If you are in charge of marketing a business in Singapore, you have to implement practical brand strategies.
A brand strategy is a plan that comprises of specific, long-term and achievable goals. It is a combination of the aspects of your company that make it easily identifiable.
Ideally, a brand strategy should affect all aspects of your business, including the needs of your customers, their emotions and competition with similar companies.
Many marketers mistakenly believe that their logo, website and business name defines a brand. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. In reality, your brand is intangible – which makes it difficult to tell apart superior brands from mediocre options outright.
When it comes to implementing a brand strategy, it takes more than having a list of what you intend to do. Businesses must have a thorough understanding of why they choose specific brand strategies and a detailed outline of how they wish to execute them.
Here are some key branding strategies that can significantly drive up the performance of your business in Singapore.
Educating Employees and Providing Guidelines
The first step to achieving a strong and consistent brand identity is ensuring that your entire staff are on the same page. It can be quite overwhelming to ask your employees to create it for the first time, but a deep understanding of the working of your brand and its goals makes it much easier.
If you want to use your employees as a means of diversifying the content in your branding strategy, it is advisable to hold training sessions beforehand. There, you can teach them how to use your brand voice on different social platforms and websites.
Employees can assist in creating insightful and emotional content that connects with your audience and turns them into loyal customers. Besides providing educational guidance, you also need to avail useful resources and tools that can help workers to create and distribute the emotive content efficiently.
For example, if your employees can’t create the content but can distribute it, you can handle the creation part and let them do the rest. Remember, if your employees are sharing thoughts about your products and services, customization is crucial so that the process isn’t mistaken for an ordinary advertisement. The easiest way of achieving this is ensuring that the involved staff have an in-depth understanding of the products or services they are describing.
Motivate and Reward your Employees
Although the majority of your staff will be happy to participate in your branding strategies, some will naturally want to know how they stand to benefit. Such employees usually want recognition for their invaluable input in growing your business. Luckily, you don’t always have to add a significant amount to their paycheck – in most cases, a small celebration or a simple shout-one is sufficient to convince them that you value their contribution to your branding efforts.
Alternatively, you can add motivation amongst your employees by creating a leaderboard showing the individual who gets the highest level of engagement on social media. It is advisable to start with members of your staff that are already familiar with social media to increase the chances of success.
Competitive Analysis
If you want to succeed in your marketing campaign, it is mandatory to study your competition.
Competitive analysis is crucial, as it helps you understand what sets you apart from other business in Singapore. Your marketing message should centre on what differentiates you from your rivals.
If you go straight into executing your branding strategy, you are likely to end up saying what your competitors are already saying, which doesn’t encourage your audience to choose you over them.
Develop your Brand Standards
This involves creating a set of design rules that define the look and feel of your marketing campaign. Precisely, you should emphasize consistency in the following – the logo, graphics, colours, typography, and photographic style.
The most critical aspect of your brand standards is having a consistent logo. Its placement and sizing should remain constant throughout your marketing material.
Using the same graphic elements across your marketing material makes your brand easily recognizable. The same also applies to your choice of colour. You should go for colours that create the emotions you want to evoke in people, and the best way of knowing such colours is by studying the preferences of your target audience.
The rule of the thumb regarding typography is maintaining consistency and using three or less different font types in your documents. As a brand strategist, you should also aim for constancy in your photographic styling.
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Adopt Creative Consumer Engagement Tactics
Stop using widespread tactics and adopt an innovative approach to increase consumer engagement. People like surprises and want variety. Avoid being overly predictable, stretch your thinking, capitalize on the vulnerability of competing brands, and most importantly, don’t take your audience for granted.
It is essential to refresh your brand at least once every year, instead of the typical three to five-year timeframe. Keep in mind that consumers in Singapore are continually re-evaluating their needs. Instead of being reactive to their changing desires, be proactive and assist them as they reinvent themselves. If you don’t take charge of your consumer engagement strategy, somebody else will.
Establish An Easy to Remember Identity
In an attempt to reinvent themselves, brands complicate things and end up frustrating their consumers. Overdoing your brand strategies can sometimes lead to a loss of identity.
A brand identity is most effective when it is flexible, and its value proposition strengthens as the demands of its target audience change. Keep it simple, as consumers want brands that are straightforward with their identity and demonstrate their readiness to adapt to changes. Remember that people don’t have the time to figure out the intentions of your brand, especially when they are not deliberate.
