The revolution of digital marketing in Singapore is fast growing through the incorporation of social media marketing, online marketing, branding online, and search engine optimisation. In this competitive environment, it is essential that your business differentiates itself from others through branding.
Good branding strategy enables you to outperform, outdo and outplay your business competitors. In that case, most of the business’s downfall is as a result of poor branding strategy. Business development ‘requires a vast branding investment to keep it competitive in online marketing.
This proves the need to get into branding online to try and sell your business brand to the demographic market.
Branding is how you charm your customers. It’s the magnetic personality that makes your business memorable. It’s what creates the excitement your customers need to stay loyal to you. It keeps them engaged. And as the popularity of your business grows, more and more people come in contact with this side of your business, thus making it even bigger.
The biggest asset of your business is NOT the infrastructure or the resources you’ve mastered over the years, but the brand you’ve been establishing since the very first time you went into business. Basically, it’s what sets you apart from everyone else.
Every business drive to create a strong brand that will be working towards keeping the bulk of their customers hooked in. You want them to remember your business and the product and services you offer, and even learn to associate all of your products and services with a certain happy feeling.
This is the kind of charm your business needs to connect people with your brand. It’s the dynamic personality that gets people to stick with you. It tells your story, and which a majority can relate to.
The size of your business doesn’t matter. Whether small or big, you both have equal chances of creating a strong brand. All you have to do is make a few calibrations in your line of business and you’re good to go.
That being said, here are some solid tips on how a small business can create a strong online brand in Singapore.
Business Name And Logo
A business name and logo are one of the best steps in the journey towards the establishment of a great brand. You should do extensive research to come up with a name that has not been used by any other company and one available for registration. A logo represents the visual identity of your business and hence should be unique.
When one sees your logo in any of the online businesses, he should easily know the company or business it stands for. You should correctly choose the design and colour of your business logo to catch the eyes of the online users. An excellent logo and name provide a consistent brand image and enable people to recognise you easily.
More so, a business trademark ensures the protection of your brand image. Your business competitors will not be able to use your business brand in their business.
A strong brand is tied down to the visuals people associate it with. Take time to paint a clear picture of your business. Think of all the positive attributes you suspect your audience will be super-excited about whenever someone mentions your brand.
In summary, think of all the things your company represents and find a way to transform it into a logo.
Look at all the prospects you’re targeting, and think from their viewpoint. What strengths do you have that they’ll certainly love and even consider shifting their fealty to you?
The logo you make should be what connects them to your brand. It’s the identity you’ll never want to lose, come what may.
There are however a number of things to keep in mind while creating a logo. Here’s a shortened list of them:
- The logo you choose to make should be simple and stripped down of all the complications. People should be able to recognize it from a casual glance and automatically associate it with your business or the kind of services and products you offer.
- The logo you make should be memorable. Again, it’s important that you keep it simple enough to achieve this. A classic example of such a logo is Apple. No one needs to remind you of what it stands for upon viewing it for the first time.
- The logo you choose must be recognizable. Everyone can recognize the Coca-Cola logo, and it’s all because it’s easy to pin it up with the company it’s associated with. You can do the same for your business logo and you’d have succeeded in making it recognizable.
Organisation Brand Voice
Consistency is the key to creating a big brand for your business. Online users mostly prefer to buy from already known brands. You need to consistently communicate and message your customers with an organisation brand voice. This creates a true relationship between the customers and your brand. They will start feeling that they know you and eventually become your reliable customers. The consistency should also be detectable in customer service. Make efforts to provide a seamless and consistent customer service experience through all online channels including live chats, emails, and social media.
Branded Emails
The use of branded emails communicates to the world how established and professional your company has grown. Business emails need to be consistently connected as a series. The customers should be able to comprehend their connection to each other. Use a similar style, colour scheme, and logo for your email and website. This consistent design creates a visual brand of your business to your customers. Choose a theme that increases your brand awareness by incorporating the story, image, and profile of your business. You should ensure that your website or e-commerce site is easy and attractive to navigate when making purchases.
Establish Trust
The best strategy for establishing your brand and securing customers is showing them their worthiness and value. You should provide them with unique content that other site visitors cannot access. These may include unique discount codes or free purchase gifts. Make your subscribers feel special treatment compared to ordinary visitors. Give them VIP treatment. This will go to a significant extent in establishing customer trust. You can also ask your customers to give testimonials about your business for the visitors seeking to know others’ experiences to review.
Build a Reputation
Establish yourself as an online authority.
