Do you know the difference between a brand and branding?
The brand is your business; branding is how people learn about your business.
Today’s post offers you various options for your brand and branding your services effectively.
This post is for marketers who need to know how to market their services in 2020.
Are you ready to learn how to change your brand and branding methods so your marketing techniques are effective in 2020?
Let’s go.
What Does Branding Mean?
Janice Wald
Brand and branding refer to the promotion of a business through advertising.
How has your brand and brand strategy shifted since the pandemic crisis?
This guide will explain how to use content marketing and social media marketing to advertise your business during and after the Coronavirus epidemic.
New Brand Strategy for 2020
Are you aware there is a new brand strategy due to the Coronavirus outbreak?
During the Coronavirus pandemic, many people lost their jobs and therefore had reduced income.
In order for brands to continue to market to people who might be affected by health and financial problems, marketers had to be creative.
They still have to be creative. This shift continues during the resurgence of the Coronavirus and will continue going forward.
Branding experts now have a brand communication strategy that involves subtlety. Marketing philosophies must include subtlety or people you’re trying to market to will be offended.
If you’re not subtle, people with serious health and money concerns will find you insensitive. They certainly won’t want to give you their business when their problems go away.
Related: Read more about this shift in marketing tactics during and after the Coronavirus.
Brand and Branding Tips to Promote Your Business and Services Through Content Marketing
Reetika Kalra
One way to integrate tact into your marketing strategies is through blogging.
There are a bunch of ways via which you can use your blog to make money either directly or indirectly.
However, using your blog to promote your business and services is often one overlooked alternative.
As far as blog monetization is concerned, things such as affiliate marketing, advertising sales, product sales, and AdSense tend to be the most popular approaches over offering services.
The reason this subject is so vital is that there are tons of people out there who can greatly benefit by using their blog as the primary tool for marketing. Photographers, graphic designers, home-providers, consultants, and web designers are only a few of the many service providers who can fetch massive growth in their business by using blogging as a pivotal tool.
Blogging is not only for the service industry. Even those of you in other industries with a popular blog can certainly monetize it via a bunch of services. Keeping all of this in mind, let us take a look at a few things, which you can do to employ blogging and promote your business and services.
Try to focus on name recognition and building an authority
Those of you who offer services are technically out there selling yourself.
To be successful in this, you need to make people trust you and your abilities to be successful as a service provider.
With the power of blogging, you can have people recognize you and your name. Over time, it will help you build authority through your good-quality content. Your content will be the advertisement for your skills and expertise.
Thus, a blogger who intends to offer services should put his or her primary focus on building the trust of their readers on them. With trust, you gain credibility and establish an authority for yourself within the industry.
For instance, James, an online homework provider, says he started with a small blog where he would provide assignment help services; with time, the blog grew, and now his popularity has increased. People would Google “help me do my homework” and James’s blog would appear in the search listings.
When your popularity increases, it becomes easier for you to demand good value for your services.
Perform adequate keyword research
Many a time, when we are deciding the titles or the topics of the blog, we overlook an important step, which is the keyword research.
If you do not use the keywords right, the clients and the customers wouldn’t even be able to find you. For finding the keywords, you can use Google Keyword Planner. If you need more specific keywords, you can use a paid tool, such as the Long Tail Pro.
These keyword research tools will help you find what people search in context to your industry or the offered services. It wouldn’t take over a few minutes to do this entire research work, and based on this research, you can create incredible posts for your blog, and have a chance to rank in the long tail searches.
Angelina, a blogger with EduWorldUSA, says that she uses her posts to answer the questions that her target audience has, and then uses that context to smartly plug in the services that she offers.
Publish some case studies for authenticity
Natasha, a popular reviewer, who recently did a ThanksForTheHelp Review, says that the best plausible way to promote or talk about your services is to depict some examples of how your services have helped real people. Of course, to do this, you’ll need permission from your past clients, and you have to ensure due confidentiality and privacy while giving away the data.
For instance, if you are a social media marketing manager, you can publish the stats of how your input drastically impacted the client’s campaign, with some statistics and real-results. Put forth the things that you did in this whole thing.
Host blogger’s comments: To find stats for your blog post, go to Google, and type in the search bar your topic + stats.
Subtly promote the services
One pivotal step in the whole process is being able to get the clients to your blog.
Now, to get adequate business from your clients, you have to promote your services.
Usually, a lot of bloggers have a service section wherein they put forth all of their services, and navigate the users or the clients to this page.
Yes, this works well, but you know what would work even better? The ability to promote your services via the content that you are putting up on your blog has a different impact altogether.
Gargi, an online homework help providing expert who offers homework assignment help, says that as a blogger, she uses her blog posts to tell people how assignment help services can be beneficial for them, and then amidst the posts, which highlight the benefits, she plugs in her services.
Host blogger’s comments: Gargi offers homework help in Sydney, Australia. When people go to Google and other search engines and type “assignment help Sydney,” her blog comes up. This is where she advertises her services.
This is the subtlest and the efficient way to go about content marketing. When people are already reading your post, it gets easier for you to nudge them and persuade them to use your services. So, just briefly mention the service that you provide, along with a contact form link or a page that gives them details to reach you, and the business will come walking up to you.
Thus, for anyone, who’s already a service provider, blogging can be a great tool for service promotion. It will accentuate your client number and be good exposure for your business.
Content Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
Can you tell traditional marketing is more direct than content marketing? Traditional marketing overtly comes out and tells people what you have to sell them. Content marketing subtly expresses concern, compassion, caring, so people come to you.
In 2020, you have other marketing methods are your disposal which will boost your brand and branding. Read on.
Content Marketing vs Social Media Marketing
Janice Wald
The above strategies involve content marketing, subtly weaving mention of your services into your content. However, content marketing is only one trendy marketing strategy in 2020.
Social Media Marketing
One way you can get consumers to come to you is by expressing subtlety and creativity on social media sites.
Let’s look at an example of a creative brand implementing this new brand strategy:
Brand and branding example: Snapchat
The 7-11 brand put this ad on Snapchat before 2020 but it still proves the point about the need for subtlety and creativity for brands and branding.
Look at the ad.
Did 7-11 come out and say, “Buy a Slurpee?”
No!
The brand 7-11 advertised “Bring Your Own Cup Day.” By subtly weaving in their logo, people will remember to go buy a Slurpee on those days in May.
This is brand and branding at its best since this is a creative brand concept: Cute and subtle equals memorable.
Did I just make up a marketing formula? Cute + subtle = memorable. Use it.
This 7-11 ad was made before the Coronavirus. That’s why this brand concept of creativity and subtlety will outlast the Coronavirus. It’s timeless because creativity is timeless.
Wrapping Up: Brand and Branding
In closing, this guide told you how to get attention to your products or services through subtle creative brand and branding ideas.
Reetika offered four content marketing examples while I offered a social media example. All five showed you creative brand and branding strategies using two different types of marketing.
Takeaways:
This post explained
- What is branding?
- The new brand strategy for 2020 and beyond
- The difference between content marketing and social media marketing
- Examples of both subtle content marketing and subtle social media marketing
Readers, please share so other marketers learn about creativity and subtlety in marketing, the two strengths of a successful marketing brand now and going forward.
Can you add to the discussion by suggesting ideas for a successful brand and branding campaign? Do you know of any campaigns that fit those two descriptions you can tell us about? I look forward to your views in the comment section.
