Top 10 Branding Tools and Strategies to Boost Your Business

Top 10 Branding Tools and Strategies to Boost Your Business Business owners need to pay attention to branding tools that can help streamline efforts to effectively bring customer to their business as well as help keep them loyal. Get the Top 10 in this post!

When building your brand you must have the capability to attract potential customers and retain these customers for the long run.

Obviously this doesn’t just happen, because it’s one of the biggest dilemmas among business owners.

Actively nurturing customers and leads takes a lot of effort and strategy. That being said, having the right branding tools can make these strategies go a lot smoother.

The right branding tools can effectively bring customers to your business. The right branding tools can help you retain the customer’s loyalty and consistently cater to their needs and wants.

Boost Your Business using the Top 10 Branding Tools & Strategies 1. Content Marketing

Content feeds customers.

As a critical key point, content marketing is one of the most reliable and effective strategies to boost your brand. One of the best ways for brands to not only gain customers, but to keep them engaged with the brand is through content.

An effective content marketing strategy must have the capability to deliver comprehensive and informative data that will ulitmately help the customer solve a problem.

When we say content marketing, this can take the shape of really any useful content such as blogs, articles, eBooks, hardbound book copies, ads, graphics, and social media content.

So What are the Best Branding Tools for your content marketing efforts? 1. BuzzSumo:

Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding what type of content to share as well as analyzing how well content performs on social media. You can use Buzzsumo to analyze your competitors content and the overall content in your industries niche.

Simply plug in a keyword or website, and Buzzsumo will show you the most socially shared piece of content related to the keyword or from the website. As you can imagine, this is powerful data for social media and content marketers.

2. Social Animal:

Social Animal is another great content marketing tool that helps you to research top performing content on different social media platforms.

Not only does Social Animal analyze thousands of articles — it tells you when to post, and which social media platform will work best for your niche.

Social Animal also features an Influencer Search that finds key influencers based on any keyword or search term.

DRIV Content:

DRIV content is a fully managed and drip-fed stream of high quality and unique content published directly to your site. This means all the research is done for you, the content is optimized for you and even published for you.

2. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, unlike content marketing, includes tactics like SEO, PPC or running ads on social media. Your goal here is to gain exposure and of course capture conversions. Digital marketing is really more of the visual message delivery for your brand; where content marketing is more about building consumer trust.

When you promote your brand, the goal is to combine these different types of marketing so that they all work together in a way that supports your brands’ goals.

A great example of this is SEO strategy…

The goal of search engine optimization is to drive traffic to your website by gaining brand visibility in Google search rankings.

Riffraff Diesel uses SEO to establish brand visibility for it’s products online:

What I really like about Riffraff’s strategy is that you can really see that they are bringing multiple avenues of digital marketing together to reinforce their goals. To clarify, in the screenshot above we can see that they are effectively using SEO strategy to gain first page exposure and traffic.

However, they don’t stop there. In the example below we can see that they build on this by using paid ads to dominate the first page for high yield search terms that relate to their products.

So, what are the best branding tools when it comes to digital marketing? SemRush:

SEMrush is one of the absolute must have keyword research tools. This tool provides both short and long-tail keyword research, along with information on keywords for both PPC and organic traffic.

Canva:

Canva is a pretty awesome free design tool that comes in handy any time you need to create a custom image, an activity that you’ll find yourself doing pretty frequently if you’re managing your company’s social marketing efforts.

Google Keyword Planner:

Any digital marketer is going to be using the Google Keyword planner to hone in their ad targeting. The search volume forecast tool is a great way to not only fine tune keyword selection, but it’s a great way to predict what your ads will actually cost and what your potential ROI might be.

Ahrefs:

Ahrefs is an absolute must have!

Well, at least if you want to;

See the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search results and how much traffic this brings them.

See the exact keywords for which your competitors rank in organic search and the amount of traffic driven by each of them.

Use the Top Pages report to see which pages send the most traffic to their site. Use the Content Gap feature to uncover the keywords they rank for but you don’t.

Rank1 Fully Managed SEO:

RANK 1 is the BEST of the BEST when it comes to fully managed SEO services. If you’re looking to automate or outsource your SEO, then Pixel’s Rank1 program puts all the pieces of the puzzle together to get your website to rank in Google!

3. Event Branding

Event branding as a strategy is the collaboration of various elements to come up with a must-see event. It may be costly on your part but if you can manage it right, it will definitely give your brand exposure and attraction.

