Today's Savvy Branding Mixes Traditional and Modern Brand Strategies Grow your brand in 2018 by focusing on authenticity and consistency
By David Meltzer Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There is an ongoing discussion about the benefits of traditional branding versus modern strategies of branding. In the past, marketers used to think that all you needed was a quality product, strong logo, mission statement or a catchy tagline in order to establish a brand. Big brands thought that having an effective website or buying a Super Bowl commercial became what separated their marketing efforts from smaller competitors.
Related: Online Sales and the Importance of Branding Your Business From Day 1
Nowadays, most of these things are still important (apart from the Super Bowl commercial), but they work to support your other branding efforts. Traditional branding is all about consistency, while modern branding is about authenticity combined with consistency.
Leverage tech for branding.
Technology enables a brand and its content to have a greater reach. There are 7 billion people on Earth and approximately 3.6 billion of them are using the internet.
As an individual among these billions, you might not have the name recognition, but now there are several opportunities, provided by technology, to help connect you with consumers. We have the ability to access information from individuals as well as to communicate with them, and the number of options is increasing faster than ever.
Related: Why You Should Hire One of These People to Tell Your Brand's Story
Be social.
Social media is an essential facet of branding in today's business culture. By effectively utilizing social media, it can be an inexpensive tool to showcase yourself to an audience of billions. It is important for you to learn how to promote your brand across multiple mediums and make sure to focus on the metrics of each of those audiences.
Crawl before you walk, before you run. By doing so, and evaluating the mediums that your audience prefers to use, you will be able to better distribute the information that you convey. Listen to the people who are already listening to you and learn what content they want, and enjoy.
Related: These 13 Skills Will Improve Your Branding Efforts
Be ready to mix it up.
We still need traditional marketing, such as logos, websites and missions, to combine with the other branding tools provided by technology today. In order to be the most effective, do your own branding experimentation to help you decide where to best allocate your time, as well as your money.
Try using different mediums to communicate, focusing on those that provide the greatest returns for you and the best value for your target market. Learn where your brand (and its content) gets the most engagement.
Related: 20 Tips to Organically Market Your Brand on Instagram (Infographic)
Put podcasts on blast.
For example, podcasts are one of the go-to mediums for helping to elevate an individual brand or even a company's profile in 2017 (or 2018). In fact, studies show that the number of people who listen to podcasts monthly is increasing among men and women. This is something that many are trying to capitalize on, especially since the studies also report that podcast listeners tend to have a higher household income, in general.
A podcast gives the opportunity to create fantastic and easily digestible audio content and gives you the opportunity to incorporate video for marketing purposes, as well. You need to focus on branding something unique in this increasingly competitive medium, so play to your strengths. Know your message or mission.
Brand your expertise.
Make the most of your situational knowledge and relationship capital in order to find your own niche and share the value that you have. Sharing the valuable insights that you possess will allow your brand to make the greatest impact on your audience.
Related Video: The 8 Laws of Branding
