How to Market Your Brand

I am currently the “marketing manager” for a host of various brands. Our clients come to us for advice and ongoing marketing plans, I have some personal projects and I help out a few friends with advice, design and development for their brands. But really, how can I market your brand?What I find is each and every time that I approach a company’s marketing plan, the first thing I have to think of is how will they build their presence. How will they get their desired result? How and why will customers buy their products. Surprisingly the answer is sometimes “they won’t”.

Taking your brand to market

Take a band for example. Bands that are not famous or popular and just starting out are in an extremely competitive market that only has one real type of customer. It’s not the people who listen to the music, it’s the venues that allow the bands to play there. These venues have literally thousands of people contacting them offering services and have no need at all to go searching for bands to play there. So, how does a band “market” and “collect customers”?They don’t.  They do their music stuff that a marketer will generally not understand, like record themselves playing (in video or in sound), and then I can put that on a website, social pages etc and they can start to contact venues and send them links to their website.They do need a good social presence, which can start by simply inviting their friends and family to like and share their pages, but in the end, not many people are going to search for “good band to play in my pub” and find their website.Another very different example is one of our current clients which is a consultancy firm in a certain industry (forgive me for not releasing the name, we’re still working on the project after all). Now, when someone needs THEIR services they WILL go to a search engine and type in “industry consultant” and find the one that has the best website, the best blogs, the best videos.  And by best, I don’t mean most flashy and exciting.  I mean they ones that have the best and most correct information. Because when you need a consultant you need one that knows their stuff.So, for consultancies, content is king, quality content that is easy to understand and straight to the point, knowledgeable and correct. This marketing plan will be all about a social media and blog plan, search engine optimisation, keyword analysis and all the normal digital channels.So, you can see by the examples, how vastly different marketing plans can be. Most companies will come to you and tell you how they can boost your SEO and how they can help you get customers with their cold calling and a bunch of other generic nonsense that may or may not apply to you, but always look and sound good. Using words like “increase revenue” or “boost customers”. But really, what everyone needs to do is take a deep breath, look at their company, look at their customers and work out the best way to bring the two together.DigiGround can help you with a marketing plan, an audit of your current plan, or even if you just need someone to bounce ideas off. And, if you are looking to get started now, read our blog Your Business Revealed and learn how to market what you do with a few simple questions.