Your Guide to Marketing & Brand Management:
Which Service is Best for Your Business?

You’ve started a business, launched a product and now you’re looking to promote or rebrand yourself to the world! Where do you go from here? 

Our answer should come as no surprise to you: You need business marketing.

However, finding the right marketing agency and marketing service for your business is like trying to find a couple of Skittles in a giant bowl of M&Ms. You know they’re in there, but to get to them you have to dig through all of the M&Ms first. It shouldn’t be this hard, right?

That’s why we decided to put together this Marketing Guide - to help you figure out:

1) Which marketing service is best for your business?

AND

2) Which marketing agency is best for your business?

We answer this second question in more detail here.

Which Marketing Services Are There?

The number of marketing services your business actually has to choose from may surprise you, so hold onto your hat.

• Strategy

  • Company Mission Statement

  • Industry Research

  • Buyer Personas

  • Marketing Tactics to Follow

• Branding

  • Brand Identity

  • Brand Voice

  • Logo Design

  • Web Design

  • Videography

  • Photography

Now, keep in mind, these are only high-level categories. You can get more in-depth under any one of these with applied strategies and tactics used by different marketing agencies. 

It’s like telling someone there’s only one way to catch a fish, when in fact there are many: a) Fly fishing, b) Bait casting, c) Fishing, d) Wading in the water with a net, e) Walking into the grocery store & buying a fish from the cashier (I think this counts!).

After reading the full list of digital marketing services above, you may come away with two counterpoints: 

1. Do I really need all of these? It seems like overkill.

2. Don’t I need all of these? Are you going to tell me I can just pick and choose a few of these marketing services and I’ll be good?

When applied by practiced experts in their field, several of these marketing services can do well enough on their own, but just like the Avengers, they work better as a team, most of the time.

However, as you’re trying to grow a business, if you try to master it all, all at once, you’re bound to fail. We highly recommend focusing on a few areas of business marketing to bolster your business before forming the full team.

For our clients, we recommend: Full Branding, Social Media Marketing & Ongoing Marketing Consulting. We believe these are the foundational components every business needs to grow their brand and business.

What's the Difference between Marketing and Branding?

When you visit the BGD website, you may be surprised to see that our primary target in our messaging is not “marketing services” as most marketing agencies utilize, but, instead, “business branding.” 

So what’s the difference between business marketing and business branding? Why do we put such a strong emphasis on branding?

To address this difference, let’s first take a look at each one:

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. 

What Should Be Included in a Marketing Plan?

While every marketing agency may have different marketing plans they offer, here are some of the essential ingredients marketing plans for businesses should include:

• An understanding of your company goals and products or services

• Familiarity, or the ability to familiarize themselves, with your industry

• Strategic marketing plan to follow as they market your company

• Ways to reach your target audience (website, social media, blogging, email marketing, SEO, etc.)

• Messaging to reach that audience

What Are the Benefits of Marketing?

Marketing takes your products, services and company name to your target audience in the places where they spend time (i.e. social media, searching Google, checking email, etc.) and, in turn, brings those customers to you to purchase your product or service. 

What Is Branding?

Business branding is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and design. 

What Should Be Included in a Business Branding Plan?

• An understanding of your company goals and products or services

• Familiarity, or the ability to familiarize themselves, with your industry

• Strategic marketing plan to follow as they market your company

• Ways to reach your target audience (website, social media, blogging, email marketing, SEO, etc.)

• Development of your brand voice in all messaging and designs

• Brand management and design (logos, infographics, social media images, website design, etc.)

What Are the Benefits of Business Branding?

Business branding helps your target audience easily identify with you and your product. It helps users more easily find and be drawn to your company because you have a consistent design and messaging that offers them something familiar and connects them to what you’re selling. 

How Do You Manage a Brand?

Brand management is the act of supervising the promotion of a particular brand of goods. Your brand management team should oversee all promotional elements of your marketing to make sure the design and messaging are consistent with your brand voice and company identity.

They create logos, build graphics, edit images, etc., for consistent branding across all business marketing.

How Does Business Branding and Business Marketing Work Together?

I like how 99designs puts it: 

“Think of marketing as the actions you take to connect with your customers and get them to buy your products or services. Branding, on the other hand, is the marketing practice of actively shaping your brand. Branding is about defining who you are as a company.” 

We’d add it’s not just about defining who you are, but also how your target audience perceives you from that brand messaging and brand design.

What Are Some of the Best Branding & Marketing Strategies?

Take a look at one of our client’s branding and marketing strategies. 

WEBSITE

You can see that her brand identity fits well with the services she has to offer and it fits well across multiple marketing channels. 

FACEBOOK

INSTAGRAM

GOOGLE

How Can Branding Help Your Marketing?

Through business branding and brand management, Alice Approved has been able to develop a brand voice and identity that is clean, consistent and clear, and she has been able to use that in her marketing efforts across multiple channels.