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Story Architecture: Element #1: Your Brand is a Character

A powerful brand tells a powerful story. Companies that understand and utilize the fundamentals of storytelling create emotional experiences for their customers and build trust and connect with communities of real life people.

But what exactly makes a good story? Let’s take a look at some of the fundamental elements of stories.

It all begins with a character – a person — who starts out living in their comfortable world.  Every good story involves characters – the actual people involved – who have certain fears and desires; people who want something deep in their heart and struggle to pursue their goal against the obstacles.

Characters Have a Role

In the context of branding, there are 3 what we can call “main characters.” In reality there are dozens of characters in a brand’s story-including the people who supply raw materials for products, manufacture, right up to the person who delivers it to your door. Basically everyone involved in any of the business activity or product development is considered a minor character. But that is too vast a network and the roles are less central, so we’ll focus on the main cast of characters for now.

Main Character #1: The Company
These include the actual real-life human beings that make up the company. Some examples are: the founders, a visionary behind the business or product idea, CEO and other leadership who run the day to day business, and any other essential or public facing employees. The company forms the basis of the story – the real-life human actors and activity that the brand story builds upon.

Main Character #2: The Customer
These include the people currently and potentially out there in the world who the company wishes to connect with and sell to. This is the community of people who share a common challenge or need. They may already be organized into associations and interest groups—they may already know each other—or they may be mostly separate and unaffiliated.

Main Character #3: The Brand
The brand functions as a persona of your company, like an emergent property. It cannot exist without the company yet it is distinct. The brand is its own person – complete with desires, needs, fears, hopes and personality. It is the invention of good brand storytelling.

Characters Have a Type

In a good story, each character plays a particular role, and there are 6 basic character types.* They serve as the archetypes needed to make the story engaging and have forward motion.

  1. The Hero. The hero is the protagonist, the main character in your brand story. This is going to be the customer.
  2. The Villain. The foil to and opposite of the hero. These people will actively work against your customer to stop them from getting what they want.
  3. The Sidekick. The hero’s helper. They live to support the hero and help them to get what they want by being by their side. This could be your best friend who buys you a gift you didn’t even know you needed.
  4. The Mentor. The one who has the wisdom and ability to help the hero. Most often this is going to be your brand. The mentor finds the customer and gives them what they need to get what they want.
  5. The Tempter. Their job is to distract the hero from their goal. They create diversions and distracting conversations to knock your hero, your customer, off track. They create confusion.
  6. The Heart. The opposite of the tempter. They empathize with your hero and lead
  7. The Skeptic. They work to question your hero and sow doubt. They make your hero overthink, procrastinate, and fail to act on getting what they want.
  8. The Mind. The opposite of the skeptic. The mind supports your hero intellectually, and helps them think through considerations in a productive way and bust through doubt.

In the context of branding, your brand will likely assume the roles of the mentor, the sidekick, the heart, and the mind, depending on the place and time they encounter the customer.

Characters Have a Desire

Good, believable characters are driven by a strong desire. This works on two levels. They have something that they want, and they have something that they need.

The job of the brand is to supply what they need. Characters typically already know what they want. What they want is more hidden from them – it exists underneath the want. E.g. I know I want to feel better and be healthy. I do not yet know that I need a new probiotic health drink in order to feel better and be healthy. (Note: If I do already know I need the new health drink, then the story is complete, and the job of branding has already been accomplished – the customer is seeking you and wants to make a purchase.)

So the real job is to connect the NEED and the WANT together in the mind of the customer. When they make that connection in their mind, they will be willing to connect with you, and invite you to help them – sell to them.

Characters Have a Personality

It’s not enough for characters to play a role. Strong characters are also unique individuals – they have a personality, style, tone, voice, and look. It’s the expression of the role. When you combine the role with the personality, your brand becomes unique and starts to stand out with the customer. Connection becomes natural and easy. E.g. Your brand as a mentor could be a Gandalf the Great type (they have the secret knowledge, and they will be humorous and sly and confident in how they give it to you slowly over time. Or, a mentor could be more of a mad scientist – emerging from the lab with advanced technology, and constantly informing you and directly teaching you proudly about it’s benefits.

Summary

Viewing your company, customer, and brand as characters in a story makes possible powerful storytelling. And customers love a good story – even better, they love to be INVOLVED IN and playing an good role good a story!

Next up in Part 2, we will take a look at Setting, building the World where the brand story takes place.

 

 

Citation:

*Charles Euchner: https://theelementsofwriting.com/spinning-the-wheel-change-your-characters-roles/

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How to Market Your Brand in the Virtual Reality

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How to Market Your Brand in the Virtual Reality

In 1972, the world was introduced to video games with Atari’s Pong – a simple yet revolutionary game that involved two paddles (they were just horizontal lines) moving back and forth to hit a ball. Now, only in the span of 50 years, we have unprecedented graphics, the ability to play online withone another across the globe, and are on the precipice of making virtual reality a household commodity.