Constant Innovation with Perfect Timing and Execution
Despite the obviousness of innovation as a part of an effective brand marketing campaign, many companies in Singapore continue to fall short on this front. The primary reason for these failures is not failing to launch new products and services. Instead, these companies are getting it wrong with timing and execution.
The timing of a launch must be in sync with the demands of your target audience. If your consumers are not ready, it is advisable to delay the start until they are. The same applies when you are not ready to execute the requirements to ensure the success of the new product. Once your business develops a reputation for launching excellent products, your innovation efforts will become a marketing strategy, and consumers will always anticipate new products with zeal.
Reward Customer Loyalty
According to the Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Customer retention transcends beyond meeting their expectations – you should aim to exceed their expectations, as this converts them into loyal advocates of your brand.
One proven method of achieving customer retention is by launching customer loyalty programs. Here, consumers get points for every purchase they make, which are redeemable for discounts or other products offered by your business.
Additionally, you can introduce customer satisfaction surveys. These assist in ascertaining whether your clients deem the quality of your services to be satisfactory.
Use Influencers
Several studies indicate that shoppers are more likely to purchase a product that is recommended by someone they trust. You too can make use of influencers to drive up your sales by having them recommend your brand cto new and existing customers.
When choosing an influencer, consider the following factors – relevance, reach and resonance. The influencer you want should be relevant to your niche. For instance, if you sell beauty products, consider using a popular model. They should also have a broad reach, as this determines the number of people they are likely to convince to buy your products. Resonant influencers can easily evoke emotion, which, as seen above, is an integral component of active brand development.
The quickest method of engaging with influencers is through their content and conversations on their social media channels. It is vital to maintain relationships with the influencers using the help of customer-resource management (CRM) tools and Twitter Lists.
Use Video
Video is a persuasive content format that can prove to be an invaluable addition to your endeavours as a brand manager. As of now, YouTube is only second to Google in terms of web traffic, which showcases the power of video. Most people prefer watching a video to reading text, and the majority of prospective online shoppers are likely to purchase after watching a video.
Making a video is a relatively affordable affair. Any business, regardless of size and resource, can quickly produce a video and share it on social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
When making a video, ensure that it informs or adds value to your target audience. Try to infuse a bit of creativity, as this increases the level of engagement.
Leverage User-generated Content
It is quite challenging for marketers to regularly come up with fresh and unique content that appeals to their existing and prospective customers. It is worth noting that leveraging user-generated content can be as effective as using influencers to promote your products.
A smart way of engaging your users is by creating a hashtag that aligns to your marketing strategies. Once the hashtag is in place, encourage users to share their reviews of the product, preferably using visual content such as photos and video. You can then repost the best reviews from this lot.
By seeing other people using and reviewing your products, passive users are likely to convert into regular customers.
Develop A Website
A business website ranks among the most important branding tools. It offers a platform through which your entire audience learn what your company is all about, how you do it and who your customers are. Although prospective clients will not choose your website solely based on your website, they will certainly ignore you if the site isn’t up to the required standards.
Furthermore, your business website hosts the entirety of your valuable content. Online content is the centrepiece of modern brand development strategies. It is also the focal point for SEO efforts, which enables online traffic to get more information about your website.
Nowadays, there are two types of professional services website. The first category, known as branding sites, tells the story of a business, who you are, what you do, and the group you are targeting. The other kind does all of the above, generates leads and convert those leads into regular clients. These are known as high-performance websites.
Give Back
Brands that give back a share of their profits to their customers tend to more successful than those who don’t. The spirit of giving should be a part of your business’s culture. Besides sharing gains, you should share the success of your brand with others, even if they are not your clients.
Irrespective of the magnitude of your sales, always strive to express gratitude to the communities you serve. Interact with them, provide sponsorships, engage in outreach programs, and actively contribute to humanitarian causes.
If you have limited resources, a simple thank you message would suffice. When your brand makes the world a better place, you are likelier to attract more customers.
Flexibility
It is imperative for brand marketers to remain flexible to maintain relevance. Consistency sets the standard for your brand and flexibility ensures that you make the necessary adjustments that inspire customer engagement and distinguish your approach from other businesses in Singapore.
If your tactics aren’t working right now, it is time for a change.
Conclusion
There you have it – these are the best brand strategies that you can implement to boost the performance of your business in Singapore. That said, implementation is not enough. It is advisable to track the progress and impact of your strategies. Check if you are getting more leads and sales, if your brand is easily recognizable, and so forth.
Tracking ensures that you make the right adjustments to increase the success of your branding campaign.
Get in touch with us for the best branding services in Singapore. We will help you get ahead of the competition within the shortest time-frame possible.
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