Brand Management Solution: Tools for Effective Marketing Communication

Building a thriving brand is always a challenge. It doesn’t matter if you’re building the next Apple or guiding a new version of Google to dominance, reaching your audience, creating awareness, and building loyalty is never a simple process.

The good news is that modern tools offer streamlined solutions to this age-old issue. What tools do you need, though? What are the best options to reinforce an effective marketing communication strategy? In this post, we’ll discuss brand management solutions that help you reach, engage, and solidify your audience.

Your Branded Website

We’ll begin with the single most important “must-have” for every single business, regardless of industry or niche: a branded website. Once, websites were optional. They weren’t much more than digital business cards and offered little in the way of measurable value.

Today, websites are so much more than that. They have transformed to become the online hub of all your marketing and communication efforts. Your website ties everything together and, without one, your efforts will be fragmented at best.

Building a branded website is essential, no matter what your industry might be or how small your business is. However, there are a few rules you must follow to maximize the value of your site:

Branded and Customized – Skip the DIY website builders and templates. Have a website custom-built for your brand. Yes, you can use frameworks like WordPress, but by avoiding templates, you can achieve important benefits, including:

• You don’t have to worry about security flaws in the site code.

• You control every aspect of the website.

• You can create a website that perfectly mirrors your brand and value position.

• You don’t have to worry about brand confusion if another company is using the same theme or template.

• You get support from the website developer, including ongoing maintenance, the ability to adjust branding on the fly, and more.

SEO Optimized – Search engine optimization (SEO) has been around almost as long as the World Wide Web. It’s also evolved a great deal in recent years. The point of SEO is to make your website as visible as possible to your potential customers who are using Google, Bing, or another search engine to find products or services like those you offer.

SEO has many facets, including on-page and off-page elements that require deep expertise to implement correctly. However, when professionally handled, search engine optimization creates strong visibility in organic search results, driving traffic where you want it, whether that’s your homepage, about us, product/service pages, or somewhere else.

Connected – Your website is not a standalone tool. It’s the hub of your marketing efforts. As such, you must ensure that it’s connected to those other platforms. For instance, you need to connect your website to your company’s social media accounts with social sharing buttons on blog posts and links from other pages that allow customers to find you on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms to deepen engagement and expand your reach.

Speaking of social media, that brings us to another must-have tool for effective marketing communication strategy.

Your Social Media Accounts

Social media was once a novelty. Facebook and Twitter were useful for consumers looking to socialize or connect with friends in the digital space, but their value to businesses was questionable at best. It did not take long for that to change. Today, social media marketing is a critical component of any marketing communication strategy. If you’re not targeting your audience through social media, you’re missing a critical element in your success.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just creating an account and then discovering your audience. Conquering the social media paradigm is incredibly complex and involves many moving parts. Let’s break it down a bit for you.

Platform – First, understand that not all social networks are worth your time. You might be best served through LinkedIn marketing, while another business would see more ROI with Snapchat marketing.

Marketing through the wrong social network is a waste of time and money, but it can also create the wrong view of social media marketing in the first place. Throwing away your marketing budget will skew your view of all social media marketing, even though you could have simply been focused on the wrong network.

So, the first thing you must do is determine what platform(s) your audience members use the most. For instance, if you market to adults and older Americans, Facebook is probably where you need to look. If your audience is younger, Snapchat or TikTok might be better. If you’re marketing to other business owners and entrepreneurs, LinkedIn is a no-brainer.

Choose your platforms wisely and do it before you spend a lot of time and money trying to reach an audience that’s not well represented on a particular platform.

Engage – The entire point of social media is to be, well, social. That means you can’t look at this as being like one-way advertising. You’re not going to gain any traction on social platforms by posting ads and then not engaging with your audience. Today, you must give to get, and if you’re not willing to engage, your audience won’t be willing to buy.

So, how do you engage? First, resist the urge to make every post self-promotional. Find a balance between advertisements and organic content.

Second, remember that you’re ultimately here to deliver value to your audience. What do they need from you? How can you help them and in so doing help yourself?

Third, engage in the comments on your posts. When someone asks a question or leaves a comment, respond. Be genuine, gracious, and available. Your audience will respond with increased loyalty and engagement.

Connect – Finally, make sure that you’re connecting your social media accounts, website, and other digital properties. For instance, promote your latest blog post on Facebook. Share a link to your new downloadable eBook or whitepaper through Twitter.

By helping your audience connect with you better, you achieve several goals. One of those is driving more traffic where you want it, whether that’s to your homepage, your Facebook page, an opt-in form, or somewhere else. Second, you help create stronger connections between your online properties.