Virtual and augmented reality will have a large presence in our future; there is no doubt about that. It’s expected to hit a global market size of $296.9 billion in 2024. This is almost ten times the $30.7 billion market size registered in 2021. That’s why it’s important from a marketing perspective to be an early adopter and understand how to market in the virtual space.

In this post, we’ll highlight ways brands are already implementing virtual reality in their own marketing efforts and ways we think will be effective marketing methods in the future. We’re particularly going to focus on how virtual reality can offer unique product experiences, improve customer service, enhance
online events, and give marketers endless possibilities for creative advertising.

Virtually Experience Products 

Virtual reality will take the old adage try before you buy to a whole different level. There are already forward-thinking companies, like IKEA, implementing this marketing tactic that gives consumers unique
experiences and insights into products they would never have been able to test out and experience in
their own home before. The possibilities are endless for brands of any industry to allow potential consumers to try out their products in inventive ways.

Imagine this, you’ve picked a vacation destination for you and your loved one(s), and all that’s left now is to book the hotel. It’s happened to all of us at one point or another when we’ve booked a hotel room, and it wasn’t exactly what we were promised, or maybe the photos gave a false perspective on the size of the room. With VR, you can virtually tour any hotel, apartment, or home before being met with any unexpected surprises.

Virtual reality lets you showcase your product in a new light that stands apart from your competitors. By allowing potential customers to interact with your product, you can create a memorable experience that will stay with them when they are ready to purchase.

Improve Customer Experience

Over the last few years, there has been a major shift in power for customers, which has created a customer-centric marketplace. Brands have learned to start listening and putting the customers’ needs first, which, we know especially well, ultimately drives brand, development and service improvements for an unbeatable customer experience.

Already, brands like Gucci and Etsy have set up virtual storefronts people can interact with. This allows them to not only introduce their products to new and younger audiences, but also tell their brand story in a unique and fun way that resonates with customers. With the help of virtual reality, memorable customer journeys can become more frequent and, ultimately, the norm.

Picture one day virtually walking into a store that has everything and more than its brick-and-mortar counterpart without having to leave the convenience of your home. You can interact with a variety of products and services in an unlimited amount of imaginative ways – and if you need help, you can ask for a virtual assistant (a real-life worker) at any time to offer their expertise. This is just one of many ways the customer experience can be improved by virtual reality, and we’re sure in the near future, brands will adopt even more inventive & creative ways to create a more seamless customer experience.

Online Events

As it’s becoming a more common occurrence to connect with people, places, and brands online, it only makes sense for virtual events to become the next big thing in the virtual space. You’ve probably already attended a virtual event at some point of time during the height of the pandemic and noticed the sense of community is still there as a traditional inperson event would possess.

A great example of a successful online event, which showed the massive opportunity for virtual concerts, was Travis Scott debuting a new song of his on Fortnite that was attended by over 12 million people. Since then, several artists like Foo Fighters, Megan Thee Stallion, and Billie Eilish have started hosting virtual concerts with great success.

It’s important to note that you or your brand don’t need to be rock stars to successfully host a virtual reality event. If you look on any of the event-sharing apps, like Eventbrite, and search for virtual reality events, you will find pages of interesting things going on in the virtual space, like immersive language exchanges, sculpting classes, and much more. 

Maybe you’re a fashion brand that wants to host a virtual runway show or an automotive brand that virtually shows people how to fix their car, you can even be an architecture firm showcasing wonky building designs – the moral of the story is as long as you can offer people a unique, memorable experience where they can take away something from it, you’ve successfully built brand awareness.

Creative, Fun Advertising

We believe this is the most important aspect when approaching marketing in the virtual space. People are putting on their VR goggles to escape their troubles and have fun, not experience the same mundane everyday occurrences such as traditional advertisements. Spammy ads like pop-up ads will not work in the virtual space – you’re going to have to get more creative than that, but that shouldn’t be too hard in a world where the possibilities are endless.


Maybe you want prospective customers to go on an adventure and slay a dragon or go on a scavenger hunt through different periods of time for a 20% off coupon to your store.


Honestly, no one can predict what virtual reality will truly look like in the future, but like the internet – most people who adopt future technologies early on put themselves in advantageous positions and reap the benefits with financial success.

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Print Ads Aren’t Dead, You’re Just Not Using Them Right

Print Ads Aren’t Dead, You’re Just Not Using Them Right

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The phrase ‘print is dead’ is something we’ve all repeatedly heard over the last decade. Repeatedly might not even be strong enough a word as opposed to beaten over the head. Although some of these industry professionals and marketers are correct in some regard, they are concerningly off-base in terms of overall marketing strategy.

Today we’re going to review why we still implement print ads as a part of our marketing strategies and why print ads may be beneficial for your brand.

Let’s Start with the Facts

The idea that print is dead has been vastly exaggerated. Have major news outlets lost a serious amount of revenue through advertisement? Of course, but as you can see in the chart below, direct mail vastly outweighs its counterparts in terms of response rates from your target audience.

Another incredibly insightful infographic is one that was made by USPS and the data they were able to gather.

