An element gaining ever-greater terrain in the Tech Sector is that of the brand of a product or service. Brands enable products and services to be identified and so make them stand out from the competition, as we mentioned in our last article on Inbound Marketing. Brands intervene in the forging of their own identity and are making a big impact in our Inbound Marketing strategy.
One of the fundamentals of Inbound Marketing methodology is to give our visitors, users and prospects alike a feeling of confidence, at the same time showing our expertise and stressing the importance of Value content and personalization via emailing activities in automated Workflows.
Brand has a major influence in a faster growing relationship of confidence between our Company and future clients, if the brand built has been shown to provide added value to all our activities. It will also speed up the path through the Sales Funnel.
This is because brands bring features such as prestige and security to products and services. The brand concept is both complex and relevant as it comes with a series of parameter which we must differentiate to be able to know how to best fit it to our Inbound Marketing strategy:
- Brand: Specific, according to its name, term, symbol, design combination of these. The aim is to identify a firm’s products and services in order to set them apart from those of the competition.
- Brand name: The voices that make it possible to pronounce – i.e. its phonetics.
- Logo: The written symbol which enables it to be identified and situated.
- Registered trademark: A legally protected brand, which enables companies to have exclusive use of their products or services.
We must make sure that when creating a brand name it is easy to recognize and that it engages positively with users and consumers. It must become part of our Look & Feel and be up there in all our content be it in infografícs, Whitepapers, Datasheets or eBooks which we offer within our Map of Contents of Inbound Marketing methodology.
This will enable users to recognize us when they are surfing the internet looking for information on competitors or similar services. It will be easier for them to remember us and keep us in mind before the competition when they are in the decision making phase of the Buyer Journey.
Brand image in the Buyer Persona of our Inbound Marketing
Brand image is the personality or meaning via which consumers and users describe, remember and relate to a brand. A brand can become known through the type of people who buy it, the way it is used and how it is advertised on internet. Therefore, our Inbound Marketing strategy must keep our Buyer Persona in the middle of the picture at all times.
Brands often project more than one meaning – they can conjure up a series of connotations, be they physical attributes, how they are used or indeed how they are sold. This is why it is so important to plan and design a brand that will create the right idea for a product, service or its use.
The so-called influencers can help speed up brand recognition processes and generate benefits for it. The exclusivity given to some products and services by Partners, Distributors or Manufacturers can also boost our brand if they make it viral along with our the strategic contents of our Inbound Marketing campaign via social profiles or including it in Newsletters etc.
Another useful feature of a good brands is that there is no need to use generic names. That said, some brands have become so widely accepted that they have actually substituted the generic name of a given product or service, which shows them to be a paragon of consumer confidence.
