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What’s your branding definition and how can you apply it to your business?

A nice article from 99Designs on the importance – and the implied promise – of your company’s brand…

In a free-market world where companies fight for market share and recognition, your brand can be your most valuable asset. It helps you stand out from the competition, gives your company a clear sense of place and purpose and it’s an important element of customer loyalty.

There are millions of recognizable brands in the world, but when you think about how many different companies exist to serve different purposes, you realize that the number of truly known brands – legacy brands – is meager.

A truly great brand goes beyond a great logo and color palette. A great brand has a singular idea behind it, a sense of purpose that drives everything that the company does.

Once you come up with that story for your own business, you can determine the personality of your brand; the logo and design guidelines will come much more easily. Design is that element that stands out initially, but it’s your brand story that is going to give that design and your company’s identity resonance.

Your goal doesn’t need to be as ambitious as creating a legacy brand, but it should be threefold:

Branding your brand is not an easy task. A lot of it requires introspection and commitment.
Thinking about your complicated, multi-faceted company and trying to come up with a singular idea of what it stands for is a difficult and time-intensive process. So where do you start and how do you go about getting to a brand promise, brand story, and design guidelines?

The brand promise

What do you believe? What gets you up in the morning and gets you to work? What problem does your company solve for your clients?

Create a statement by filling in the blank: “We believe….”

Do this repeatedly, targeting different aspects of your company and of yourself (if you’re branding yourself). This is an exercise in identity, and it’s important to start as big as possible and then get smaller over time so that you’re sure to cover every aspect of who you are.

Coming up with answers to this question is easy for some and hard for others, but it’s the most important step in creating a brand that resonates and has lasting value.

Keep in mind that this statement is not a tagline. It can be, but it’s better to think of it as a guiding principle from which a good copywriter can derive a tagline – an idea that a great designer can turn into a beautiful logo and design guidelines, and a feeling of purpose that your company’s employees can support.

Once you have a good number of “We believe that…” statements, start looking for patterns. Combine similar statements and discard any that don’t feel true.

Look for buzzwords (e.g. “inspire,” “innovate,” “best”) and replace them with more precise synonyms. The purpose of this part of the exercise is to focus on a handful of truth-bearing statements that you can then bring to different stakeholders and gut-check them.

You know you’ve found your promise when you land on a statement that reminds you of your company when read entirely out of context. Don’t worry – if you land on something that feels 85 percent there, you might come up with ways of tweaking it to perfection as you move along through the next steps.  This isn’t written in stone, but it will guide the remainder of your brand discovery process.

How do you do this? Why do you do this?

Once you’ve landed on a statement, you’re comfortable with, you’re ready to expand on it and give your brand a story. Answer the questions “How do you do this promise?” and “Why do you do this promise?” separately.

Again, go through the same exercise as before – create many statements that answer each question, using many different synonyms, variations on sentence length, etc. This way, as you create more statements, you’ll discover more about your brand and be able to focus on the truth behind the work you do.

via Footloose&Furry on 99designs

Like you did with the brand promise, make sure you run you how and why statements by stakeholders and people you trust. Set them next to the brand promise and see how they all live together.

Look for patterns that lead to a story. Is your company the hand-holding security blanket-like service you wish you had during your own personal experience in the past? Or are you a luxury-focused company that’s inspired by years of study in human behavior and needs?

These are the kinds of stories that build brands with purpose, and this part of the exercise exists for you to find your own story.

Personality is where your branding definition takes shape

Once you have three statements, you’re comfortable with (your brand promise, your “how” statement, and your “why” statement) and the seeds of your story have been planted, you start to have the beginnings of a brand personality.

What words are you using? Are they more complicated and academic, or are they simple and straightforward? What tone are you gravitating towards – clever, comical, serious, trustworthy?

Pull together all the synonyms you’ve been looking up and pick out a dozen that speak to your brand personality. Be precise. Are you simply “friendly” or are you “affable”?  Are you “trustworthy” or “dependable”?

Over the course of the previous exercises, you saw your brand take shape. Now it’s time to nail down all your particulars and get ready to start creating some tangible brand pieces.

The result of all this introspective work is a single document that can be handed off to a designer, a copywriter, a marketer, or a stakeholder as a brand brief that can easily guide the creation of design guidelines, internal or external communication, or business decisions.