Print Ads Have a Sense of Credibility

Print publications that have been around for decades, some well over a century and have developed a reputation and a higher level of consumer trust compared to their online counterparts. There is a standard that news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post must adhere to. Because of this, consumers tend to trust ads in print about 34 percent more than ads found on search engines when making decisions regarding conversions, including when it’s time to make a purchase, according to Relevance.

To further prove this point, let’s briefly disregard the overwhelming proof and statistics that print ads still make sense. Right now, the United States is grappling with a serious issue: fake news. Completely fabricated and misleading information that is presented to audiences with an ulterior motive. You can find it virtually everywhere online. On Facebook, in pop-up ads, and even from sources that seem, at first glance, credible. It seems inescapable and has begun to taint the reputation of the internet as a whole.

This is increasingly important information to know as a marketer who is trying to sell someone on the idea of buying their product. People have become more hesitant with what they see online, and the fact remains they trust print more.

Print Ads Last Longer

We all know what happens when you run out of marketing dollars for your digital ad campaign. Your ads literally cease to exist and are deleted from the internet forever without a trace.

But what about print ads? Although you can’t measure engagements and conversions as easily as digital advertising, print ads give you the best ROI with their shelf life. Consumers online can see hundreds of ads within a short period of time and oftentimes try to avoid them with the help of ad blockers. But print ads create an entirely different kind of experience for your audience by resonating with them over a longer period of time – thus making them more likely to respond to your advertisement.

Think about one of the magazines you have sitting on the coffee table in your living room. It’s last month’s issue, and you still have another week until the latest one comes in. Since then, you’ve looked through it yourself a few times, but you also have had friends and family over a few times for get-togethers, and they trust you – therefore, they trust what you read and have picked up the magazine too. Already, multiple people have looked at the advertisements within the magazine with a sense of trust they would not have with a digital advertisement.

Remember, this is only one magazine in a private residence. Just think about how many people would see your ad if the magazine was placed in a more public setting like a doctor’s office, the lobby of a building, or a salon.

Target Your Audience Better

With the help of modern-day technologies like data analysis tools, you can better find your target groups when utilizing print advertisements in your marketing strategy. Analytic insights can help you curate a better list for your next print mailer. The right analytics mixed with the most impressionable from of advertising is a recipe for success.

Not only that, but print media audiences, especially within a certain niche, tend to have more spending money. Did you know that 70% of households with an income of over $100,000 are newspaper readers?

Yes, digital advertising can effectively get your brand’s name out there, but you also want to make sure you’re targeting consumers with spending power.

Print and Digital Working Together

Putting all your marketing dollars into print or digital advertising is not a good idea, but a healthy mix of both working together is a great one. By investing in both, you can amplify and elevate your call to action by creating multiple streams or journeys for your audience members to buy into what you’re selling. Additionally, by implementing both forms of advertisement, you’re separating yourself from what is considered ‘traditional’ marketing strategies now.

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Want to become our client, global consultant, designer, or corporate partner? Feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you!

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Why Your Brand Needs to Utilize Affiliate Marketing in 2022

Why Your Brand Needs to Utilize Affiliate Marketing in 2022

Marketing is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the consumer. With so many different ways to market your product or services, it’s tough to decide which ones are the most profitable for your brand.

Now, there never is one correct answer, but with the direction of how marketing as an industry is going, it’s safe to make some calculated assumptions – one being affiliate marketing. According to Statista, affiliate marketing spending in the United States increased from $5.4 billion in 2017 to $8.2 billion in 2022.

Today we’ll be reviewing why affiliate marketing is beneficial to your brand.

 

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a performance- based model of marketing revolving around revenue sharing. Brands reward third-party publishers or affiliates when they successfully generate traffic, leads, or sales to the brand’s products or services.

Most affiliate marketers share the same tactics to generate revenue for the brands they are partnering with, but it is important to know the several different marketing channels available to help advertise your products or services.

Benefits of affiliate marketing

  • Avoid up-front costs and decrease risk

A lot of brands that are still finding their footing in the marketplace do not have the financial resources for a full-fledged marketing or advertising department within their company – so you have to get creative sometimes. Affiliate marketing offers a cost-effective approach to getting your brands name out there without having to spend a fortune. Since affiliate marketing is based on a performance-based model, you only have to spend or compensate your affiliates when they generate a sale or lead.

  • Boost brand awareness

When you begin working with affiliates, you begin to open new doors for consumers to know what your brand is. Your affiliate’s main goal is to use their own following or audience they’ve already established to, at the very least, drive more traffic to your website. With other marketing and advertising strategies, you may not get the results you were looking for, but with affiliates and their pre-established following, the likelihood of establishing a presence for your brand is much easier and geared more toward the type of consumer who is more likely to purchase your product or service.

  • Better understand your customer

After working with affiliate marketers, you can begin collecting data to gain unique insights into who your ideal customer is. Where did they come from? Why are they buying? What are their needs/desires/interests and other demographics? All  of  this information can be compiled together to develop better ways to market and strategize your brand for the future to improve conversions.

