Adding Branding Effect to Your Local Online Advertising Campaign – Marketing at the Cutting Edge

Branding is very important in a fast-paced economy. There are several things constantly vying for our attention. Using branding helps your product or service stand head and shoulders above the crowd. But how does branding work? And how do you make it work for you?

Even a local online advertising campaign needs branding. It helps elevate even a small and young brand to a new level. It makes you recognizable and accessible to customers. A good brand creates evangelists, people who will spread the word for you.

1. Find a unique benefit or niche.

A brand identity lies not just in a logo or a slogan. There has to be something underlying to make it compelling. Branding begins with figuring out what makes you different from your competitors.

You may be more affordable or more convenient than others in your industry. Maybe your product has features that the others don’t. Once you find that something, it’s easy to build a brand around it. If you look at early advertisements for FedEx, you can see that they always branded themselves as the faster delivery service.

If you can’t find anything different about your product, maybe you can create a customer perception or affinity. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if your competitors can make the same claim, what matters is who stakes the claim on that niche first. This helps you shape the perception of your brand, and the different features and improvements can follow.

When Nike started, they were just a company selling athletic shoes, with no difference from others. Then they came up with the Just Do It mantra, which can be translated to environments that have nothing to do with sports. They made it easy for ordinary people to take up sports. They created a market for athletic equipment as consumer goods.

2. Target a certain group.

An unsharpened pencil can’t write, and to start creating a brand identity, you need to sharpen your focus first. You’d like to believe that everyone will have a use for your product or service, but you need to figure out who would have the most use for it and start from there.

Try to learn as much as you can about the people you want to sell to. This helps shape what you are going to say and how you are going to look. When Apple first started, they meant to be just like IBM and Microsoft. They wanted to be used for business applications. They were surprised when they gave rise to desktop publishing. The company has embraced this development and learned to talk directly to their main market, particularly with their Think Different campaign.

3. Use a specific tone.

Once you know who you want to talk to, you’ll know what language they speak. Use this communication style for your logo and graphic design, to the style of writing for your ads.

Mountain Dew decided they would be the drink for alternative and extreme sports enthusiasts. There ads show a young, kind of manic energy that resonates with their core audience.

4. Make it easy for your audience to find you.

A coherent brand needs to be seen by consumers. One way to do this easily is to use an ad exchange platform. This removes the need for a media agency. A service like ADEX helps you choose who sees your ad. You can streamline where the ad will be seen. State the topic of your ad and receive suggestions of the most appropriate ad networks, where people who are likely to be receptive of your advertisement are. You can even streamline the appearance of your advertisement, and the form its going to take, be it pre-roll or overlay.

ADEX also makes it easier to stick to your advertising budget, no matter how modest. You can bid for specific video streaming channels, or choose a specific cost per impression. The service also allows you to view daily results of the ad and its performance.