This document now has three parts – your brand promise, your why statement, your how statement, and a dozen or so stand-alone words that describe your brand’s personality. This is an internal document that will guide all external-facing brand elements and keep them grounded in your company’s core truths and ideals.

Design guidelines (The fun part!)

Congratulations, you have your brand identity brief! The hardest part is now over, and it’s time to get a logo and accompanying brand guidelines that reflect everything you’ve put together.

Whether this means designing it yourself or having decided to hire an outside designer, be sure that the person you hire understands your brand brief. Finding a designer with a style that reflects the personality you put together is difficult, but crucial.

There are three ways to go about it – explore Behance for talent with a style that works for you, find a brand you love and try to find the designer who did their work, or reach out to designers on 99designs and get a slew of crowd-sourced designs to choose from.

No matter what you do, ask for three things in your guidelines: a logo, a primary and secondary font, and colors with codes. This will allow you to infuse your brand in all your communication without having to go back to the designer every time you need a new document done.

At this point, the brief should be in stone and should not be changed to yield different design results. This is a blanket statement – there are plenty of times when tweaking one word or another, or adding a bit to explain something further, can yield better results. But be careful that doing so isn’t distorting the message you created in your brand identity statements.

Establishing a branding definition is an incredibly difficult task to undertake, and it’s one that you can do yourself or hire professionals to do. Regardless, you should be incredibly involved every step of the way, as you know your brand best.

Use the brand identity statements to help drive communication internally and externally, because the strongest brands have a bulletproof and consistent identity that permeates every element of their businesses. Strong brand recognition is powerful, so do your best to reinforce its use as much as possible to create a coherent identity.

FAQs:

1. What is branding?

Branding refers to the process of creating a unique name, design, symbol, or combination thereof that distinguishes a product or service from its competitors.

2. Why is branding important for your business?

Branding is important for your business because it helps you establish a unique identity in the marketplace. It differentiates you from your competitors and makes you more memorable to your target audience.

3. How does branding impact a business’s reputation?

Branding has a significant impact on a business’s reputation. A strong brand can build trust and credibility with customers, while a weak or negative brand can harm your reputation and drive customers away.

4. What are the key elements of branding?

The key elements of branding include brand identity (logo, colors, typography), brand message (tagline, slogan, mission statement), and brand experience (customer service, packaging, website design).

5. How can branding help with customer loyalty?

Effective branding can help build customer loyalty by creating a strong emotional connection with your target audience. When customers feel a positive affinity towards your brand, they are more likely to remain loyal and continue supporting your business.

6. What is the role of branding in attracting new customers?

Branding plays a crucial role in attracting new customers. A well-established and recognizable brand can attract attention, generate interest, and entice potential customers to choose your products or services over those of your competitors.

7. How does branding contribute to business growth?

Strong branding can contribute to business growth by differentiating your business, increasing customer awareness and loyalty, and enhancing your reputation. A strong brand can also command higher prices, leading to increased profitability and revenue.

8. Can branding help small businesses?

Absolutely! Branding is equally important for small businesses as it is for larger ones. Developing a strong brand can help small businesses establish credibility, attract customers, compete against larger competitors, and ultimately grow their business.

Source:  99Designs

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Brandwatch’s Chief Marketing Officer Will McInnes encourages readers to look upon visualizations and social data as a business’s “Social Command Center.”  Given our work to help companies extend their conversations with clients throughout the social media ecosystem, the resulting management complexity at times can be enormous.  Read on to hear Will’s take on the growing importance of visuals in modern life and business.  ~ LSi Media

The dominance of visuals in modern life

visualization

We’re stuck in a world of seemingly endless information overload – cat photos, work emails, personal health data from wearables, Tweets, the list is infinite. Every day Americans consume an average of over 100,000 words and 34 gigabytes of content, according to the most recent study on “Measuring Consumer Information” from the University of California. Regardless of the source, that’s a lot of data.

Luckily, humans are visually wired. Visuals help us make sense of the data by showing patterns and connections that matter. It’s the ideal way to consume large amounts of information. Visuals play a massive role in our personal and professional lives, and visualization is the leading solution for efficiently sharing and understanding social information-whether it is live or historical.

The power of visual data in business

Infographics, charts, maps, and dynamic visualizations are the most direct way to communicate stats and numbers to a brand or agency about their audience and business. Social data is becoming a vital part of everyday work for community managers, marketing professionals, customer service employees, and others throughout the enterprise.

