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Branding vs Marketing: All You Need To Know
Branding vs Marketing: All You Need To Know
Most times, people think that branding and marketing are the same. It is true they have so many features that define both as similar. Beyond that, there are major differences between the two that make each unique in its own way. The important thing is that they both seek to achieve the same goals – awareness and lead generation.
To help you be more effective in lead generation and get more return on your advertising budget, you need to understand some important things about the two and why both are important to the growth of your business.
Let’s quickly differentiate them.
1. Branding
Every business has products to sell or services to render with a promise attached to it. We can see branding as the fulfillment of that promise. It is the thought that people who have had a connection with your business hold on to. Brand strategy, therefore, involves stating precisely a promise and illustrating how it will be accomplished. Effective branding helps develop a well regarded, loved, and respected brand.
Features of Branding:
- Personality: Your brand personality is exclusive to you alone. It creates a presence that makes you unique, and it determines the customers’ relationship with your brand.
To get the best brand personality that will have an impact, you must work with your customers. Key into their opinions. It will help you navigate your way through crafting the most compelling personality for your business.
- Purpose: Your brand should have motives and core values that attract your ideal customers. The best way to get loyal customers is by defining a clear purpose for your brand.
You need to have a clearly stated mission that guides you through decision-making phases and helps you connect properly with your customers.
- Guidelines: Having guidelines and by-laws keep team members on the same page. You should follow the set guidelines strictly if you want to build a cohesive brand. Brand guidelines cover: all aspects of branding including
- voice,
- tone,
- language,
- image, and
- personality.
Staying consistent with your brand guidelines allows you to stay true to yourself. If your message is all over the place, your audience will be confused about who you truly are and they likely won’t convert to paying customers.
- Experience: Brand experience helps you identify loops and fill them up. When customers give their feedback on how they feel about your brand, you get to understand things better.
Loyal customers support your brand through thick and thin. To build a team of brand loyalists, the stability of your brand experience must be remarkable. A lot needs to be invested in branding, but the ROI is worth it many times over.
2. Marketing
Marketing is what you do after you have a solid brand. Marketing is letting customers know of your brand and why they should buy from you. It’s the process of identifying, analyzing and meeting customer needs. In context, marketing strategy involves using the appropriate channels to let your audience know who you are and to boost sales.<br><br> The essence of marketing is to get sales. It uses the push tactic to promote a product or service. The push tactic is a strategy adopted by a brand to sell (push) its products or services to consumers by using different marketing techniques.
Marketing can be online or offline in the forms of pay per click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, mobile marketing, print campaigns, TV and radio.
- How to sell with marketing
Marketing can be done traditionally or digitally. Social media pay per click, blog posts, emails and other contents are forms of digital marketing. Traditional marketing can be done via direct mail, networking, and word of mouth.
Regardless of the type of marketing you choose to employ, the goal is well-defined: to sell. With the right marketing skillset, customers get driven to do business with your brand. For marketing to succeed, the message must be clearly stated, informative, and simplified. In other words, if you don’t build a solid brand before you do marketing, you’ll be wasting your time and money.
- Branding first, then marketing
Branding and marketing complement each other as one can not do without the other. Marketing presents your brand to the world. But, you should know that marketing cannot be implemented in your company if it does not have a brand-building technique to operate with.
Having a logo, business design, and a motto might make you assume you have a brand automatically. Don’t assume wrongly – you need an integrative branding strategy that works well with your branding strategy. Many companies have taken marketing over branding, believing that’s how the system works. No! Branding should be the first thing every business considers. Marketing will do its part afterwards.
All your marketing efforts will not sum up to elevate your market value if brand management is missing.
3. What differentiates branding from marketing?
- Scope: Marketing is an activity that focuses on external influence to attract prospects. Branding is extensive in that it covers the image of the brand both internally and externally.
- Marketing is useful for creating brand awareness, getting new customers and generating sales. Branding backs up marketing by ensuring the message maintains conformity and consistency.
- Marketing reveals potential and serious customers. Branding helps attract the RIGHT customers to you and builds their loyalty to your business.
- Both branding and marketing need a robust strategy that should work cohesively together.
- Branding uses pull marketing. Marketing uses push tactics. In push marketing, the business attempts to take/push their products to the customers; while in pull marketing, the aim is to draw consumers to the products or services and create brand loyalty. Once a product has successfully gained awareness in the market through push marketing tactic, the pull marketing strategy is introduced to attract dedicated customers.
- Branding strengthens your values before the public, while, Marketing implores a customer to take action.
- It is easier to control, measure, and understand marketing, compared to branding.
When marketing says “buy me,” branding says “hey, have a good look at me. This is what I stand for and this is why I was made. Do you like me? If so, buy me and tell your friends about me.”
As a brand, it is important to use your understanding of how branding differs from marketing to build a strategy that connects with your core values. Listen to your customers and let their feedbacks guide your trajectory.
Having a deep understanding of the difference between branding and marketing will help you set up a strong brand foundation, and expand it through marketing.
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Nectar is part branding powerhouse, part consultancy, and part digital marketing agency based in Manhattan.
