Social media brand management.

Information overload.

That’s what the average person has experienced almost every day since the rise of the internet. Every notification, from social media or email landing in an inbox – along with the wealth of info pinging every few seconds on a smartphone – floods people’s consciousness.

Then, there’s your business.

Everything about your company is just more information flowing into the daily deluge that the average person has to handle. If that information doesn’t stand out – due to your company having a weak brand – it’ll just sweep on by. Ignored. Unheard. Disappearing into a sea of discarded information while the people to whom you’re trying to sell turn their focus to something a little more interesting.

Enter a branding firm.

With the right firm by your side, you can create powerful branding strategies that turn the flow of information coming out of your company into an undeniable identity that your prospective customers can’t ignore.

That’s what NEWMEDIA does:

We develop brand strategies for businesses.

Before we get into how our brand design agency can help your business, we need to answer a big question:

What exactly is a “brand?”

We could spend pages writing about brand identities and appealing to a target market, but the answer – at least according to NEWMEDIA – is fairly simple.

Your brand is whatever makes you unique among the many other companies that are vying for supremacy in your industry. That may make the entire concept seem malleable – what makes your company unique could differ wildly from another.

“I get why having a brand is important,” you might say to yourself. “But do I really need one of the top branding agencies to help me build it? I know my business better than anybody else – surely I’m the best person to build my brand.”

You know what? You’re right!

You do know your business better than anybody else, which probably means you understand better than anybody what makes the whole thing tick. But that alone is not enough to develop a great brand. You need a strategy – encompassing everything from your visual identity to how you tell your story to maintain an advantage in a competitive landscape – to build a true brand.

That’s where a brand design agency comes in, with the best delivering these critical benefits.

You understand the host of benefits that come with developing a brand identity with the help of an agency. Your business gains the trust of its customers – through consistent messaging – and achieves more sales because it differentiates itself from the pack.

That’s all well and good, but you still have one question in mind:

What does a branding agency actually do to help me reap those benefits?

The answer lies in the host of services that NEWMEDIA offers.

Most companies don’t know enough about their target audiences.

Sure, they may have a general idea about the ages and locations of the people they’re targeting with their branding. But when it comes to what makes their audiences tick, they’re completely in the dark:

HubSpot demonstrates that with these survey results, which show that fewer than 50% of marketers have key information about their audience in major categories. For instance, only 45% know about their audience’s interests and hobbies – limiting how well they can engage on social media – while only 42% know the basic demographic information they need to target their advertising campaigns toward the right people.

Keep reading the chart and it only gets worse.

Less than a third understand the pains their audience has – knowledge that is key to branding – while 42% don’t even know what products their audience might have an interest in buying.

It all adds up to a branding disaster.

How can a company deliver a coherent – and consistent – message to customers when it doesn’t know what those customers look like or what they want?

That’s where NEWMEDIA’s target audience identification service comes in. As part of building your brand, we get into the who’s and what’s of your main clients. Who are they? What do they want? How do your products and services heal the pains that they have? With that information, you’re able to develop stronger marketing and branding campaigns – built on real data – that are designed to appeal to the people who are most likely to buy from you.

You may remember that we told you earlier that 47% of companies have no defined content marketing strategy. That lack of strategy isn’t reserved for copywriting alone – a huge number also have no documented digital marketing strategy:

Smart Insights reveals that a shocking 44% of business owners are basically taking a scattershot approach to their digital marketing. They’re doing…something. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the campaigns they create, meaning their strategies lack the consistency needed for proper branding. That’s also the case for the 12% of companies that have a defined strategy but have siloed it away from the rest of their marketing. Messages will get missed because their digital marketing isn’t integrated into their wider branding efforts.

It’s haphazard – perhaps the most damaging thing when consistency is so crucial to the creation of the trust that leads to people buying from your brand.

A brand strategy agency fixes these problems by creating a cohesive plan that aligns with the rest of the marketing that your company does. Your strategy builds upon the market and audience research NEWMEDIA offers – which shows you who to target and how to differentiate yourself – while setting the standards you’ll follow to build consistency into your brand.

Fonts. Color schemes. Positioning. Brand personas. It all goes into this strategy, which becomes the bedrock of everything else your company does from a branding perspective.

There’s one word that underpins your brand positioning efforts:

Creativity.

The “same old, same old” isn’t going to cut it from a branding perspective, especially with differentiation being such a key part of building a strong brand. It’s all about memorability – how well do your creative efforts stick in the minds of your target customers?