  • Flexibility with marketing needs

Unlike other marketing tactics, affiliate marketing allows you to scale up or down your marketing efforts with little to no cost whatsoever. Since affiliate marketing is based on a performance model, you don’t have to worry about being locked into a service or spending X amount of dollars within a certain period  of  time for advertisements. As your brand’s marketing needs change, so can your affiliate program with no hesitation.

  • Higher ROI

Due to affiliate marketing’s low start-up and ongoing costs, it tends to have a much higher return on investment than a majority of other marketing strategies. This is in part because consumers are learning about your product from an affiliate they have come to trust, which also ties back into boosting your brand’s awareness.

The reality of affiliate marketing

With the unfortunate gaining traction of fake news or fake Amazon reviews, consumers are looking for someone to trust and look out for their best interest when purchasing a new product.

Due to this, affiliate marketing has quickly become a key component of brand’s marketing strategies. As the industry continues to grow and the benefits become apparent to businesses (no matter their size), you can anticipate seeing more brands implementing this strategy in their marketing methods in the near future.

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Want to become our client, global consultant, designer, or corporate partner? Feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you!

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How to Effectively Use Social Media to Grow Your Business

How to Effectively Use Social Media to Grow Your Business

At this point, we all know social media has become a commonplace for consumers to discover and learn about brands. If you’re not maintaining an online presence – rest assured, you are giving your competition a noticeable advantage.

The possibilities are endless with social media marketing. From increasing your brand’s awareness to building relationships with your target consumers, marketing in the virtual space can add value to your brand in more ways than one.

Although the sky is the limit with what you can achieve for your brand through social media marketing, it is not always the easiest. At WBG, we have a tried and true social media strategy that we implement with every one of our clients — although sometimes it varies, there are always three constants that we focus on: events, design, and hashtags.

Let’s take a look at some brands we’ve recently worked with and show you how we implement the three tactics listed above in all of our social media campaigns to produce measurable results.

Events

One of our favorite tactics for growing a successful social media account is through events. Online events such as giveaways, sales, or contests are a great way to drum up attention and get people to interact with your brand.

With events, you can build and strengthen your brand’s community, which can be done in so many creative ways depending on your community’s interests!

What we especially like about giveaway posts is their ability to incentivize people to follow brands and raise brand awareness. We’re always asking for two or three things in these types of posts: a follow, tag your friends, and, of course, to like the post.

Having people follow your brand’s account for giveaways is usually free advertising in the future since most people don’t end up unfollowing you after. With contestants tagging their friends in order to be considered for the prize, you can expand your brand’s awareness without spending extra money on boosting posts. And as I’m sure you’re all aware, liking the post will help it appear on the discover page, but it also helps it appear at the top of whichever hashtags are used — if you get enough likes.

Although giveaways are great for building brand awareness, events such as photo contests, like above, are great for interacting with your brand’s core consumers. These events directly translate into customer loyalty, just like big brands with cult
followings such as Carhartt or Apple.

Design

Social media loves visuals. Videos, images, really any kind of graphic will always outperform posts that only contain texts. That’s why well-thought out visual designs are key to building brand awareness and grabbing the attention of viewers with the
little time you have.

When it comes to design we like to focus on a few things like color, balance, and lines when creating the perfect social media post.

Each of these designs above execute the aforementioned design principles, but it’s
important to understand why they work.

Colors are hands down one of the most important yet complex aspects of social media design. Did you know that a case study revealed that up to 90% of snap judgments about products can be based on color alone? It makes sense when you think about color theory and its use to create a mood or convey emotions.

Certain colors elicit certain emotions and depending on the brand and the industry it
belongs to, it’s vital to pick the right colors. Look at the differences in the designs
above and notice how the colors vary between brands and the personalities conveyed through them.

Another important factor when it comes to visual designs is the use of balance and lines. Both the use of balance and lines in these designs are pretty straightforward but important to the overall aesthetic of your post.

Without balance, your image can come off as busy or cluttered – pulling your viewers
in every direction and giving them a headache, ultimately forcing whoever to scroll to
the next post on their feed.

On the other hand, a balanced post with strong lines can guide and help viewers understand the message you are trying to deliver. With balance and lines, you can create a sense of harmony and comfort that people unknowingly look for in designs.

Hashtags

Although we’re listing it last out of our social media tactic do’s, it is far from the least important part of how WBG grows social media channels.

Knowing how to use hashtags within your social posts is an art. Use a hashtag with too many posts, such as healthy choices (26 million), and your post will never be seen because you’re competing with too many other posts. Use a hashtag with too few posts like glassjug (7 thousand); then you’ll never be seen because no one is looking up that hashtag.

The trick is to find hashtags somewhere in the middle of these extremes for optimal visibility and engagement.

Another reason why hashtags are helpful to us is their ability to hyper-focus on your target audience rather than blindly posting, hoping someone will notice. With hashtags, you can go to your prospective consumer’s virtual front doorstep and show them how your product or service can benefit their life.

