RESOURCE GUIDE
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Experience Builds Presence
VISUALIZE ENGAGEMENT
A Complete Guide To Brand Consulting
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." – Sun Tzu
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, you need to know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to enhance your own strategy and take advantage of any gap in the market. This is where competitive analysis comes into play.
Competitive analysis can also play a significant role in your branding. Fyi, when we say brand, we’re not just talking about your logo and other visual representations, but also what truly represents your business and how your audience perceives you.
Competitive Analysis
How to conduct a competitive analysis to improve your brand.
At LOJO Marketing, we conduct an in-depth competitive analysis to help you succeed in today’s cut-throat competition.
Meanwhile, here are the steps that we follow.
1. Seek your direct competitors
These companies offer the same products and services and serve the same target customers as yours.
2. Identify your indirect and substitute competitors
These competitors offer products or services that can serve as a substitute for whatever you’re offering, OR they have a slightly different product but target the same customers as yours (e.g., accountants competing against bookkeepers).
Knowing how they fill the gap against your business is key to building sound branding and marketing strategy.
3. Identify key points you want to focus on
These could be your competitors’ marketing share, business model and strategies, pricing, marketing approach, target audience, quality of their after-purchase service, or anything you find worth investigating.
4. Begin your actual research
If your competitors are non-public companies, you may find it hard to conduct accounting and operational research. Fortunately, it’s easier to gather more helpful information such as their target customers, price points and product features.
5. Use proper documentation
You may want to use graphs and charts to help your team visualize your market position. The idea here is to create a written analysis that will allow your business to come up with a concrete plan of action.
6. Identify your weak spots while looking at your competitors’ strengths
Are your competitors’ customers raving about your after-sale customer service? How about their social media engagement and online brand visibility?Are they also enjoying success in these aspects? Perhaps you can learn and adopt the strategies that make them successful in these areas.
7. Adopt certain changes
You can learn from your competitors’ mistakes and weaknesses and adopt their winning strategies (or at least be inspired by them).
8. Track your results
Measure your sales, social media engagement, search engine ranking, or whatever goal you have in mind. Also, you need to set a timeline.
Ways to improve business using competitive analysis
Competitive analysis can improve your business by thinking of it as purposive research in which the goals are to achieve the following things:
Identifying your strengths and weaknesses
Comparing your business with your direct competitors makes it easier to be objective because you have a baseline.
Evaluating trends in your industry/sector
The business landscape has never been static. From consumer sentiment and technology to social media and distribution channels, the only permanent thing is change.
Understanding your marketplace and position
Knowing your direct competitors can help you differentiate your brand.
Planning your growth
With key information about your competitors, you can point out the gaps in the market that you can fill in and at the same time improve your product and service to your customers.
"No competition, no progress."
– Bela Karolyi (Hall of Fame Romanian Gymnastics Coach)
Audience Research
The overall success of your brand boils down to one thing: Your ability to make customer-centric decisions. Consequently, successful businesses often conduct audience research, which is sometimes called a “listening process” since the goal is to uncover what the target or potential audience wants and needs.
Audience research can also shed light on how, why and what motivates them to engage with your brand.
The Benefits of Conducting Audience Research
Create accurate buyer personas
In simple terms, a buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. Although this person is fictional, it’s based on in-depth research of your existing or desired customers.
When you have accurate buyer personas, you can have a better understanding of what your actual customers need and want, allowing you to be more efficient in marketing, sales, product development, after-sales customer service, and other business aspects.
Develop audience-centric communications
Your social media posts, blogs, videos, paid ads, landing pages and all the content you publish should reflect your audience’s language and core values, and provide them with relevant or interesting information.
Imagine that a UK-based food chain wants to open a branch in the US. To succeed in their new turf,
they need to act locally, which is only possible if they know their audience’s preferences, language, pain points, demographics and spending habits.
Innovation and product development
Remember that audience research is about challenging biases and assumptions. For instance, you may think that your product needs improvement, but in reality, your online store just fails to deliver an easy and pleasant buying experience.
Create a better customer experience
When you know your target audience well, it’s easier to create a positive customer experience in which they have memorable, enjoyable and worthwhile interactions with your brand.
