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5 Emerging Trends in Branding for 2018

“Digital Marketing”, a term you must be familiar with today, was first used in early 1990s. If you trace the evolution from way back then, you’ll truly realize how digital marketing has evolved.

With the digital marketing industry evolving on a daily basis, it’s safe to say that it determines the future of marketing. With new trends coming in, new algorithms fabricated on search engines, you need to stay updated on digital marketing trends if you want you market your business successfully.

However, digital marketing is just a tool that helps connect your brand to the world.

But before that, do you understand what your brand is? What is branding? How does branding effect your business? What is your brand identity? Is your brand successful? If not, what are the reasons why your brand is not working for you.

Branding is all the methods you use to build an image of your business or organization. A brand identity is how you present yourself and how your customer and users perceive you. It is the collection of all the brand elements (colors, design, logo) that reflect the true spirit of your organization to the world.  It is the brand identity that differentiates your business from the others. If branding is done appropriately and the right way, it helps your business gain loyal customers overtime and helps build a strong brand reputation.

To become a strong and powerful brand, you need to have a strong foundation. To have a successful business that grows, one needs to embrace the trends in digital marketing!  

Here are some branding trends in 2018 you need to be aware of:

How relevant is your brand?

Perhaps the most important aspect of your brand is to know whether you are relevant in today’s day and age to your target audience. If your brand is a company that manufactures radios, chances are you are highly irrelevant. Why? Possibly because we’ve witnessed a huge shift to smartphones and gadgets and there are very few people who would want to purchase a radio.

You need to make sure that the product or service offered by your brand is relevant and stands out. It needs to be something that your customers are consciously looking for and need in order to solve or overcome a problem they face.

If your brand can address a customer’s pain points through the products or services your offer, then your brand is bound to be a successful and relevant one.

Are you marketing wisely?

All brand and businesses have competition. There will always be someone else in the market or industry who is doing the same thing as you, irrespective of whether they’re doing better or as well.

But to stand out and really make your brand the one that takes the win, you need to make sure you market your brand, product and service carefully. This means you must take into your brand identity and brand reputation.

As a business owner, you should have a thorough understanding of where your brand stands in the market and how your audience perceives your brand. Use this information to further your marketing. For example, if your brand is known for aggressively promoting your products and nothing else, maybe it’s a good idea to shut that off for a bit and focus on other things such as building a relationship or connection with your audience through storytelling and personalization.

Social media channel

Which social media channels you pick to market your business can make or break your marketing and promotion strategy. The social media channels you select must be in line with your brand values, mission and vision. You must also keep in mind the target audience and the nature of your products or services.

For example, a travel agency in Iceland is probably not required to have a strong presence on a channel like LinkedIn. A more suitable option for them would be channels like Twitter and Instagram.

A good way to shortlist your channels is to identify your target audience and the platforms they are most likely to hang out on.

Marketing funnel

Having various marketing funnels for your brand is a good idea. This is because in case strategy A doesn’t work, all your effort shouldn’t go to waste. If you have more than one marketing funnel, you are increasing your chances of conversions.

It may take a couple of rounds of testing and tweaking, but eventually, you will land upon the most effective and optimal way of driving conversions.

For example, you could have a social media strategy in place, which asks your customer to visit your website or fill out a form. At the same time, you could be running a contest which requires your audience to fill out the same form, just through a different funnel.

What ads are you promoting?

For too long, businesses have only focussed on promoting their products and services. What nobody realizes is that your audience will only form a relationship with your brand if they connect with it. And if you think aggressively promoting your products will help you achieve that, you’re wrong.

What’s really needed is to form a bond with your audience such that it makes them trust, understand and relate to your brand. Which is why you need to pay special attention to the kind of advertising and marketing you carry out.

It is a good idea to build a connection with your audience through storytelling, sharing behind the scenes, responding to comments and engaging with your audience. Once you manage to build a community and turn your users into loyal customers, your brand is going to achieve success.

Times are changing and so are the ways of building a brand. Businesses are constantly looking to build a relationship with their customers instead of making a sale, and we agree that’s the way forward!

We hope you have a little more knowledge about how marketing trends are paving the way for successful branding! If we missed out on anything, let us know in the comments below!

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