Creating your own hashtag (or choosing a hashtag with little use) for a service, product, or an upcoming event is also a great way to promote brand awareness. By doing this repeatedly, you’re giving your brand the opportunity essentially control this hashtag. Continuously including that hashtag in your posts helps increase your visibility and helps users begin to associate your business with that hashtag, further establishing your brand.

The Results

When these three social media tactics are properly implemented, we guarantee you will begin to see noticeable growth over time on your social media accounts and online presence overall.

Below you can see the data on one of our client’s social media performances before and after we started helping them with their social media needs.

Before we took over their social accounts in April, they were receiving minimal likes, and their engagement with users was minimal. Over the next three months we were able to successfully increase likes, comments, and interactions by adhering to our three big social media tactics: events, designs, and hashtags.

Let WBG Grow Your Social Media Accounts

WeBranding Global is a full service creative agency and marketing consulting network driven to help brands fulfill their true potential by connecting them to the world around them.

We love working with brands to plan and create strategic social media strategies to help you build better brand awareness and develop and connect with communities that interest you.

Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about how we can help grow your social media accounts.

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A Marketing Guide for Industry Specific Companies: Technology

A Marketing Guide for Industry Specific Companies: Technology

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Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all business tactic. It’s complex and varying at times, but when done effectively, it can truly make your business thrive in any industry. That’s why understanding your industry is the key to any successful marketing strategy.

 

 No two industries are alike, and because of that, some marketing strategies are more effective than others for specific industries. For example, businesses within the financial sector can initiate a social media campaign to generate more sales. Still, it’s safe to say they will not be as effective as a campaign driven by a retail company because of the varying desires or needs of audiences within these two very different industries.

 

But today, we want to talk specifically about the tech industry. Did you know that 70% of upstart tech companies fail within the first two years? Taking a further look into this study, 5 of the 10 reasons for them failing were directly related to the customer or the lack thereof. This is the biggest takeaway for us as marketers/branders since every business survives by listening and communicating with its target audiences.

 

 At WBG, we’ve worked with various tech companies to help them grow as a business and have learned a few things along the way that we’d like to share with you today that are the essential needs for every tech company.

Building Your Brand and Brand Awareness

 

 The tech space is saturated with new companies being formed what seems like every week, so it’s imperative to not only know what unique and specific need your product or service addresses but, most importantly, know the brand story and promises that go along with it to lay down the foundation of a strong brand concept.

 Silicon Valley is full of brand stories/promises that sound something similar to envisioning a future landscape of technological advances that make our lives infinitely easier – we’ve heard it a thousand times. It has become dull, hyperbolic, and disingenuous to the consumer. Your brand needs to be authentic, concise, and, most importantly, enacted daily.

 

 Branding is the practice of living an insightful company story, which should consist of three main factors: The value your products generate for your customers, how you differentiate from your competitors, and the journey that motivates customers to connect with your brand.

One particular brand that comes to mind that embodies these cornerstones is Mailchimp. Unlike most SaaS or tech companies, Mailchimp doesn’t try to be some sleek, futuristic entity that doesn’t feel human. They’re quirky, fun, relatable, and show throughout every aspect of their business. Despite its content being on the goofier side, it’s still highly informative, thus making them one of the most down-to-earth and approachable brands in the tech space.

 

Now that you know what to do to build your brand, what is it exactly do you get from it? Well, the short answer: Brand equity. This, in turn, leads to better relationships with customers leading to growth and repeat business, a more substantial customer preference for your products allowing for product expansion, and finally, a stronger reputation amongst employees allowing for better talent and retention.

 

Content Marketing

 

 It’s no surprise that content is king, and with a uniquely developed brand, content marketing can exponentially grow your tech business. Over the years, content marketing has become the new norm for interacting with consumers, and it’s not going away anytime soon since it generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing.

 

Content marketing is crucial within the tech landscape because of its ability to separate you from the sea of your competitors. Many companies say the same recycled jargon about innovation, cutting-edge, and being on the forefront of technological advancement, but with consistent, original, high-quality content, you can position yourself as an actual authority figure rather than a run-of-the-mill generic brand.

One company that understands these ideas and the power of content marketing is Blendtec. Their massively popular YouTube series ‘Will it Blend’ is a simple but uniquely entertaining concept that sets them apart from the other thousand companies just like them. Using their blender products, the company tosses ridiculous objects to see if their patented blade technology will shred them. Their most viewed video has 18 million views. ‘Will it Blend’ is a content marketing masterpiece that’s platform-specific, respecting the kind of content YouTubers love.

These videos have now directly translated into audiences trusting them more and sticking around longer (I know I have).

 

Creating positive experiences and building relationships with your customers can help alleviate many concerns, fears, and assumptions the general public has about tech companies. Adequately positioning yourself with quality content can very easily sway consumers’ decision-making process, much more than any other marketing technique.

