When people talk about how to grow a great business, “branding” and “marketing” often come up. Mixing the two up is easy because they are often used interchangeably instead of as two ideas that should be thought about carefully. Learn about the differences between branding and marketing today so you can understand the benefits of each and how to use them for your business.
What Is Branding?
Branding is a way to communicate a business’s beliefs, core principles, purpose, style, and anything else that makes the business, its goods, or its services stand out. Your brand is usually shown through visuals like logos, color schemes, fonts, and how you write.
Seth Godin, an expert in the field, says, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, accounts, and relationships that make a consumer choose one product or service over another.” Seth states that your brand is only valuable if you charge more for it, people talk about it, or people choose it over other brands.
How a brand plan is made hasn’t changed much over time. Many of the essential parts of a brand haven’t changed much in the past 50 years. This is because the heart of a product or business changes more slowly than its communication methods.
Most Branding Activities
In the bigger picture of your branding and marketing plan, your branding actions will usually include (but are not limited to):
- Making a Brand Style Guide
- Color Scheme Development
- Choosing a tone and style for communication Logo Design Vision and Mission Statements
- Core Values and Principles Development
- Managing Your Reputation
- Unique Brand Intangibles
Branding rarely occurs in a vacuum, and the above things need to be reworked and improved based on studies into the target market and tests with users. Follow our guide to picking an advertising firm for the best chance of finding a good company for the brand in Houston, Austin, or DFW.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is finding people who will pay for your goods or services. Marketing was all about making sales and getting the word out. You can’t have a successful business if your products or services don’t reach paid users. Depending on your business’s sales, you can use business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) marketing to spread your message or get your target buyers to connect with you.
Your marketing plans and strategies should change as the ways your target audience spends their time and attention change. For instance, 30 years ago, a TV commercial might have been the most effective means to reach the most possible people. But as more people got online, social media became one of the most prominent places where people spend their time and pay attention.
Common Marketing Activities
Most Marketers Will Use One Or More Of These Methods And Tactics:
- Web Design and Development
- SEO,
- PPC and Digital Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Direct Mail Marketing
- Graphic Design Trade Show Marketing
- Traditional Media Placement
In the past 20 years, digital marketing services have developed quickly. This is mainly because your business has so many possible customers on websites like news sites, social media platforms, and search engines.
How Do Branding And Marketing Differ?
Branding and marketing are often used almost equally, but there are apparent differences between the two. Here is a way to explain the difference between marketing and branding that is too simple. Branding is the process of figuring out what needs to be said, and marketing is the act of saying it.
Marketing and brand building have some things in common. For instance, graphic design is utilized to develop a brand’s colors and how its image looks and feels. Graphic design is additionally employed to promote a brand through images, digital and accurate material like sell sheets and goods PDFs, and even website design.
As digital marketing systems grow to add reputation signs to their platforms, reputation management is also growing very hard to do. For example, when local SEO marketing ranks search results, it looks at image signs such as reviews and direct brand searches.
The Mental Difference
It is said that logic and rationality only play a role in about 20% of Americans’ decisions, while feelings play a role in about 80%… People don’t buy or choose what they need; they buy or pick what they want. Your marketing may attempt to use every fact and reason in the book to get people to pick your brand over another.
But eight times out of ten, a possible customer will choose your brand based on how it makes them feel. In short, if your product or service has a firm name, it can go from being a stock to a market winner. Because of this, you need to spend a lot of time and effort constructing your brand before you start marketing.
Brand Marketing and Growth Marketing
Growth marketing (“performance marketing”) is all the rage because marketing today is so intelligent. With the internet and voice-over-IP (VOIP) phone systems, you can keep track of almost everything a possible customer does when they talk to your business.
This is great for marketers who are good at analyzing data and gives them a straightforward way to improve since their success can be measured and shown by the relevant stats. But people who have been in the business for a long time are starting to wonder if the younger, more tech-savvy performance marketers are good at marketing or just good at the tactics for each platform.
You can ignore a brand’s personality and still get a lot of shares, high results, and many clicks, which will lead to more sales. But short-term marketing doesn’t keep putting money into a strong brand that will hold up when a potential customer decides based on feeling.
Brand marketing is a method of branding and marketing that looks at the whole picture. This type of marketing considers how your company looks and sounds across all platforms while applying those things to your advantage. Brand managers know that a strong brand can speed up the results of social media, SEO, and paid ads.
