The Fundamentals of Brand Advertising – All You Need to Know

No matter how good your product is or how well you market it, all those efforts alone cannot guarantee your company’s success. In the current marketplace, having great products and services isn’t enough. Advertising them properly is also not enough. Along with all those things, you need to have a memorable, unique brand that captures the attention of customers and inspires a long-lasting relationship.

To accomplish all of that, you need terrific brand advertising. In this article, we will talk about it: what it is, how it’s done, and why it matters to businesses.

Let’s get started.

What is Brand Advertising?

To put it simply, brand advertising is a type of advertising which aims to help your business establish connections and build strong and lasting relationships with customers over time.

Companies that specialize in brand advertising are aiming to achieve a good reputation and long-term positive recognition. Such companies work to establish a strong brand identity, as well as credibility, which helps forge loyalty amongst their customers on both a spiritual and intellectual level.

How Does Brand Advertising Add Value to a Company?

While it’s impossible to measure brand advertising campaigns – ones that are being run to improve a company’s SEO ranking or social media following – they still offer a tremendous amount of value to a business.

The more customers know about your company, the more likely they are to go through the entire buyer’s journey and the more likely customers will take action whenever they see a performance-based ad in the future, which may potentially turn them into loyal customers.

Brand advertising matters most in the beginning stages of the marketing funnel and, more specifically, during the exposure, influence, and engagement stages. Let us take you on a more detailed journey to see how brand advertising adds value across those early stages.

Exposure: Helps Establish Brand Identity

During this first stage, the exposure one, it’s vital for the brand to deliver a terrific first impression and establish a strong, positive, and consistent brand image. This brand identity has several different components: the brand’s logo, colors, fonts, web presence, other visual elements, and even its slogan.

All these elements aim to tell the story of the brand. If you want to be perceived as a stronger corporate brand (for example, if you’re in the legal or financial industry), then you want to have a more professional image. That’s conveyed by having a plain logo, simplistic fonts, a simple but effective web presence, and a more serious tone of voice.

On the other hand, if your business aims to be more lighthearted and recreational, then you can have brighter colors, a more playful logo, unusual fonts, and a fun brand message.

The best brands have such a strong image that they don’t even need to be named in order for customers to recognize them. Think of companies like Apple, Nike, Twitter – you just see their logo, and you immediately know that it’s them.

Influence: Makes the Brand Feel Credible

Trust is a vital component of the relationship between a brand and its customers. This means that if customers have trust in your company, they’re more likely to purchase products from it. Having effective brand advertising is a great way to build credibility and inspire trust in your target audience. One of the ways to achieve that is by portraying your company as a leader in its industry. You can so by

• Launching campaigns during which experts offer their knowledge and advice to the general public.
• Sponsoring community events and sports teams.
• Organizing charitable events for causes that are in a way relevant to your industry: school reform, human rights, medical research, helping veterans, or fighting climate change.

The idea behind these actions is to spread positive news about your company to a broader audience. They help build an image for your business and portray it as a “good guy”, eager and ready to help the community. This helps not only build recognition for your brand but also increases trust in it.

Engagement: Builds Stronger Connections

The best brands not only offer products, but they also offer solutions and a sense of belonging to an idea to their customers. This means that ads shouldn’t only make logical sense, they should also offer an emotional aspect to encourage meaningful engagement and provoke positive feelings. If people feel like the relationship between them and the brand isn’t personal, they likely won’t get attached to it.

There are two ways to engage your audience in such a manner:

• With the use of memorable slogans such as Nike’s “Just Do It,” McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it,” Wheaties’s “Breakfast of Champions,” and many more.
• By having interesting spokespersons like Mr. Peanut, Kool-Aid Man, Jolly Green Giant, and others.

Using these elements in your commercials and ads makes it easier for the viewers to remember your company and distinguish it from the rest of your competitors on the market.

Why You Need Brand Advertising in Your Marketing Strategy

There’s a great quote from Maya Angelou that I love and it goes like this: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Brand advertising matters because it’s all about provoking feelings in customers. It aims to show your company as a character, a person – one that has goals, ideas, a mission, and a personality. Whenever people feel a kinship, a connection to your brand’s message, they will become loyal to it. They identify with it.

Consider the world’s most memorable brands, like Nike and Apple. They don’t just sell a product, they sell an idea, the idea that an individual matters more than a corporation or the idea that if you just work hard, if you “just do it,” you can be the next great athlete. That’s what people associate with those brands, that feeling that they understand, that they have the same goals.

That’s why brand advertising matters. It creates an emotional connection that lasts longer than any product, service, or ad campaign.