PPC Campaigns

Pay-per-click advertising is nothing new. Google AdWords is probably the most familiar of these, but there are plenty of other options. Note that paid social media marketing, like Facebook Ads, falls under this heading, too. Today, paid ad campaigns offer quite a few advantages and should be part of your toolkit.

PPC ads allow you to drive traffic where you want it while organic SEO is still developing. For instance, if you just built your website, Google’s spiders haven’t had a chance to index your site yet, so you won’t rank well (or at all) in the search engine results pages (SERPs). PPC ads give you the chance to rank for targeted keywords during the interim.

Paid advertising can also be used for campaign-specific purposes. After you’ve established your online presence and you’re ranking in organic search results, PPC ads and paid social ads allow you to expand your reach and drive traffic to specific landing pages, product pages, service pages, and more.

Email Campaigns

Email has long been a go-to marketing communication tool to support overall campaigns. It has some obvious benefits over other tactics, like social media marketing, too. For instance, email marketing allows you to cut through the clutter and get your message right to your audience’s inboxes.

However, email marketing is not as simple as it sounds. You must have compelling subject lines that get recipients to open your message, for one thing. For another, you must keep your messages succinct and respect your audience members’ time.

Email marketing should also dovetail with your other marketing methods, including social media, PPC, SEO, and everything else. You can use it to support social media marketing efforts, to promote downloadables that you’re marketing elsewhere, and in other ways to move your customers through the sales funnel. It’s also an invaluable tool for ensuring that you’re giving your customers the support they need at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Conquer Google

Finally, we need to discuss Google. We’re not talking about SEO, but about establishing a local presence on Google by using your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Claiming your profile, creating it, and then using these free tools offer several important benefits.

One of those is that it builds credibility with Google. A physical business location, including a street address and phone number, goes a long way toward separating your business from those “only online” companies.

Your Google profile also allows you to connect with customers, respond to Google reviews, post blogs and updates, and so much more. You can pin locations on Google Maps, rank in the local pack, boost visibility in local search results, and share information directly with your audience.

The Challenge of Managing Multiple Marketing Tools

We’ve covered quite a few tools that can help you expand your reach. The challenge, of course, is managing all these efforts. Trying to manage social media marketing, Google marketing, email marketing, PPC and everything else through individual interfaces is a huge time sink. It also increases the likelihood of costly errors and missteps.

The good news is that a cloud-based platform for digital asset and brand management can cut the time required and improve your results. An integrated marketing platform offers you access to multiple tools, all from a centralized dashboard.

What to Look for in an Integrated Marketing Platform

SaaS offerings abound today, so what sets one marketing platform apart from another? It comes down to some pretty specific things.

Manage What Matters – The first thing to consider is whether the platform lets you manage what matters most to your brand. Compare different platforms and make sure that the ones you’re considering make managing social media, Google Maps, and email simple. However, look for other management capabilities, including product templates, business intelligence, list acquisition and creation, and more.

Single Sign On – A marketing platform worth your time will be easy to use and access, and available when and where you need it. That means single sign-on capabilities. In other words, you should be able to log into the platform once and have access to all the available tools and capabilities. There should be no additional hoops to jump through.

Print Marketing – Digital marketing methods get a lot of attention these days, but they’re not the sum of what you should be doing. You still need print marketing, whether that comes in the form of trade show displays, banners for a physical storefront, or something else. The right marketing platform will give you access to print marketing services so you can handle all your marketing and advertising needs in one place.

Finding the right tools takes time, careful consideration of your options, and an understanding of not only your underlying needs but also best practices to inform your actions and decisions. A well-rounded tool will support your online and offline efforts while delivering innovative solutions to your most pressing needs, whether that’s managing your audience on Facebook or creating customized product listings on your website.

The Cloud-Based Platform for Digital Asset and Brand Management You Need

At FuseBox One, we’ve developed a one-of-a-kind integrated marketing platform designed to help you build your presence online, but also manage your offline print advertising. Whether you need to surface critical business insights, manage your social media conversations, create robust email marketing campaigns, or something else, FuseBox One’s Marketing Management Platform helps you automate, empower, and move forward.

Interested in learning more? We’d love to discuss your needs. Get in touch today to learn more about our Marketing Management Platform and how it can help your business thrive.

Source:

https://marcom.com/what-are-marketing-communication-tools/

https://www.techfunnel.com/martech/essential-marketing-communication-tools-good-marketing-campaign/

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/corporate-communications-tools/

https://www.fuseboxone.com/services/#MP