Alphabet®
Building a Branding Campaign: What, How, Why & Where
No matter your business niche, the playing field is likely chock-full of competition. That’s why it’s more important than ever to develop a strong branding campaign within your marketing plan.
According to data from the Revenue Marketing Alliance, most companies think of branding as a way to differentiate their business from competitors. While this is true, your branding can be so much more. By running a thoughtful campaign, you make your brand work for you, building relationships with consumers and growing your business.
At Alphabet Creative, we understand the importance of holistic branding—and how to use your brand identity to bolster business growth. A branding campaign doesn’t just advertise your brand and its promise; it nurtures a relationship between your target audience and your brand persona that generates a loyal consumer base. But how do you do it? Here, we go over the what, how, why, and where of a branding campaign – so you know where to start.
What is a Branding Campaign?
A brand campaign leverages your brand promise to build a positive association with your brand. This is unlike a product- or service-specific campaign, which aims to entice customers into making a purchase. Instead, branding campaigns mean playing the long game of building awareness, recognition, and loyalty. When executed well, your brand becomes synonymous with your services, experiences, or solutions, and your consumers feel like they have a relationship with you.
A successful branding campaign fosters a customer base that loves your brand. With so many options on the market, consumers turn to the brands that they connect with and trust. Effective brand marketing is key to building this relationship and influencing consumer purchases and behaviour.
For example, if you build a brand that stands for humanitarian rights, it doesn’t matter if you only sell socks. People will flock to your company because they resonate with your mission and share values with your brand. Your products and services merely serve as proof of your value. Brand marketing is all about loyalty in the brand-consumer relationship.
Key Steps to Building an Effective Branding Campaign
So you get why brand marketing is important—but if you only have a logo and a dream, you may not know where to start. Launching a brand campaign is key to establishing your company in your niche, building customer loyalty, and, ultimately, driving conversions. To do this, you’ll need to dedicate careful effort to fleshing out the details of your campaign. It all starts with effective and creative brainstorming.
Once the ideas are flowing, follow these six steps to building your brand marketing campaign.
1. Establish Your Goals & Vision
The first step to creating an effective branding campaign is to establish your goals. Without a clear vision, a piecemeal branding campaign likely won’t have the desired effect. While most marketing goals centre around generating leads, increasing conversions, and increasing brand awareness, you’ll need more than these vague marketing platitudes.
Successful branding campaigns call for specific goals. Take inspiration from the SMART goal philosophy: each goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Sensitive.
For example, instead of saying your goal is to “increase engagement,” take it a step further. Changing it to “increase engagement rate on Instagram by 40% in Q3” has more specificity and intention. Now you know exactly where to target your efforts and what success will look like.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Developing your branding campaign means knowing who you’re talking to—you must identify your target audience from the start. This isn’t just blind guessing; find your target audience by sifting through existing data on your consumers. Then create in-depth buyer personas. These will help you understand who is converting to your brand—and why they are choosing you over your competition.
Well-developed buyer personas help you walk in the shoes of your consumers. For example, if you want to attract leads who are 35-49, value job security, and have moderate-to-high incomes, then you probably won’t use the newest Gen Z slang in your marketing copy. Instead, you’ll adopt a voice that caters to their desire to make informed decisions and investments that support work-life balance.
3. Choose Your Designated Platforms & Channels
With your goals outlined and your target audience defined, the next step to developing a brand marketing campaign is deciding your platforms and channels. In most cases, you will run simultaneous campaigns in multiple spaces. Each requires slight adjustments to message and imaging.
Your platforms are the spaces where a consumer engages with a brand’s digital presence. This includes your website, social media platforms, mobile apps, and so on. Channels are the means that you communicate directly with your audience—think emails, ads, chats, and messaging apps. Most platforms have a respective communication channel (direct messaging on Instagram, or a chat box on your website).
Your target audience will impact which platforms and channels you choose. Discover where your prospective consumers spend their digital time and dedicate your brand campaign to those spaces.
4. Determine KPIs
Polishing your current marketing plan is a more efficient use of resources than scrapping it and starting from scratch. But if something didn’t work, how do you know what to change?
Reflecting on your key performance indicators – or KPIs – and other important metrics will help you see what’s working in your branding campaign and what parts didn’t pan out. Use specific metrics to address issues and make changes; track brand engagement, brand awareness, conversions, and repeat customers, along with asking for feedback from customers. With a bit of time and tweaking, you will better meet customer needs and get better ROI for your branding campaign.
5. Set Campaign Timeline & Budget
Your branding campaign is really getting somewhere now—but to put it into action, it needs a timeline and budget. This means breaking down your overall goals into smaller points and defining your key results.
Your campaign’s timeline likely won’t be linear. If your goal is a 40% increase in engagement, don’t expect a steady increase of 5% each week. Instead, give your team time to research and prepare materials, to implement and tweak your campaign, and so on. It’s helpful to define your workflow in advance, so you can gauge progress each week.
A branding campaign takes more than just time and expertise. It will likely require cold hard cash. Ads, employee time, and software subscriptions add up. In the planning phase, form a clear estimate of both your timeline and budget so you can hit the ground running.
6. Create Campaign Promo Materials
Now that you know the what, when, how, and why of your branding campaign, it’s time for lift-off. That means creating the quality content of your brand and sending it out into the ether.
From the imaging and visuals to the tone of the copy, everything must be dialled in to reflect your brand identity and speak to your prospective consumers. Be creative but consistent—you want to build on your differentiators without confusing your audience. Everything should feel aligned, from ads to packaging to customer service.
Intimidated? Alphabet Creative Can Guide Your Branding Campaign
Running a branding campaign as part of your marketing strategy builds customer loyalty. An attractive brand that speaks directly to your target audience will help you generate more leads; but it takes nuance, skill, and experience to develop a winning branding campaign.
Our years of expertise enable us to guide our clients through integrating brand identity flawlessly into marketing campaigns. Together, we’ll uncover your brand story and help you build and execute campaigns that truly celebrate the soul of your company.Are you ready to level up your branding game? Reach out today!