There are many factors that determine how successful a business becomes – but none is as critical as branding. In today’s highly competitive environment, branding has become the single most important business strategy for businesses. Branding is not just about having a good logo, it entails all aspects that are related to your business.
The first thing that your customers come into contact with when connecting with your business is your brand. It is the basis on which they develop perceptions and hence the image of the business. As such, your brand represents the reputation of your business and it is the branding strategy you put in place that will build the identity of your business.
While branding is a great strategy to pursue, businesses should also be wary of brand abuse. This refers to the infringement of a company’s intellectual property by a third party. Social media impersonation, patent theft, copyright piracy, rogue websites, and counterfeiting are some of the common forms of brand abuse. Brand abuse harms the reputation and image of a company. It results in huge revenue losses and causes a decline in busy value.
Big brands invest heavily to protect themselves from brand abuse. One way they do that is through value propositions. Here are five ways big brands use value proposition to protect their brand:
- Creating compelling brand stories
One way to build brand loyalty is to demonstrate the value that your business adds to its customers. The best way to do this is to humanize your brand by creating a compelling story about it. This enables your business to earn the trust of its target audience.
Knowing and understanding the needs of your audience is an integral part of creating a story that will resonate with them. The story needs to be true as that enhances the validity of your brand. Case studies and testimonials are some great ways of telling stories that improve the credibility of your brand. Brand stories create value for existing and potential customers by clarifying information about business dealings.
They tell the audience who you are, what you are offering and why they should listen to you. Empowering people with such information goes a long way in building solid relationships between businesses and customers. Ultimately, it helps safeguard the reputation of the business.
- Engaging in online conversations
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful modes of marketing in business. What people say about your brand both online and offline can affect your brand. Unlike before, word of mouth is today reflected in the conversations that people have on social media. As such, businesses need to be aware of what people are saying on social media. The best way to do this is to monitor and take part in online conversations about their brands.
To be effective in this, it is important that they maintain consistency and focus on the major functions and core values of their business in the conversations. This helps create awareness about the value the business brings to its target audience.
- Creating value with brand content
Content plays a pivotal role in brand protection for any business. It forms that foundation for other brand protection strategies and therefore strengthens the foundation of a brand.
To ensure that content plays this role effectively, businesses should strive to create content that is not only unique but also relevant to their target audience. After generating the content, businesses should go a notch higher and promote that content to their audience.
One way to do this is by working with reliable influencers. The choice of influencer matters in content promotion. For best results, businesses should identify influencers who represent the values and culture that a brand stands for.
- Optimizing SEO
Big companies have perfected the art of using SEO to protect their brand. They understand how leading search engines rank content. Google, for instance, is a strong advocate of high-quality content and continuous improvement of user experience. To create and improve their brand value, these companies know that they must first create value for users.
There are several things big brands do to protect their brand inline. First, they optimize their websites for SEO. The design and loading speeds of a website affects user experience. As such, improving website features enables businesses to build strong brand visibility for a business. Google uses different forms of content and website features to rank search results pages. This includes images, videos, Google My Business features, and any other content that it deems useful in answering questions that users have.
Big brands ensure that their website features and content add value to their target audience. This online visibility boosts loyalty and secures the reputation of their brand. Secondly, big brands work with experts like Joel House Media to optimize the structure of their websites for easy navigation and accessibility. They listen to and learn from what people are saying about their brand so that they can attend to demands from their audience.
- Using integrated marketing
Brand visibility is critical in business growth. As such, big brands use an integrated marketing approach to ensure that their brand is visible on all marketing platforms. Further, they craft marketing messages that reflect their value proposition. This means the message that their brands carry consistently informs their target audience of the value that the company offers. Big brands then use consistent messaging, making their branded messages visible on different platforms – from their social media pages, websites, content, to paid marketing platforms – both online and offline.