Enter social media command centers.

Whatever you want to call them – social media command centers, war rooms, control centers – they are the hub for brands’ online engagement activities, customer service centers, and crisis and security management. Probably the most powerful way a social command center influences businesses is by enabling decision-making and behavioral changes that can have incredibly positive effects.

They show live social data such as sentiment, complaints, images, and trends like campaign success, emerging topics, and consumer journeys. The power of a social command center is its ability to bring the customer’s true, unadulterated, and real-time voice straight into the organization in a visual way that can quickly and powerfully allow staff to do something different.

All of this activity is driven by visuals. With the ability to see social data in real-time, it’s easier to consume timely and vital information. It’s a method that can make the difference between identifying and managing a PR issue when it emerges and being late to the conversation. Delayed or absent information can have drastic negative implications. Conversely, with real-time data, community managers can find emerging influencers and topics, create conversations and promote positive messaging.

Social data + visualizations = social command centers

Many global brands are embracing the power of visual data and implementing social command centers. The mainstream consumer and technology media isn’t discussing social command centers in-depth, although multinational companies are embedding them into their organizations as they focus on becoming socially driven enterprises. As more and more businesses understand the importance of real-time social data and embrace visualizations that allow employees to consume complex data, the more deeply social command centers will penetrate the market.

How exactly does a social command center benefit businesses?

The information flowing through a social command center can be leveraged to inform a brand’s social activities, but that’s just one use case. Social data visualizations can help inform more than a brand’s Twitter, Facebook, or blog posts and responses. From the marketing department to product development, almost every role across an organization benefits from seeing what’s being said online through the data visualizations in social command centers.

In what scenarios do the visual features of a social command center become more valuable than strictly analyzing raw data?

Campaign tracking is a highly cited use case for social command centers. Usually located smack dab in the middle of the marketing or social media team, a social command center provides a heads-up display for community managers, marketers, and PR professionals. But a different reason is emerging and driving businesses to decide to implement command centers: to spark the process of embedding social media throughout an enterprise. A social media-first strategy for any organization can include displaying social data in lobbies and company headquarters, executive and C-suite offices, marketing, and social media departments to show the brand’s digital mentions in real-time.

The power of social data in a command center is visualization. Seeing graphs, charts, Tweets, and competitive comparisons beautifully displayed helps us as human beings and businesspeople process information lightning quickly. Visuals can quickly convert social data points into insights that allow us to inform better and more strategic decision-making.

Smarter businesses know that social media is a powerful medium to learn from and communicate with their consumers. Organizations can disseminate valuable social data across every department through the power of visualizations in social media command centers.

Businesses should dive in headfirst when it comes to social data. Immerse the whole enterprise, every single employee. By directly tapping into consumer conversations on social about brands, competitors, products, and the general industry, you’re empowering your people to absorb and share important information. Visuals make it easy.

FAQs:

1. What is quality visualization?

Quality visualization refers to the use of various visual elements, such as charts, graphs, and diagrams, to represent data and information in a way that is easy to understand and interpret. It allows users to gain insights, identify patterns, and make informed decisions based on the visual representation of the data.

2. Why is quality visualization important?

Quality visualization is important because it enhances data comprehension and communication. It helps to simplify complex concepts and information, making it easier for users to grasp key insights and take action. Well-designed visualizations can also highlight trends, outliers, and relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed in raw data.

3. What are the benefits of embracing quality visualization in 2022?

Embracing quality visualization in 2022 can bring several benefits. It improves data-driven decision-making, enabling organizations to make more informed choices based on visual insights. It enhances information sharing, making it easier for teams to collaborate and understand complex data sets. It also improves data transparency, allowing stakeholders to see and understand the data behind the decisions made.

4. How can quality visualization help businesses?

Quality visualization can help businesses in various ways. It can assist in identifying market trends, customer preferences, and product performance, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions for better outcomes. It can also improve communication with stakeholders, helping to present complex information in a simplified and visually appealing manner.

5. What are some common tools or software for quality visualization?

There are several popular tools and software available for quality visualization, including Tableau, Power BI, Google Data Studio, and D3.js. These tools offer a range of features and capabilities for creating interactive and dynamic visualizations that can be customized to suit specific needs.

