled the iPhone as a revolutionary device, they certainly weren’t lying! Ever since the iPhone was introduced, nearly every product on the smart phone market today resembles it or presents similar features.
Is your brand actually making good on its promises? No? Well you better start doing something about it.
Why?
Does your brand have a good and clear reason why it does and what it does? Is this reason made evident to all which includes not only your customers but your own staff and your competition as well? In the case of Apple, the answer was certainly a resounding yes as they set out to reinvent the way people experience technology in the best way possible.
It’s not just aesthetics that catapulted Apple to the top as today’s most valuable and desirable brand. It’s an excellent mix of several factors which includes:
- A truly excellent product or service
- Customer dedication
- Eyes for aesthetics
- Focus
- Courage
- Keeping one’s promises
- A clear reason why
Think that you can come up with a similar approach for your branding strategy? Then perhaps you are well on your way to the top!