Most common methods to conduct audience research
First things first: You should always conduct audience research in relation with a specific organizational goal. Once you have a clear objective in mind, that’s when you can start the actual “listening process.”
Save money, time and other resources
When you know your ideal customers and how you should interact with them, you can focus on marketing and sales strategies that are likely to deliver the desired results.
These are the 5 most common methods brands use when conducting audience research
Build on existing research
You can use studies, data, and surveys published by business organizations, industry groups and journalist reports.
Hold focus groups
This approach is ideal if you’re focused on quick and qualitative feedback. The idea is to select 5-10 people who represent your ideal customers.
Use surveys
This method is ideal if you want quantitative information about your audience; however, it may fall short when identifying their habits and motivations.
Look at your metrics
Your site traffic, visitor conversion, new and returning visitors, location of your users, keyword performance, traffic from inbound links, etc., can reveal a lot about your audience’s online behavior and demographics.
Conduct interviews
While these are time- and labor-intensive, they can reveal valuable insights that may disprove your biases and assumptions.
Brand Consultant vs. Brand Strategist
It’s not uncommon for business owners to develop blind spots when they get used to running their own show; this is problematic since it can prevent them from adapting innovations based on the ever-changing market trend and consumer behavior.
If you want to remain competitive and innovative, you need fresh eyes that give you new perspectives on your brand–this is where brand consultants and brand strategists come into play.
At a glance, brand strategists and brand consultants look the same because they both provide expertise in your business. Nevertheless, their functions and goals are a bit different when you look closely.
Key Message
Your brand is not just about your logos, colors and other visual elements, which are just the superficial aspect that describes your business. In reality, your brand is the entire identity of your business and how your customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders perceive your organization.
You can also think of your brand that gives your business its personality.
The importance of humanizing your brand
Imagine you’re a B2B software company that caters to small- and medium-sized enterprises. Do you want your organization to be perceived as a “tech guy” who is reliable, innovative and friendly?
If your answer is yes, then make sure that your branding should include excellent customer service and digital products that adapt to the ever-changing needs of your clients.
Notice that in the example above, we use human-like traits like reliability, friendliness and innovation. This is because you need to humanize your brand since people only respond to people–it’s that simple.
But how do you humanize your brand?
At LOJO Marketing, we follow these “best practices” to make your brand more “human” and relatable to your target audience.
Share valuable content and engage with the right audience
The idea here is to promote human interactions that create a fun, relevant or worthwhile experience with your customers.
Focus on human relationships rather than hard-core selling.
Today’s consumers don’t want to be sold to; they want to be informed about a product or service. Also, they appreciate brands that listen to their feedback.
Consistency is the key.
If you want to present yourself as a reliable and innovative company, your product, service, paid ads, social media posts, images, videos and other content should reflect this brand’s “personality.”
Take your audience behind the scenes.
Your website’s “About Us” page, social media posts and videos are great platforms that give “face” to your business.
FYI, no one remembers “faceless” brands and “robotic” marketing strategies.
Benefits of having a strong brand
Creating a solid brand is a long-term game. In fact, it’s a perpetual process in which you adapt to the market trend, changing consumer behavior and sentiment, and ever-evolving technology. Here are the benefits you can expect if your organization has a strong brand.
Effective advertising
Ads and branding always go hand in hand since you can’t sell something people can’t relate to or don’t recognize.
Effective Advertising is a result of knowing the audience,
knowing your company values and what the service or product represents to the whole mix that speaks to customers with authority, knowledge and comfort.
More engaged employees
When you have a solid identity and your staff knows and believes in it, chances are they feel more invested in the organization.
The internal language and theme of a company can spell unity and harmony within the core business through the strong faith in the company from the employees themselves, at a genuine level.
More loyal customers
Again, a solid and humanized brand has no problem attracting and keeping customers.
Positive and consistent perception
You need a recognizable and trustworthy “face” that’s reflected in your product, quality of service, sales efforts and marketing content.
Brand Strategy
Contrary to popular belief, your branding strategy is not just the sum of your logo and other visual elements, although they are integral to any successful branding effort.
In a nutshell, a branding strategy includes the logo, colors and other visual elements, public perception, and brand awareness and sentiment. In short, it’s about the emotions you want to solicit from your target customers and other stakeholders (partners, employees, vendors, etc.) every time they see your product, logo, or anything that represents your business.
