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New Year’s Resolution for IT Companies: Pay More Attention to Branding

Stephanie Clark

Your brand is a promise. It communicates with your customer even while you sleep at night. It’s also a symbol for your business model that distinguishes you from your competitors. Tech firms of any size from small startup to enterprise giant must put a focus on effective marketing efforts.

Brand marketing influences the buying decisions of all customers, including personal consumers, public officials, and businesses of all sizes. Branding is essential for developing repeat business because customer perception about a brand is often shaped by previous experience with other products and services by that same brand. Each brand name represents instant knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about an entire company.

A recent Gartner survey of marketing executives and leaders asked them to rank activities that contributed the most to successful sales campaigns. Unsurprisingly, social media was ranked pretty high on that list — coming in at number two.

But what was number one?

Investing in the design, development, performance, and maintenance of the corporate brand on the main pages of the corporate website. This makes perfect sense because all online traffic from social media sites to corporate investors is eventually going to land on your website to review what you have to offer as depicted by one or more brands.
The full list of the most popular marketing activities appears as follows:

  1. Corporate Branding and Website Content
  2. Social Networks
  3. Digital Ads
  4. Content Marketing
  5. Online Shopping
  6. SEO and Paid Search
  7. E-mail and Newsletters
  8. Mobile Marketing
  9. Analytics

Rethink Your Branding Strategies in the New Year

Content marketing, ranked fourth in terms of its return on investment (ROI), was ranked first on a related poll showing where teams spent precious budget dollars. This category includes special reports, white papers, data sheets, blog articles, video, and promotional items. After content, marketing budgets were consumed by ads, paid search, and corporate website activities.

Before you allocate budgets to marketing, it’s important to first re-think the critical power of your brand. Not just a logo on paper, not just a stylized type face in an e-mail signature, and not just an icon on a glass screen, a brand is a promise. It’s a symbol for your business model that distinguishes you from your competitors and communicates with your customers for you while you sleep at night.

It doesn’t matter what your product or service happens to be. Your unique business model is your product or service. It includes your selling style, placement, tone, messaging, pricing, policies, procedures, and the end-to-end experience that you want your customers to enjoy.

A Winning Brand Strategy Wins New Customers

To reach new consumers by region, industry, or any other demographic, your brand identity has to evolve to appeal to the new audience.

The strongest form of branding occurs when customers associate an entire industry with your product by name. This phenomenon sometimes arises out of convenience, and other times, it occurs at the very highest level of brand awareness, consumer confidence, and trust.

In the first sense, that of convenience, you might often hear yourself or other people refer to an object by a specific product brand name. Primary examples of this type of branding occur when someone asks you for a Xerox copy, a Kleenex tissue or a Taylor Ham sandwich (don’t even get me started on whether it’s called Taylor Ham or pork roll). You might be asked to Xerox five copies of something. The verb works. It just happens to be a brand name.

Quality or other differentiating factors may not even enter the person’s mind. The person may be just as comfortable using generic glassware, another copier, or another paper product. However, what remains clear is that these brand names are simply clever and convenient identifiers for these products.

It’s the second type of branding impression that all companies so desperately seek. In this sense, a customer truly considers the branded item to represent the best product or service in the entire industry. Other products and services are in a deprecated class or lower tier.

To see how this works, let’s look at the top ten worldwide-recognized brands of the past decade according to the Interbrand Top 100 Brands Report (you might recognize a few CDI partners on this list):

  1. Coca-Cola
  2. IBM
  3. Microsoft
  4. Google
  5. General Electric
  6. McDonald’s
  7. Intel
  8. Apple
  9. Disney
  10. Hewlett-Packard

Now, think of the little voice inside your head when you last shopped for products and services in the industries served by these brands. What you are about to see is that the power of branding is often only rivaled by the power of another offsetting brand!

When you shopped for a new laptop, did it just have to be an HP product with an Intel processor? For many people around the world, it did.

Could your preference have been a Dell or Lenovo with an AMD chipset? Sure; however, these are simply more examples of other successful brand campaigns.

Maybe you prefer Burger King, Wendy’s, or another popular fast-food brand, but for most people, the McDonald’s brand resonates with their expectations about convenience, location, service, pricing, quality, and other details all the way down to the serving temperature of the food, selection of sauces, and cleanliness of the restrooms.

And if you need a final motivator to ignite your brand marketing efforts this year, consider the hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue annually from soft drink sales. When placing your order, does it have to be Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, or some other brand name?

For some people, a generic or substitute product can be interchanged without issue. But remember your goal as a business is to differentiate your brand in the best possible way so customers ask for your product or service by name. That’s the power of branding in action.

Stephanie Clark

Stephanie Clark, Content and Branding Manager, CDI

Stephanie Clark, Content and Branding Manager, CDI LLC, is the primary creator for all marketing assets including presentation templates, sell sheets, collateral, literature, website content, case studies, email communications and direct mail campaigns. Always ensuring that corporate brand image is maintained in all facets of marketing, her additional responsibilities include press release creation and dissemination, media pitching, managing social media platforms, securing editorial opportunities and acting as tradeshow and conference coordinator. A graduate of Seton Hall University, she earned an M.A. in Strategic Communication and Marketing and a B.A. in Public Relations and Journalism. In her spare time, Stephanie is an avid fan of the New York Mets and firmly believes that if anyone has a problem with Syndergaard throwing inside, they can meet him sixty feet, six inches away.