Business

Drive sales through brand management

Managing a brand is similar to building a reputation. It grows slowly, gaining the trust and loyalty of its followers until it is established. Brand recognition and consistency in the marketing message build trust, which in turn leads to increased sales. However, consumers are fickle and easily distracted by bigger, bolder marketing messages and glossier packaging, and trust is easily broken.

Just like building a reputation, it is often much faster to lose that reputation compared to the time it took to build the brand. Therefore, it is imperative that companies pay attention to their brand management and business reputation.

Creation of brand awareness campaigns

Every brand is different. It takes a lot of understanding to get the message across. By using creative brand communication strategies, it is easy to capture the attention of your consumer.

A great example of a company that has achieved this is Johnnie Walker. They have built the brand from an emotional campaign. A difficult task, and one that works best when it flows and reinforces a truth of the product. His “Keep Walking” campaign produced good sales growth of 48% over eight years for what was a struggling whiskey producer.

Here are four tips for building an emotion-based campaign similar to Johnnie Walker’s campaign:

  1. Tell a Story: Bring to life the brand idea of ​​”personal progress” that people want to aspire to.
  2. Make it difficult to copy: In the case of Johnnie Walker, it is almost impossible for another whiskey brand to copy this campaign, as it is based on the brand name and icon.
  3. Consistency is key – use a message consistently. In the case of Johnnie Walker, the brand name is linked to the message and each ad is linked to the packaging or marketing material.
  4. Execution is everything – quality and attention to detail shows, from TV commercials to print advertising and website marketing. All the material is related to the main message and the campaign.

Managing your Reputation

Once you’ve achieved brand recognition, it’s imperative to maintain your reputation. Reputation management can be defined as the process of monitoring the actions of an entity and the opinions of other entities about those actions; report on such actions and opinions; and react to that report by creating a feedback loop.

Understanding this process and being a part of it is the bare minimum that a company should pay attention to in order to maintain a positive reputation. Reputation management has gone mainstream with the advent of pervasive computing.

Five simple tips for managing your reputation include:

  1. Perform a reputation audit: identify all the issues that could affect your company’s reputation
  2. Analyze issues to determine the historical influence, current landscape, and possible future state of that issue.
  3. Carry out change strategy options to address each problem and act on them
  4. Constantly evaluate your landscape
  5. Be present, consistent and communicate your message persuasively

One thought leader who truly understands that consistency and communication are two of the key ingredients to a brand’s success and is able to express this message effortlessly is David Taylor, a world-renowned expert in persuasive brand communication strategies. .

Taylor’s guide to the essential steps in achieving persuasive brand communication can be summarized as follows:

  1. Brand understanding and goal setting
  2. Get the right team
  3. Keep brevity and strict information
  4. Get the most out of production
  5. Brilliant Brand Activation
  6. Development and execution of the campaign.

So how do we drive sales through brand management?

Build bridges between marketing and sales

There are positive, synergistic roles in both marketing and sales, and if each party accepts the role assumed by their counterparts, the organization will thrive. Traditionally, it was quite difficult to identify the criteria to build the bridge between marketing and sales.

Traditionally, a company would resort to the following five strategies:

  1. Take a new approach to lead development
  2. Determine the piping requirements.
  3. Synchronize marketing communications channel upload activities with sales force requirements
  4. Feed the sales pipeline with precision
  5. Practice aggressive marketing to build the relationship.

Marketing and sales have traditionally been kept as two separate concepts with marketing paving the way, while sales closing the deal. With the advent of pervasive computing, the gap is rapidly narrowing. Social networks are the key to this result in the online approach.

With social media spaces becoming more popular, marketers and entrepreneurs around the world are using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites to discover new markets, meet prospects directly, and forge profitable new business relationships. No lead generation, branding, or cold calling required. In a sense, many sellers are becoming their own sellers.

The roles could be defined as follows: The sales role in social media is to initiate and develop key relationships. The role of social media marketing is to help marketers plan, execute, and measure their efforts.

Regardless of the approach, be it online or traditional, effective brand communication remains key to all strategies.