Lastly, as a business within the tech industry, it helps to incorporate proven SEO tools within the umbrella of your content strategy. It not only improves the ranking of your site, so you can hopefully pop up on the front page (fun fact: 92% of people don’t scroll past the first page), but it also helps you better understand what your potential customers are looking for, the language used for those searches, and giving them the information they want.

Remarketing

 

Although often overlooked because tech businesses are hyper-focused on acquiring new leads, remarketing is how industry titans such as Apple are created. You have to live under a rock not to understand how devoted Apple supporters are to their products and the ongoing ‘war’ between Apple and Android. They have reached new plateaus partly because they understand the importance of remarketing and its direct correlation to customer retention rates.

 

 Along with your remarketing efforts comes an increase in brand awareness and conversion in sales. By staying in the eye of prospective and current consumers, you’re allowing your company another opportunity to tell your story and engage with audiences in a meaningful way that can even end up attracting your competitor’s customers.

 

 

How to Market Your Industry the Most Effectively

 

 WeBranding Global is a full-service creative agency and marketing consulting network driven to help brands fulfill their true potential by connecting them to the world around them.

 

We work with brands within several industries, including the tech space, and find each one as unique and fulfilling as the next to create strategic marketing plans to better communicate with your target audience.

 

 Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about how we can help your tech brand thrive.

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: The Importance of Branding

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: The Importance of Branding

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Branding can be one of the most powerful disciplines within your marketing strategy to gain or lose momentum for any size business. Since your brand is a reflection of who you are, the feeling customers get when they think of you, or briefly put your personality, it’s incumbent upon your business to have a good branding strategy to thrive in any marketplace.

Because when branding is done right, your company will see an increase in sales, a rise in product value, and ultimately make a name for yourself among a sea of competitors.

Over the years, many brands have come and gone because of 5 unique qualities that distinguish a good brand from a bad one—those being consistency, uniqueness, simplicity, storytelling, and engagement.

Branding disasters and triumphs happen all the time. So when globally renowned brands find success or failure with their strategies, it’s important to note whether you should implement these tactics for your own development or avoid others’ mistakes.

 

Now is the best time to re-evaluate your branding strategies – with summer at our front doorstep and the pandemic winding down, people are ready to interact with brands again and spend money. To help, we’ll review a few household-named brands, so can you compare them to your own branding strategies and see how they match up.

 

So let’s take a look at a few major brands like Carhartt, Fubu, and REI to learn more about where they found success or failure to help you learn more about your own brand.

Carhartt

Carhartt is one of our favorite brands for several reasons and is the perfect example of how branding should be implemented. For the 126 years they have been around, they’ve made little to no mistakes with their branding strategies, which is unmistakably impressive.

In the beginning, the essential part of their branding success was storytelling through their defined audience. Carhartt has been known to make durable, long-lasting clothes for blue-collar workers. This campaign or brand idea highlighted the ruggedness of these workers, ultimately creating a tribe mentality between everyone working a blue-collar job and giving them something in common.

This commonality led to an exchange of experiences and why people personally use Carhartt. This is the basis of how successful brands are built, which ultimately drives growth, awareness, and sales.

But what is more impressive with Carhartt’s brand is its ability to change with the times. For years, Carhartt’s brand perception was the male blue-collar worker, but as we’ve made technological advances, that need is not as prevalent as it once was. Recognizing this, they implemented several campaigns directed toward women, artisans, and craftspeople to meet the needs of a new and growing customer base. Even now, you can find Carhartt on the streets of NYC because of what it represents: getting things done.

Brand Takeaways:

There is a lot to learn from Carhartt and its branding and marketing strategies. Still, the biggest takeaways for any brand are knowing who your audience is, developing communities within that audience, and knowing when to adapt to your audience.

Fubu

Like Carhartt, Fubu is a clothing brand, but instead of focusing on the blue-collar life, they represent streetwear.

In the 90s and early 2000s, Fubu was inescapable, you couldn’t walk a block in any major city without seeing someone wearing one of their designs, and within only a few years, they managed to fade from the limelight. But why?

There are a few reasons for their downfall, but the biggest one is how they strayed away from their brand. When you aren’t consistent with your brand, you confuse your customers as to what you stand for or against, and ultimately the struggle to trust you.

For instance, in 2001, Fubu decided to expand by creating a record label. They entered an entirely different industry without strategically aligning themselves with industry professionals or a business strategy.

If you’re thinking about expanding your business, it is always important to ask yourself why you are expanding and does it reflect your current brand’s vision or mission?

Similarly, Fubu started designing and purchasing inventory on a much larger scale than was needed or wanted. Without consulting their customers, they unknowingly strayed away from what made them a 350 million dollar a year grossing company.

Brand Takeaways:

Fubu’s downfall can be directly correlated with its inconsistency in brand strategy. Rather than keeping it simple, they ended up biting off more than they could chew, which led to confusion, indifference, and a lack of trust in their consumer base. Had they been more attentive to their customer’s needs, just like Carhartt, they may still be as relevant today as they were 20 years ago.

REI

Another exemplary brand to take note of is REI. For those who don’t know, REI is a co-op that sells outdoor equipment for basically every scenario, whether it’s camping, hiking, biking, or simply the clothes people love to wear while being outside.