The idea you want to sell is that of excitement. It’s that where everyone is excited upon hearing about your products and services. In other words, it’s the reputation you’ve managed to create over the years.
As a small business, you’ll certainly have to go out of the way to solidify one for yourself considering you’re competing against high-profile brands that have already established themselves in the industry you’re in.
This is NOT to hamstring your online effort. But it’s important that you understand that it’s going to take a lot of effort on your part to establish a reputation that your customers will live to trust and even consider spurning their products for what you’re offering.
Tips for Building Your Brand Reputation
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Be Honest
You can’t build your brand reputation without embracing honesty. If you’re sure you can’t deliver on something, make a point NOT to promise it.
Customers get turned off by false promises. Eventually, they start associating your business with broken promises, and as word get out there, more and more customers fall off because they can’t simply bring themselves to trust you for any word you say/
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Establish Yourself as an Authority
People want to trust that you have the required expertise and experience to live up to the hype you receive. As an authority, you’d have succeeded in proving that you completely understand the intricacies of your line of work. That way, people will love to trust you and even be encouraged to stay loyal to you.
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Be Consistent
The key to it all is consistency. You want to keep doing what you do to convince your prospects that it wasn’t just a one-time deed.
Keep on being seen and working on your online reputation. Come up with a plan to stand out from the rest of the companies you’re competing with, and work on adopting the plan as your modus operandi. And when your brand gets to be seen repetitively — not in a spammy manner though, people will learn to trust it and payback with loyalty.
Marketing Collaboration
Marketing collaboration and partnership is good strategy for online branding. Seeking collaborations with other big brand businesses in a bind of win-win online marketing enables you to market your business brand to new online users who probably have never heard about you. These partnerships will hence influence your company’s market share. Digital marketing conferences are the ideal environment to get these partnership opportunities.
Social media marketing is a marketing field that any Singapore-based business cannot afford to miss out. Social media cannot be underestimated in its power to promote online branding. Social media marketing requires a good strategy for knowing the market target for your business.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would be the perfect platform to launch your online branding campaigns if you are targeting the young generation. Additionally, for companies that are targeting top CEOs, LinkedIn is an ideal platform for branding.
Mobile Friendly
Today, your business site should be mobile-friendly if you want its brand to be known. More and more online users are using their mobile devices to access business websites. Google has even started ranking mobile-friendly sites on their search engine top pages.
It is no secret that searching online information through mobile devices is the order of the day. Making your business site mobile-friendly increases the number of people that visit your website and eventually leads to higher user to client’s conversions. This will promote your online branding.
Blogging and Posting
Singapore has many businesses that offer similar products and services. Radiating your expertise to the online users about the specific area you deal with may promote your brand above other companies. Share some knowledge content with online users.
This way, you will establish yourself as the industry leader and expert to your customers. Have an online presence to help your customers with answers to their questions and promote yourself online. The customers will start trusting in your brand and will also generate increased leads.
The use of online blogs is an effective way of branding online. Blogging provides a great way to build your brand. The blog posts effectively build traffic on your website and give you an excellent platform to demonstrate your expertise.
The content you post on social media and blog defines the kind of person you are, if not the kind of business you run. It’s the reflection of what you do and your level of experience and expertise in the line of business you are in.
It’s therefore important that you figure out the type of content you think will suit your audience best, and at the same time, get to cast your business in a positive light.
The content you post must be valuable, well-researched, engaging, and credible to be shared by your readers. By sharing the content, your readers learn to trust your business and even self-promote themselves as your brand ambassadors.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool. If anything, a good portion of the customers you’re targeting can be found on social media, and when they’re constantly supplied with amazing content, they soften up and are even more encouraged to go through with a purchase.
Slogans
Business slogans are common in the Singapore market. Most big companies are known for their business slogans. A sweet short message is essential in establishing your brand. A good slogan acts as a glue to stick in people’s minds. The slogan continually reminds people about your business. Moreover, a good slogan may go viral through social media platforms in the whole world.
Determine Your Target Audience
The fundamental step to building your brand is identifying your target audience. Look at the nature of the people you’re trying to reach. What are their needs and how do you intent to meet them?
Be specific when digging out for details. What do they like? What’s their behaviour and lifestyle?
Here are a few examples of the kind of audience you can come up with:
- Stay at home moms working at the comfort of their home
- Aspiring techies
- College students looking to better their lives and make some money on the side
- DIY enthusiasts looking to learn something new or add a new skill
Establishing a Mission statement for Your Brand
Think about your brand mission and what you wish to achieve. This should help you paint a clear picture of what your business is all about.
