How to Market Your Business Through Branding
Branding is about your company's name and logo at its most base level, but it should be about so much more than that. Branding also encompasses your company's reputation, especially concerning your company's reputation for meeting or exceeding your customers' needs. Marketing by using your brand ensures that potential customers hear not only what you can do for them, but how well you can do it.
- Make a list of the ways that your company is different from others who do the same or similar things that you do. Think of all the things that make your service or product different from those against whom you compete.
- Identify your target audience. Who needs and wants your product is just as important as all of the research and development that goes into your product.
- Make another list of what your target audience needs and wants from your product. If you are not meeting those needs, decide what you need to do in order to begin meeting their needs. If you are satisfying your customer's needs and wants, put on paper all of the ways in which you accomplish this feat that are different from the ways in which your competition can do the same thing. If your competition is not meeting your clients' needs, make note of that as well.
- Educate your sales force and your customers about what your company does that is different from the competition. Establish your company as an expert on your product. Make sure that the information about what makes you different accompanies your company name and your logo. This creates an association between your company's name and what you can do that is better than what your competitors can do.
- Follow through with meeting your customers' needs, and continue to assess your competition's ability to meet your customers' needs. Keep in mind also that your customers may very well have changing needs, so continue to ask what they need and want from a product or service such as yours.