6. What are the key elements of effective quality visualization?

Effective quality visualization typically includes the following key elements:

• Clear and concise presentation of data
• Appropriate use of color, size, and shape to convey information
• Consistent and intuitive labeling
• Proper scaling and axis representation
• Interactivity to enable exploration of data

Source:  SocialMediaToday

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We continue to be impressed with Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard is rapidly maturity into a strong and compelling marketing platform.

Pinterest has a new strategy for getting brands on its service: Show, don’t tell. The online inspiration and discovery company unveiled a new, free analytics dashboard for businesses on Tuesday, providing potential advertisers with a glimpse of their mobile and audience analytics for the first time. Pinterest* previously offered a bare-bones dashboard with Web-only information on traffic back to a business’s webpage. Still, it didn’t show traffic numbers from mobile users or any demographic information about the audience each business was attracting.

Businesses could pay third-party analytics companies like Spredfast or Salesforce for some of this info, and Pinterest opened its firehose of information to a few analytics companies in May. Still, the new dashboard offers some data those analytics providers don’t, including numbers related to the “Pin it” widget that companies can embed on their websites.

Now brands can see which pins or boards are performing the best or break down their followers by country, language, and even gender. Businesses can also see which interest categories are most popular with their followers. For example, a brand might notice a large segment of its followers is into a specific sport or style of clothing. The goal of Pinterest is to help brands better understand its service and, ultimately, understand who sees its content. If brands believe they can reach their customers on Pinterest, they may open their wallets once Pinterest ads are more widely available. (The company is currently testing promoted pins.)

According to Jason Costa, Pinterest currently has “several hundred thousand” businesses using the service, a product manager on Pinterest’s ads team. That’s a lot of potential paying customers. Some brands are already using Pinterest data to advertise — they’re just doing it offline. Companies like Target and Nordstrom are taking their most popular pins, for example, and advertising those products in-store with “as seen on Pinterest”-style signage. These are the types of things Costa believes more businesses will do with access to advanced analytics. And, of course, paying to promote a popular pin on Pinterest isn’t a bad idea either.

In Conclusion

Pinterest has recently introduced a new Analytics Dashboard to attract potential advertisers. This initiative aims to provide advertisers with detailed insights into their campaign performance and audience engagement on the platform. The Analytics Dashboard offers various metrics and data visualizations, allowing advertisers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their campaigns accordingly. By offering such comprehensive analytics tools, Pinterest is positioning itself as a viable advertising platform, enticing future advertisers with the promise of informed decision-making, improved targeting, and ultimately, higher return on investment.

FAQs:

1. What is Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard?

Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard is a tool that provides advertisers with detailed insights into the performance of their ads and campaigns on the platform. It offers metrics such as impressions, CTR (click-through rate), engagement rate, and more, allowing advertisers to track the effectiveness of their ads and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns.

2. How can advertisers benefit from Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard?

Advertisers can benefit from Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard in several ways. Firstly, it allows them to measure the impact of their advertising efforts and understand how their ads are resonating with Pinterest users. This information can help them optimize their campaigns to achieve better results and maximize their return on investment. Additionally, advertisers can gain insights into their audience demographics, interests, and behaviors, which can be used to refine their targeting strategies and create more relevant and engaging content.

3. What data and metrics are available in the new analytics dashboard?

The new analytics dashboard provides advertisers with a range of data and metrics to assess the performance of their ads. These include:

• Impressions: The number of times an ad was viewed by Pinterest users.
• Clicks: The number of times users clicked on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website or landing page.
• CTR (Click-Through-Rate): The percentage of ad impressions that resulted in clicks.
• Engagement Rate: The ratio of engagements (e.g., saves, close-ups, link clicks) to impressions.
• Conversions: The number of desired actions completed on the advertiser’s website, such as purchases or sign-ups.
• Top Pins: The most popular and engaging pins in an advertiser’s campaigns.

4. How can advertisers access Pinterest’s new analytics dashboard?

To access the new analytics dashboard, advertisers need to have a Pinterest business account. Once logged in, they can navigate to the Analytics section, where they will find detailed information and reports about their ads’ performance.

5. Can advertisers compare the performance of different campaigns using the analytics dashboard?

Yes, advertisers can compare the performance of different campaigns using the analytics dashboard. They can analyze the metrics and data for each campaign separately, allowing them to identify strengths, weaknesses, and trends across their advertising efforts.

Source: recode.net