Come up with values and make a promise to abide by them to the end. Your customers will learn to trust you and value for business for what it is.
Your mission statement defines your purpose for existence. It’s what informs you of every important aspect of your branding and the strategies you employ.
Everything regarding your brand including your logo, message, tagline, voice, and personality should point to the direction of your mission statement.
Top Branding Strategies in Singapore
Singapore has gone from a third-world country to a first-world country in less than two decades. The biggest consumer group, the millennials, are more nostalgic and brands making it big today are those that can bring out a sense of authenticity through nostalgia.
Here are the best strategies you should use to establish and grow your brand identity in Singapore.
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Use Influencers
Singapore is more of an image market and not a growth market. However, every brand manager in Singapore knows the importance of getting his or her brand known. With that said, there are many ways of getting your brand’s image noticed, but the best platform for brand marketing in Singapore is social media.
You should always take the opportunity to have someone endorse your brand and this is where social influencers come in.
With that said, there is more to picking an influencer than looking at the number of followers they have on their social networking accounts. You need to look at their content and see if they align with your content and values.
Next, you need to reach out and agree on fair compensation for the traffic they will drive to your social media pages or website. With that said, social influencers are not limited to social networking sites, you can also look for a blogging influencers and have links on their blogs.
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Create Authenticity
As we said, Singapore is going through a phase of nostalgia. Most of the people there are missing the old grit that was the norm when growing up before and during the dot com era. This means that your branding strategies in Singapore ought to look back to move forward. However, this means that some brands will have a head start since they are synonymous with the “good old times.”
Brands such as Tiger Balm have a long history and are considered authentic Singapore brands. If you are starting out in Singapore, ensure that you create authenticity to make up for your lack of history.
You can do this by going for an anti-design feel. What we mean is that the glossy and polished logos and perfect shapes are discordant with the design in other spheres of life.
So for your company branding in Singapore, go for the unpolished look that shows that humans, not a robot made it. However, be sure to be neat and presentable.
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Have A Creative And Compelling Heritage Story
For your brand marketing in Singapore, nothing works better than a well-told story. One of your marketing goals in Singapore today should be to take advantage of heritage credentials.
All you need is a story and tell it well to your audience. The chances are that you will create an emotional connection to your brand and this will level the playing field when you are competing against much older brands.
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Personalised Customer Experiences
Singapore is enjoying one of the best connectivity levels in the world today, and this means that many people are sharing information that can be useful for brand marketing in Singapore. However, many businesses are not taking the opportunity to create personalised shopping experiences for their customers.
Of all the branding strategies in Singapore, this has to be the one that will make you a household name. This requires that you undertake user research, and create buyer personas.
While they are in their early stages of development, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) could help you collect data for your buyer personas. This strategy will help you empower your customers through a personalised and seamless shopping experience.
The chances are that they will recommend your business to their friends, colleagues, and family. This will lead to more customers, and if you do it right, you could ensure the longevity and expansion of your brand.
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Hire a Brand Consulting Firm
Creating branding strategies in Singapore is not easy since it takes a lot of time and resources. For example, you will need to do brand audits, structuring and restructuring, and many other factors. However, this can be too much for an entrepreneur that is trying to scale their business.
A brand-consulting firm will do all the heavy lifting to realise your brand’s vision. They will work with you right from the start, and they will need C-level involvement in your business operation. The consultant will work within your budget, and grow your brand at your own pace.
11 Ad Design Tips to Supercharge Your Online Branding Efforts
Branding is all about communicating effectively with the target customers and creating memorable experiences. The customers should quickly identify your brand from the plethora of other options available in the market. A sure way of achieving this goal is by reimagining your ad campaigns.
It starts by creating stellar ads that cut through the noise and inspire the target customers to do business with you.
Here are 11 tips for designing better ads for increased conversions and branding. Stick around to the end for a bonus tip.
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Go Against the Grind to Stand Out
Sure, the eCommerce industry is vast and offers countless opportunities for businesses to thrive. However, the space is not devoid of competition. Brands are in cut-throat competition for attention and will do anything to knock you off the top spot if you’re not careful.
A sure way of ensuring your brand stands out of the ground is by going against the grind when creating ads. Make your ads different by including elements that grasp the target customer’s attention. Trying to follow trends and designing ads like your competitors will only do much for your brand.