Every customer loves free products or services. For example, if you are a fast food restaurant and you’re selling burgers and fries. You may have an event like the first 100 people to come on Wednesday get a free burger with the purchase of a drink and fries.

Properly representing your brand and shaping how your attendees, partners and sponsors remember it are absolutely critical to the growth of your event and your business.

4. Graphic Visuals and Ads

If you think the visual component to your branding isn’t important, you may want to take a look at these statistics:

• Advocacy – 38% of people recommend a brand they like or follow on social media.
• Brand – 21% of consumers say they purhased a new product because it was from a brand they like.
• 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%).
• 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. Video (63%), alone, has also surpassed blogging (60%) in usage as a social media marketing asset.
• When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.

In choosing the best visuals and ads, you should learn how the theme, colors, fonts, and images affect your consumers decisions. In formulating a design, you should relate it to your company and you must have a creative, innovative, and unique style.

You should try to experiment with the various apps and online branding tools in creating your designs. You can use the Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Canva, Filmora, Over Editing App, PiktoChart, Pixlr, and more. You may also experiment with the various editing apps using Word Press plugins.

5. Conferences and Seminars

Be an active advocate of your brand.

As an owner, you should participate and involve your business in conferences and seminars. Conferences and seminars are one of the best ways to establish yourself and your business as an industry leader and an authority.

Professionals around the world hire Andrew Neitlich for guidance on building their brands.

Why? Because he’s a proven thought leader when it comes to brand building and he’s not shy about speaking.

6. Interview Sessions

An interview session is an effective way to broadcast a live discussion about your brand and expose it to the public. Interview sessions are similar to conferences and seminars, but you can create your own interview sessions to use for YouTube or Podcasts.

Click here to see Andrew Neitlich utilizing an interview session to drive marketing efforts for the Center for Executive Coaching.

7. Email Marketing

Every business should be using email marketing. There are various newsletter apps that you can use either for free or with pay. If you’re planning to have a premium account, better think twice first and check whether your budget can meet the email management costs.

What are the best branding tools for email marketing? MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms for a reason. Its interface is clean and simple, and it offers plenty of decent features on its free account.

The best thing about this platform is how easy it is for email marketing beginners to pick up. The interface is ridiculously intuitive and Mailchimp publishes plenty of content to guide you through the process of creating an email campaign.

2. Hoovers

Hoovers is one of the world’s largest commercial databases. This is a great lead generation automation tool to begin building targeted lists of new prospects. Hoovers includes company information to help you have more relevant conversations with those prospects. That helps you turn more prospects into leads and sales.

Get the Top Tips for your Email marketing strategy here.

8. Consult to the Experts

When it comes to building a successful brand sometimes you just need to consult a few experts to for help in setting up a plan your business can follow. I’ve put together a list of the best consultants who offer a wide-range of various services related to branding, design, marketing, etc.…

Here is a short list of great brand consultancy experts for your reference:

• SketchCorp Brisbane

• Pixel Productions Inc.

• The Brand Consultancy

• Sprout Social

• Jacob Tyler

Some owners are hesitant to consult an expert because they don’t want to pay expensive professional fees.

A thorough plan is necessary to keep the branding phase a successful one. The branding experts are equipped with experience already that’s why if we will consult their specialization in this field, it will be a win-win situation for you as the business owner.

9. Rewards Program

Many don’t think of rewards programs as branding tools, but they are most definitely and important part of your brand building efforts. It is important to come up with a rewards program in which new and existing customers can participate. You may provide coupons, discounts, rebates, redeemable prizes, freebies, or any promotional campaigns related to your brand.

10. Referrals and Testimonies

Why do you need refferals and testimonials?

88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. (BrightLocal)

Testimonials are an important part of business and not just ecommerce websites. It allows the new customers to read views from old customers about your products. Almost every customer read past reviews before making a decision to buy the product from a site.

What are the best branding tools to build your reveiws? Kudobuzz:

Kudobuzz allows you to;

• easily collect and display customer testimonials and reviews from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Google+

• Send an email automatically after purchase or fulfillment to request for reviews

• Improve search ranking with Google rich snippet and increase sales

Review Push:

If your goal is to streamline and simplify online review management for businesses and brands; regardless of size or industry, then Review Push just might be for you.

Building a brand and marketing your business online is challenging enough…

Hopefully, these 10 branding tools and strategies will help simplify and streamline your digital marketing efforts.

If you’re using some tools that I haven’t mentioned that you think are great, post them in the comments below.

The post Top 10 Branding Tools and Strategies to Boost Your Business appeared first on Graphic Web Design & Brand Marketing Company Medford OR.

by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company