REI has made strides in the branding world because of the simplicity of its brand, its willingness to educate and engage with its consumer base, and the transparency in their companies goals.

REI has always stayed true to its mission: getting people outside. A few years ago, REI started the Opt Outside movement, which encourages people to step away from their screens and (you guessed it) go outside. What is particularly appealing to people about this movement is that REI isn’t asking you to wear their gear or use a hashtag to promote their own products. They simply want people to go outside.

Not only do they encourage people to go outside, but they provide educational guides and resources to help people get outside and plan adventures. It’s a direct parallel to thought leadership. They’ve established themselves as the go-to resource for all things outdoor, which has inspired brand loyalty and a massive following.

If that isn’t enough for you, they even host events ranging from volunteering to clean up your local park to classes with certified instructors that help teach you various outdoor activities. Together, all of these events prove their mission statement isn’t just a gimmick but what they truly stand for, and people love it.

Brand Takeaways:

REI turned itself into the go-to resource for everything outdoors, which is what any brand should strive for regardless of industry. By being authentic and genuine to their brand, they have developed a community and cult following that will share their values for years to come. By inviting, educating, and trusting their consumers to go outside, they have built a truly unique brand.

How WBG can help your branding needs

We’re the one-stop shop to help develop or reinvent your brand. We can assist you in avoiding the mistakes other brands have made and guide you to the successes other brands have found. Whether it’s the message you’re sending out into the world or the aesthetic of your designs, logos, or fonts, we can advise along the way so you can reach the level of awareness your company or business deserve.

Get in contact with us today.

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WeBranding Global Expands Digital Marketing Tools to Help SMEs Transform

WeBranding Global Expands Digital Marketing Tools to Help SMEs Transform

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 27, 2022 /WeBranding Global, a full-service creative agency and marketing consulting network driven by the desire to connect and inspire people worldwide through the soul of a brand, recently integrates its revolutionary SaaS Platform & A.I. Tech to accelerate growth and provide solutions to help companies compete in the global tech ecosystem.

The impact of Covid-19 accelerated the growth of online marketing channels such as eCommerce. Online retail sales have skyrocketed due to convenience and cost-effectiveness. The pandemic thrust eCommerce at the forefront, especially in the U.S. markets, where consumers spent more time online due to quarantine, work-from-home modalities, and closures of many establishments.

 

Consumers lead the way.

With the growing popularity of eCommerce and online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer (DTC) is poised to dominate the market. Up to 57% of brand manufacturers embrace the DTC model, making it the fastest-growing eCommerce category.

These remote interactions, such as Direct-to-Consumer (DTC), digitization, and self-service, have increased the SaaS world exponentially. The SaaS industry is currently growing by 18% each year and is worth over $145 billion.

In today’s time, SaaS solutions are speedy and effective and the most upcoming option in these tech-savvy and digital times.

One of the top SaaS companies, Shopify is the largest and most used SaaS platform today and about seven times more desirable than all the other SaaS-based eCommerce platforms.

 

The Strategy

Providing a personalized, omnichannel customer experience will play a significant role in gaining brand salience and early mindshare.

WeBranding Global partners with Shopify to provide organizations with full-scale business planning, custom website development, branding, overseas marketing solutions and services, and ongoing strategies, helping businesses build their personalized, omnichannel stores.

With its strong creative and marketing capabilities, WeBranding Global is proficient in using SaaS & A.I. technologies to analyze business models; it aims to find the target audience and benefit the companies with accurate data. WeBranding Global is primed to introduce the innovation overseas marketing SaaS platform with an integrated Customer Insight System (CIS) and Market Listening System (MLS). Adding a digital customer experience strategy will enable brands to meet customers’ expectations-emerging as the unexpected resilient forerunner for providing vertical SaaS solutions.

This move has been sought after by investors and has received 1 million dollars in financing support on the angel round.

Big data can compensate for the hefty workload in increasing areas. From customer support and management to marketing and social networks, A.I. technologies can help SaaS companies create a more strategic position.

As part of the strategy, organizations will understand the new norms for customers who are early adopters of technology and their digital journey touchpoints, including how they affect consumer perception and brand loyalty.

WeBranding Global embraces A.I. to provide next-level products and marketing services. CIS system uses vast data collection and machine learning technology to combine consumer data and consumer portrait into one comprehensive system to position the target consumer group. Through this system, companies can effectively use overseas consumer insights and use predictive digital marketing tools to optimize their marketing strategy, respond to different overseas marketing, and help them market quickly.

The MLS (Market Listening System) is specifically designed for companies to listen to the “Voice of the Customer” (VoC). Using extensive data and “Artificial Intelligence Technology,” the MLS system allows brands to summarize customers’ expectations, experiences, preferences, and aversions to the products or services. This helps ensure that the company puts the customers’ needs center, which ultimately drives brand, development, and service improvements for an unbeatable customer experience.

