Before we begin to market any business, we start with the foundation – and that is the brand.
Beyond a logo, some fonts, or colours, we’re asking deeper questions. Who are we as a company? Who do we want to work with? What are our guiding values?
We define the company and build a brand around that.
This is the part many want to skip! Because we want to see instant results. We love instant gratification and laying that foundation doesn’t provide immediate ROI. But it does give you long-term power.
A solid brand is a competitive edge. It improves marketing spend efficiency. It gives your business direction and purpose. It tells your customers a story. This is why, before we carry out any marketing services for your business, it’s important that we first define your brand.
David Ogilvy, a marketing expert, described a brand as “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.”
Your brand encapsulates your business as a whole. And when done right – with long-term strategy and your audience in mind – it can completely transform the trajectory of your company.
Here’s how brand development can lead to long term return on investment.
Increase Pricing Power
Strong branding can increase your pricing power. There are a few factors at play here.
Justifying a price point.
Strategic messaging, a clear value proposition, and a strong positioning strategy will help you justify your price points for your products or services.
If you get a lot of push back on pricing, it may not actually be that your service is overpriced. More likely, your company needs to do a better job of communicating the value that service provides, or re-framing the way you present it to your customers. A brand strategy will support this.
Give subtle cues.
The brain processes images much faster than text. This is why design is so important. Even for those who might not consider themselves design-minded, they will subconsciously pick up on visual cues. This will ultimately shape their first impression of your brand.
Certain design styles and elements can be more connected to prestigious or high end brands. Having quality, high-end design that is suited to your positioning and price points can make all the difference. Do you offer accessible, mid-tier pricing? Or are you the higher end, expensive option? Strong brand design will support this.
People are willing to pay more for brands they love.
If your brand can create meaningful connections with customers, they will be willing to spend more. Studies have shown that brand-driven customers will pay 38% more for brands they perceive as meaningfully different, than brands they do not.
Improve Customer Retention
Repeat buys are another surefire way to increase revenue, and building brand loyalty for long-term relationships with your customers creates an abundance of repeat buyers.
Brand Keys backs this up with a study that found a mere 7% increase in brand loyalty yields 85% higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
According to Harvard Business Review, loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.
And InMoment has discovered:
- 77 percent of consumers say they’ve held relationships with specific brands for 10 or more years.
- 61 percent of loyal customers go out of their way to buy from them.
- And 75 percent of loyal customers will recommend a brand to friends and family.
It just goes to show that it’s worth creating a brand focused on your customers because brand loyalty generates a substantial amount of profit for your company over time.
And don’t forget – as a standard, it will typically cost you more money to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing customer. So you should be keeping customer retention top of mind. Brand loyalty is a powerful way to increase customer retention.
Makes For More Efficient Marketing
You could be unknowingly wasting your marketing budget by not building a brand that your customers can connect to.
Oftentimes, when there is no direction or purpose, a company’s marketing plan quickly turns into a matter of throwing dirt on the wall and seeing what sticks. Meaning, your marketing efforts are scattered and rooted in guesswork. This approach only hurts your profits because you’re spending more money and not gaining new customers.
However, as soon as you define your brand, your story and the way you want your customers to feel when they buy from you, your marketing efforts will be substantially more efficient and cost-effective.
Outperform Your Competition
Building a strong brand allows you to have a long-term leg up on your competitors.
Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® (BRI) has studied how brands do this based on feedback from over 47,000 consumers around the world. They discovered the most powerful brands are not afraid to push the envelope and find new ways to amaze and delight their customers.
More importantly, the most relevant brands are shown to have outperformed the S&P 500 average (which is a stock market index tracking the stocks of 500 large U.S companies) by 28% over the last 10 years.
If this is what strong branding does to big-name companies, imagine what it could do for yours.
If you’re ready to build a brand that makes an impact, Nioma is here to help. Contact us to start building your brand.