What constitutes a successful brand strategy?
A successful branding strategy goes beyond letting the world know your brand exists. A more important goal is to create a positive public perception and solicit a positive emotional response from your target audience every time they see and interact with your brand.
Despite the importance of having a solid brand, it’s a bit of a challenge to measure it because we’re dealing with intangible and almost non-quantifiable elements. Consequently, the closest thing we can do to evaluate this is to conduct a brand awareness survey, social media auditing and listening, and Google Trends and Google Analytics review.
But what really constitutes a successful brand strategy?
At LOJO Marketing, our brand strategy is created by answering these critical questions.
What are your brand’s objectives?
How do you communicate your brand’s objectives and message?
What pain points do you want to solve?
How does your product or service benefit your target customers?
What reputation do you want to build for your brand?
What emotions do you want to solicit from your customers every time they see your brand?
How do you identify your target customers?
How do you identify your direct, indirect and substitute competitors?
Who among your competitors are good at meeting your target customers’ needs and wants?
What voice and personality do you want for your brand?
How do you engage with your potential customers?
Working with Logos and Website Redesign
All business organizations need a visual identity to help customers identify and remember their products and services. But surprisingly enough, many small- and medium-sized companies skimp on professional logo design.
Think of your logo as a symbol, drawing or mark that represents your brand’s identity and its “promise” to the customers.
How important is a Logo?
You can’t design your website without your logo, consistent color palette, and other visual elements that represent your brand.
A logo is one of the most important visual elements because
it creates consistency across your online presence, from your website and social media to landing pages, blogs and paid ads. Consequently, it can boost your brand recognition and help your target audience and existing customers recognize you from different digital platforms.
Logo and website redesign
A logo becomes even more important when you redesign your website because it
allows your audience to recognize you even after making some changes.
By having a unique and memorable visual identity, your customers will know that they can still expect the same quality of service or product they’re getting from you.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to be apprehensive about website redesign, especially if it involves a significant or complete overhaul, because of the risk of confusing their audience. But with a memorable and unique logo, you can avoid this problem.
Meanwhile, these are the things that warrant website redesign.
LOJO's Brand Consultants
You need to use consistent visual elements such as logo, colors and typography to make your business easily recognizable; this is why opting for branding packages makes more sense than separate branded items.Aside from having a cohesive visual identity that reflects your core business values, branding packages are an excellent choice if your goals include the following:
-You’re a new company entering the market.
-You want to rebrand your company after introducing new products/services.
-Your core business goals or target market has changed drastically over time.
-You need a large-scale marketing campaign to boost revenue, improve brand awareness, etc.
Services included in LOJO's branding packages
Our graphic designers and brand specialists will help you establish your brand’s image through a set of digital and physical resources, from logo and color palette to website, email templates and business cards. Please continue reading below to learn more about the most common services included in our branding packages.
Logo
A logo is one of the most critical elements of brand design because it’s a symbol made of text and images that identifies your business and makes you recognizable.
Think of it as your primary visual identity that reflects what your company does and its values. Depending on how you want to present your business to the public, your logo may be a figurative or abstract design, include your company’s name, or contain a memorable graphic mark.
Website
Another important element in a branding kit, your official website acts as your digital storefront where your audience can learn more about your products and services. Also, this platform serves as your online identity, or to be more exact, your multi-dimensional resume containing interactive and user-friendly elements that give visitors a pleasant experience.
Email templates
Email is one of the most potent marketing channels because of its high conversion rate and ROI, provided that you use strategies that convert your audience into actual buyers and maintain current customers engaged with your brand. Effective email marketing campaigns also provide brand consistency to ensure that your customers can easily recognize you from your competitors.
Color palette
Did you know that the color palette in branding increases your brand awareness and recognition by up to 80%? Or did you know that it also plays a critical role in how your target audience perceives your company?
In marketing and sales, color palette plays an even more important role, with one study suggesting that
ads in color are 42% more effective in catching the reader’s attention than the same ads in black and white format.
Other branding services
At LOJO Marketing, our branding packages may also include letterhead, brochures, package design and business cards. You may also ask our graphic designers to provide you with a typography service, which is the art of arranging letters to make your copy clear and visually appealing to your target customers.