WeBranding Global, through marketing subdivisions and innovative technology, has empowered overseas companies to express their brands in a way that resonates with overseas target markets-optimizing their online presence and employing more precise marketing tactics. Through an extensive marketing consulting network and international team of dedicated professionals, WeBranding Global provides business analytics, brand strategy, integrated marketing, and sales support in a way that revolutionizes how companies approach cross-border eCommerce.

Media Contact

Contact Person: Andre Clemons
Email: andre.clemons@we-branding.com

SOURCE: Yahoo!finance

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Branding vs. Marketing 101

Branding vs. Marketing 101

In the business world, it sometimes seems like there is a new acronym invented every day or a buzzword your colleagues will become obsessed with to describe a specific process or strategy. Although some of them do sound silly, it is important to be able to differentiate their meanings while understanding the concept they are describing. 

Coincidentally, this happens all too often when describing branding and marketing. A significant amount of people believe these terms are interchangeable when in reality, they are not. 

Although these concepts work in tandem when appropriately utilized to upscale your business successfully, they could not be further apart in terms of what they are and how they are implemented in your day-to-day operations. 

How to Define Branding and Marketing 

Let’s start with properly defining each of these terms/concepts so you can better implement them within your strategic business processes moving forward. 

Many people think branding is just the logo at the bottom of your email or on the front of your office door, but it’s so much more. It reflects what you, your team, and your company represent. 

It defines what your business stands for and distinguishes you from your competitors to help shape how consumers think of your products or services. For example, this can be done through your core values, mission statement, and company culture. 

Now, let’s talk about what marketing is. Simply put, it’s the set of tools, activities, and strategies you use to promote your product, service, and company, so consumers understand the value you have to offer them.

Examples of marketing would include:

  • Social media marketing
  • Sponsored ads
  • Content marketing
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Direct mailers
  • Email marketing
  • Television and video ad slots
  • SMS texts 
  • Telemarketing 

Unlike your brand, your marketing strategies should constantly evolve to gain better insight into your customers and define who they are. 

Some changes are implemented due to an ineffective campaign that did not garner the sales or attention you were expecting. Other changes may occur because you improperly identified your target audience for a new product or service you’re offering. 

There is a multitude of reasons why your marketing strategies should continue to develop and stay fresh, but your brand needs to remain consistent throughout this process. 

Maintaining a consistent brand identity is essential because it allows you to build long-lasting relationships with your consumers, which in turn helps you better understand their needs and creates brand loyalty. 

Which Comes First, the Branding or the Marketing?

It’s important to have an established brand when it comes time to focus on your marketing strategies. If you don’t have a brand to market, you will most likely be wasting time, money, and efforts on marketing campaigns.

This is because memorable brands have a lasting impact on your current and prospective consumers. People want to do business with unique brands that they believe in. So even if your marketing strategies are exemplary, your brand is bland. It doesn’t distinguish itself from your competitors, and it will most likely not deliver the results that you were expecting.

With an established brand in place that resonates with your target audience, you will be able to better utilize and hone in on your marketing efforts as to what works or what doesn’t.

To foster a relationship and build a connection with communities, you’ll need to have an established brand practice within your organization before you begin your marketing efforts.

How to Build Your Brand

Now that you understand the importance of having a unique and distinguishable brand before implementing any marketing practices, let’s discuss how to combine these strategies to build your brand and market it successfully.

So let’s ask this: What separates your brand from your competitors, and what is supposed to make it so unique in the eyes of your consumers? Are you family-friendly, or is your product or service designed for only a niche age group? If you’re a lifestyle brand, are you luxurious or tailored for the everyday man?

These are the types of questions you want to ask yourself when developing your brand because when successfully implemented, your brand should reflect your target audience. You can find more questions to ask yourself here when building your brand.

How to Market your Brand

Congratulations! You’ve successfully built your brand, and now it’s time to market it. With the introduction of the digital landscape, marketing has become much more lucrative than it once was, so having an integrated marketing strategy is essential to the success of your business.

Only utilizing one marketing strategy at a time, like sending emails to potential customers or placing ads on the television, just doesn’t cut it anymore. It would be best if you had a consistent and well-developed integrated strategy.

This means you need a user-friendly website, a social media presence, create Google Ads, optimize your content for SEO value, and have a blog that connects to each other so your potential customers can find you through multiple channels.

All of these forms of marketing act as the face of your brand, and it is important to be consistent with them. Consistency allows your brand to build recognition and reinforce your brand’s place within the community.

Remember, marketing drives sales, and branding creates loyalty.

WBG is Here to Help 

We’ve talked about a lot today, and to be honest, we could discuss branding and marketing strategies in much more detail, but we hope you gained a little more insight into how branding and marketing work together.

If you’re interested in learning more about how branding and marketing strategies can elevate your business, feel free to reach out to us.

At We-Branding Global, we’re a one-stop shop for all of your brand and marketing strategy needs. Our team of industry professionals live and breath all things marketing. For years we’ve been helping people like you not only find your company’s brand or voice within your community but uniquely market it in a way that garners exponential growth!

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