Understand that if your competitors have already pounced on these low-hanging fruits, it will be difficult for you to achieve the expected sales figures. Resist the urge to conform with the rest by using your creativity to make your ads different.
Estée Launder ad above is a perfect example of this hack. The brand changed from vibrant, colourful ads to original ads whose elements went against the norms of online advertising. Even though competitors and industry leaders hugely criticised the company, their ads got 25% more responses than the colour print ad campaigns they had run for years.
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Focus More on Benefits
Branding is all about setting your business apart from the rest. Your product or service’s unique selling point is what distinguishes you from other similar companies. Features are paramount to online customers as they help them compare brands and make informed buying decisions. It might be a good idea to engage a reputable branding agency in Singapore to get the foundation right.
However, in the context of advertising to promote your brand, you will often be reaching out to a broad audience. Most of them probably haven’t heard about your brand, so focusing solely on the features when creating ads will be ineffective in helping you generate sales. It will also make the ads look too salesy and unprofessional.
Cut the clutter by focussing on the benefits of a particular product or service. Answer the “why” questions the customers ask themselves when they come across your ads. Concisely, the benefits will make your product more appealing to the customers instead of a ton of ad copy about the features – which may be too complex for the audience to understand how they function.
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Be Open to Using Humour
With the average attention span of online shoppers reducing by the day, you cannot afford to be boring.
Earlier, we mentioned you should focus on creating memorable experiences for the customers. You can achieve that goal by adding humour to your ads. The humour will evoke positive emotions that will spur engagement and encourage the customers to purchase the product.
Zola is a brand that specialises in weddings. These special occasions are associated with joy, love, and happiness. Ordinarily, such a brand would showcase past successful wedding events they helped put together. Zola flips the script by creating an engaging video ad with two couples. The couple highlight how the company helped ensure that their wedding was a success.
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Ads Should Focus on One Message
As a results-oriented marketer, it’s easy to get drawn into highlighting multiple features and benefits in one ad in a bid to generate more sales.
Unfortunately, such ads never deliver the expected results because they overwhelm the target customers. Ever tried to read a cluttered ad online? If you have, you can attest that it takes a lot of energy and time to understand what the ad is all about. It gets more challenging to decide whether the ad is worth buying or better than the other options available.
Avoid such issues by creating ads that are clear and customer-oriented. What do we mean? It means every ad should convey one specific message. Grasp the customer’s attention by highlighting the main benefit of your product instead of discussing all the features in one ad.
Besides, one compelling message, which is the product’s primary benefit, is easier to remember. Even if the customer doesn’t convert immediately, they are likely to visit your website later and buy the product.
Borrow a leaf from the popular Citizen’s ad for its modern Eco-Drive watch. This ad uses one line of text, “a watch that never needs a battery,” and a simple but quality image of the watch to showcase its value to the target customers.
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Ads Should Be Visual, Not Text-Based
The human brain processes visuals faster and more efficiently than text. If you disagree, look at how kids link objects with behaviours. When they see a ball, they know it’s time to get outdoors and have some fun.
Scientific research shows that information presented to us in visual format acts more than 50% of the brain.
The visuals don’t have to be complicated and expensive to create. Take, for example above, LEGO’s ad that is made up of only two images. The images relate directly to what the company offers and give the audience a hint of what they should expect from the brand.
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Understand Your Market
How well do you know your market? There is absolutely no way you can succeed in capturing the attention of target customers if you don’t know them, their specific needs, and expectations from you.
Before running an ad campaign, do extensive market research to know which segment of customers are likely to purchase your products. This information will help you generate quality ads that are relatable and high-performing.
Pop Fit is a perfect company that uses ads related to its customers to generate thousands of dollars in revenue per month. Since a large portion of the target customers is women who are rarely featured in modelling magazines due to their physique, they recently recorded a video ad showing women with body physique as show stoppers.
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Don’t Tell, Just SHOW
The internet is filled with ads tailored to tell customers why they should purchase a product or use a service. Unfortunately, such ads don’t consistently deliver the expected results, especially if the audience is unfamiliar with the offer.
You also don’t always have to have text in the ad – be creative. Check out Siemen’s ad for its dryers and washers. The company decided to place them in a library to show customers how quiet the two products are when turned on.
Please find a way to create such an ad by looking at your product’s benefit and what sets it apart from other businesses. However, be vigilant not to convey the wrong message to the customers.
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Don’t Shy Away from Flaunting Your Product Benefits
Branding is all about showing that your products are the best in the market. Sure, text can help you do that, but as mentioned earlier, visuals are more effective than text. Spice up your ads with humour to spur engagement with the target audience and trigger the right emotions from them.
