How to Develop a Memorable Brand Identity

Guest Post by Christoforos Zafeiris

With billions of users active on the internet, companies (regardless of their size, outreach, audience) are integrating digital marketing and building their brand identity. By creating websites, having social media accounts across different channels, and establishing an online presence, everyone hopes to attract a share of potential customers.

All these efforts need to keep in mind one single, simple principle: respect the brand identity and make it memorable, authentic, and original.

In this article, we will focus on three main pillars of building a brand identity that everyone will talk about: email marketing, social media, and customer satisfaction.

Email marketing

Email marketing is considered a tool that can bring the highest conversion rates for a company. 

There are a few free email marketing services, which can help you create engaging, brand-oriented, authentic templates to grow your conversion rates.

Strong brand identity will boost brand consideration, credibility, customer loyalty, and customer retention. As brand awareness is only the first step in a successful brand strategy, you should make your brand identity clear in every marketing venture.

Consistent style

Newsletters, email templates and other tools of email marketing are an important part, which shouldn’t be seen as temporary opportunities for quick sales. 

You should make clear that there is a specific style and identity, throughout your email marketing campaigns. A simple email layout, engaging visuals, proper font, and typography, are key elements of your email marketing.

Do not forget that it’s crucial to follow your brand colors to make clear even visually that it’s your email.

Brand logo and hero image

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Your brand logo should be one of the main aspects of your email campaigns. As soon as anyone opens your email, the logo should be clearly visible. 

Your brand logo should be combined with an attractive hero image. The hero image is usually a combination of image and text, which can be static or dynamic. 

Based on your brand identity and the goal of your email, you can incorporate video, GIFs, a punchline, or your brand name.

Call-To-Action (CTA) button 

Every marketing action has a clear goal and as such every email marketing action has a purpose. The purpose of an email marketing action is clear in the Call-To-Action button, or at least it should be.

Your email template should be designed around your CTA button so everything will end up in the reader wanting to click it. The most-used CTAs include the following:

1. On-screen CTA
2. Single button
3. Freebies opt-in
4. Premium trials
5. No BS: this direct, prominent CTA works well for companies with already prominent branding 

The CTA should contradict the colors of the email template and have a very clear, simple, single-worded CTA button.

Respect your audience

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The prerequisite for someone to receive your email campaigns is that they have at least expressed their general interest in your brand.

As such, you already have them somewhat engaged and do not need to be too extra or too pushy; instead, you should respect the boundaries of your audience.

Your audience will associate your brand with a positive feeling and not emails as useless spam emails. The people you want to engage with will want to remain in your email subscribers’ list.

Pro Tip: Email campaigns might easily be considered as spam by email software, so don't forget to run an email deliverability test to guarantee that your emails will be delivered to your subscribers.

Social media strategy

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As time passes, more articles, researches, and posts focus on the interrelation of a concrete, comprehensive social media strategy with the brand identity of a company, business, or even a startup.

Social media is an indivisible part of our daily lives, as they are used for communication, information, entertainment reasons and play a major part in experiencing reality.

Even though creating and shaping a proper social media strategy has its obstacles, even has drawbacks, no marketing company or in-house team can deliver proper results without a social media marketing strategy. 

Set clear social media strategy goals 

The first step you have to take is to clearly set your goals of the social media strategy you are going to plan and execute.

The possibilities available for creating posts on social media are practically unlimited and this might lead you to pure confusion.

So, one of the most effective ways to shape your strategy is to consider which part of the funnel you want to address on each post and which target audience.

Infographic vector created by freepik - www.freepik.com

Define your metrics

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After setting your goals, and before creating your strategy, you should consider and decide on which metrics you will use to evaluate your actions. The KPIs (key point indicators) are crucial, as they will help you identify, analyze and reshape your strategy.

The more usual problem with deciding your KPIs is that a lot of marketers tend to focus on vanity metrics (for example, likes on Facebook), which cannot indicate the real value of your strategy.

If you wish to be efficient and result-driven, then finding the right KPI for each action is a key element.

Avoid two things: firstly, to use metrics that most companies use; secondly, to use the same metrics for each aspect of your strategy.

Consistent brand experience

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Yes, consistency is a usual buzzword for digital marketing. But what does it mean, really?

