By: Caroline Berryman, CMMP—Editor-in-Chief
More planning and strategy is involved in marketing a new brand than an existing one and poor execution can be a huge disaster for the best products and services.
The first step a new brand should take when developing their marketing strategy is making sure that they understand their target audiences. Without this knowledge, it’s very easy to create messaging that may be too broad or doesn’t address the customer’s actual needs. This can be a challenge for new brands if they try to appeal to a large audience from the start and end up not resonating with potential customers.
It’s never too early for a new brand to start marketing themselves. Even in the early stages of creating awareness, there are potential customers that will not only become early adopters, but will help spread the word about your brand through their social channels.
A common mistake that new brands often make is long or confusing messaging. Consumers tend to have short attention spans, (that’s why they skip ads on social media) so brands need to present a clear, concise and powerful message that draws their audience in. In the world of advertising, a long message will get lost amongst all the other ads your audience may see. Only the memorable ones will stand out.
Brands that don’t have an online presence are ignoring a large potential audience. Ensuring that your online presence speaks well to your brand is important. The online and offline customers are different and you need to tailor your message based on how your audience is going to receive it. Depending on the mediums being used to reach them, the message and the unique selling proposition may vary.
Some final tips for creating brand awareness for a new product or service are; develop a voice and a personality to humanize your brand and make it relatable to your audience, ensure you have a website that is mobile-friendly, build awareness on multiple channels, integrate analytics into your website to get data about your audience and use content generated by your audience to create better brand recall.