Nikol is a paper towels company that is global. The towels cannot press grapes into raisins, but the company’s ad flaunts their superior absorbent capabilities in an artful and precise way. Like the previous hack, they don’t use any text to convey the intended message.
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Be Authentic
Like how SEO optimised original content is ranked better by Google and other search engines, creating authentic ads will give you an added advantage in an eCommerce world where brands tend to copy each other’s tactics.
Planet Fitness is one of the companies best known for creating authentic ads that resonate with the brand’s sole messaging. They aim to debunk the myth that fitness is scary and it’s difficult to stick to a fitness regime.
Most of their ads show employees dancing in the gym to establish the brand’s authenticity and judgment-free zone policies.
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Use Smart Connotations
Connotations help to pass the intended message better than the conventional phrases. For example, when used in ads, the word “hot” means that the product is extremely spicy or high temperature.
Heinz, a brand in the food niche, uses that connotation in their ads to depict how spicy their ketchup is compared to other brands. This creative way of highlighting the product’s unique selling point makes it easy for the customers to remember the product when shopping. It also draws the customers’ attention smarter.
The ad focuses on one message as recommended earlier and has superb product graphics. The image details are so precise that a customer can quickly identify the product online or offline shopping.
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Scrap Off Predictability from Your Ads
Predictable ads rarely create a buzz or hype online. The customers can tell what the ad is all about even before they watch it, which hampers its ability to convert.
Stop being boring and engage better with the audience by scaping off predictability from your ads. Mazda is a renowned car manufacturing company that has been around for more than ten years now. The brand’s ad is created like a game that immediately draws in the customers.
Check out these seven gamified banner ads to get inspiration and ideas on creating yours. Some brands are already using this strategy, but the trend is overstretched. Look whether your competitors have such ads, and if not, spring into action to get ahead of the curve. Ensure that the ads are optimised for mobile to get the most results.
Top 3 Free Ad Design Software
Now that you know how to create compelling ads to promote your branding efforts let us look at the top 4 free ad design software available in the market.
DesignWizard has been around for more than three years now and is best known for its exceptional integration capabilities. It comes with a wide array of templates that you can use to design attractive ads for both print and digital ads. You can easily resize ads for posting on different platforms.
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Canva
Canva is another excellent free design software available online. It prides itself on having more than one million stock images and pre-designed templates that you can use to create smart ads for posting on social media, email, and websites. You can also integrate it with your website’s content management system to seamlessly transfer the ads to your website.
Are you thinking of running a PPC campaign? Bannersnack will come in handy to help you create exceptional display ads. Unlike the other software discussed above, with Bannersnack, you can create one masterpiece ad then create several others based on the original design.
The free plan is ideal for new designers just starting, but it’s recommendable to subscribe to the premium package once you get the hang of it and start seeing results. Must say, the premium package is competitively priced compared to other software.
BannerBoo is perfect for creating animated banner ads using its newly generated HTML5 ad builder. The interface is user-friendly, so you don’t need prior experience to create an ad. There are also free tutorial videos on the website and YouTube that you can watch to learn how to make the ads.
Another highlight of using BannerBoo is that the ads are responsive. Customers can view them on mobile and take action while on the go. The only downside is that ads created with the free plan have a watermark. You have to subscribe to the premium plan to get watermark-free ads.
These four free ad creation software will help you get started. Compare the features to find ones that best suit your preferences and brands before subscribing to the premium packages.
In Conclusion
Brand building is one of the most critical aspects of promoting your business, however small it is.
With a sound brand-building strategy, you can easily transform your business from the small player it is to a formidable force in the industry that your competitors will leave to dread.
Your customers also learn to develop deeper levels of trust for your business and will be more than willing to make a purchase with you.
Be consistent with the kind of message you share, and remember to use brand visibility to reinforce it and get it all over.
For more information about brand building, here’s a chance to have a one on one conversation with one of the leading Digital marketing agencies in Singapore. With MediaOne, you’re eligible for free SEO consultation and more clarification on anything else you didn’t understand about brand building.
Your brand is how the public feels about your business. Online advertisement is at a higher level in Singapore. Today, Singapore is a ready market for any international or home-based company or entrepreneurs dealing with digital internet marketing. It has plenty of opportunities in making your company known. All that is left is taking the first step and establishing your business’s digital online branding. Build up your unique brand and stand out from your business competitors.