Consistency in marketing means creating, shaping, and reforming your strategies and actions, based on a predetermined set of principles.

Such principles can refer to content creation, visual design, social media accounts, customer experience, or user interface. This creates a challenge for the marketing team, as they need to think carefully about all these concepts.

The best option is to use a social media management tool to clarify your strategies, goals, actions, desired results, and then be accountable by reporting them, even to someone who has no relation to the company.

Channel adaptiveness

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Each social medium has its own brand identity, loyal users, and characteristics. As social media channels try to distinguish themselves, creating one type of content for all of them is clearly out of the question.

To be efficient and let your brand identity be promoted everywhere effectively, you need to adapt your social media actions, based on the channel they will be taken. 

For example, Instagram is an image-based, video-based platform, and you should edit your images accordingly.

Also, since you have set a set of consistent guidelines and principles, it will be easy and simple for your team to adapt to trends and new social media.

A clear example of that is how the NBA uses Tik Tok to create funny, viral videos that grow the audience of the league. Currently, it has about 9.7 million followers and 174.7 million likes.

Customer experience

A part usually overlooked in the process of making brand identity unique and memorable is the customer experience. We define customer experience as any moment of interaction between a customer and the organization. 

A positive customer experience is defined by moments that bring out positive reactions, by customers who feel appreciated and can recognize the brand identity in each interaction.

Good customer service can be highly impacted by your brand identity, but there are four stages that you should consider for making your brand memorable and unique.

Consideration

All consumers go through a phase of consideration before deciding the brand that they’ll choose. During the consideration process, your values should be clear to your possible customers.

For example, Nike is a company with a clear brand identity, followed by a clear catchphrase ("Just do it!)) and most people will consider Nike when shopping for a brand new pair of athletic shoes. Nike has successfully branded itself using basic storytelling and emotional branding. 

Purchase

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The purchase phase of your product/service is a critical point of getting your brand identity through to the consumers. Why? Recognizing and understanding your brand identity will create an appropriate set of brand expectations. 

These expectations will be met by your customers, and lead to their increased satisfaction. 

But, if your brand identity is not clear and customers feel disappointed, they will not move on to the next stages of customer experience.

Loyalty

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Customer loyalty, also referred to as customer retention, is the result of constant positive experience, based on satisfaction and value.

The group of loyal customers you have can be a real goldmine of data. You can create and run target-specific surveys on the experience of loyal customers, based on their interactions with your company.

Collecting and analyzing data about your customers’ interactions with your company lets you see what you are doing right and wrong, connect your buyer personas with specific services, and find out what maintains their loyalty.

As clearly indicated by academic literature, a strong, memorable brand identity is strongly connected with customer trust and loyalty.

Advocacy

Now, to the last part of customer experience, turning loyal customers to advocates of your company.

This used to be a tricky part, as people usually relate enough to loyal to a brand, but do not feel that emotionally attached to advocate for a specific product or brand.

Nowadays, the tricky part is not to involve someone actively, as social media have made it easier for someone to share opinions. The challenge is to create an emotional attachment with loyal customers, making them “blind” to other offers and opportunities.

As such, your brand identity has to be constantly reshaped, based on the recent trends and changes, while allowing your customers to feel invested in this journey of brand management.

A very successful rebranding process, leading to the re-engagement of customers and to their turning into advocates of a company, is Aegean Airlines. The Greece-based airlines has recently unveiled its new brand identity.

The rebranding process managed to strengthen the core values of its brand identity while making the locals feel more attached to the company.

Final thoughts

Developing a memorable brand identity in 2020 is not an easy, step-by-step process, but rather a multifaceted process, based on constant interactions, analysis, and transformations.

If you wish to deliver results for your brand, you should make a clear list of goals and set your brand voice and personality.

Your brand identity will then be easily integrated into your different strategies.

You should focus on the three aforementioned pillars: email marketing to boost your conversion rates, social media to get your brand identity out there, and customer experience to increase customers' satisfaction and their lifetime value.

Christoforos Zafeiris works as an SEO Copywriter for the email marketing software company Moosend. He has always been eager to change the narrative and influence trends with his words; thus, copywriting is the only natural choice for him. Besides that, he has been an enthusiast of human communication, long walks, and emotional storytelling.