We have some insight into what makes for memorable branding from HubSpot:

“Funny” and “relatable” are the top two types of content that people want to see brands posting on social media, both of which require a creative streak. Humor is obvious from the creative standpoint, but you also need the same spark to create something relatable – the most creative people can craft stories relating to your brand and its customers they stick in the mind.

Continue down the chart and you see that every one of the top six most memorable types of content requires creativity in some way. Copy that reflects your brand’s values – memorable to 30% of people who’ve discovered a brand’s products on socials in the last three months – requires creativity both in creating those values and expressing them through social posts. On the educational side, creativity comes into play by transforming what could be a dry set of instructions into something that sticks in the mind.

In short – branding is about finding creative solutions for getting your message out there.

That’s where NEWMEDIA comes in.

Our array of digital strategies – ranging from content creation to social media marketing – take the creative approach needed to emphasize what makes your brand special across every platform.

The rise of the web took the branding industry by storm. What was once limited to traditional marketing – billboards, radio and TV ads, flyers, and the like – became global. Your company now has the opportunity to speak to a truly global audience that’s ready and waiting to hear your message.

You just need a big enough megaphone so that message spreads far and wide.

That’s where digital marketing comes in – a collection of services built into a strategy that complements your overall branding strategy to ensure you create the awareness that’s key to a strong brand. Many techniques can go into a digital marketing strategy, though the following five are key to your brand.

Web Design

First impressions are everything to a brand.

Fail to create a good one and you give yourself an uphill battle – a potential customer is wary of you from the start, meaning the rest of your branding has to work overtime to get them to buy. That’s assuming they stick around, of course. A bad first impression could be enough to cause people to abandon your company entirely before they’ve even gotten into the meat of your branding.

Where does that first impression come from?

In most cases, it’s your company’s website – the first thing a prospective customer will check once they become aware of you. And that’s where web design becomes part of your branding. You need a strong website because customers are going to judge your company based on what they see:

Three-quarters of them – 75% – will take one look at your site and instantly develop an impression of whether they believe your company is credible or not. That plays into the trust factors mentioned earlier – a lack of credibility makes it infinitely harder to develop the trust you need people to have in your brand in order for them to buy from you.

NEWMEDIA’s website design service is all about building your credibility.

Building from the messaging, color schemes, and other guidelines in your brand strategy, we build websites that achieve two key things:

• Look the part for those all-important first impressions
• Remain consistent with your other branding to build trust

Graphic Design

A brand isn’t just about the message it puts out to its potential customers. It’s a visual thing – everything from logos and colors to the graphical style you use in your visual media contributes to building your brand.

And that’s an area where many companies struggle:

Almost half of marketers – 43% – say that producing consistent visual content is a major barrier for them, with great design also being another key challenge. From there, the stats dig into finding relevant data – 22% struggle with that – and structuring that data in appealing ways – a problem for 12% of marketers – as key visual branding challenges.

Graphic design is the solution to these challenges.

It’s all about the look and feel of the media you put out for others to consume, with a focus on that keyword we’ve mentioned several times already – consistency.

NEWMEDIA’s graphic design service helps you develop consistency in your visual media by designing assets – in accordance with your brand guidelines and strategy – that you can use again and again. Nothing looks out of place because all of your graphics are designed to the same standards, contributing to building the trust you need your customers to have in your brand in the process.

Social Media Marketing

If part of building a brand is all about generating awareness, you need to ensure that your brand is prominent in the places where most of your potential audience hangs out.

Enter social media:

Brand guidelines are far from a new concept for any company that has done any semblance of branding work before. They’re your “checklist” of everything that any piece of media you put out needs to follow. Fonts, colors, specific terminology, and the messaging you want to put out there are all part of these guidelines.

But there’s a problem.

While most organizations have brand guidelines, very few do a good job of following them:

Statista’s data points out that only 30% of organizations can claim that the guidelines they’ve created are both well-known and used throughout their businesses. The other 70% aren’t so lucky – they either don’t have brand guidelines, only used them some of the time, or silo them away so only their creative teams have access to them.

When consistency is such a major factor in great branding, your guidelines (assuming you have them) can’t be optional.

NEWMEDIA ensures they aren’t.

In addition to helping you to create your guidelines – or refining the ones you have – we also help with implementation. Everything that NEWMEDIA does on your behalf will follow those guidelines, with our experts also helping you to impress the importance of understanding them on the rest of your business.

What’s the first thing that consumers use to recognize a brand?

It’s logo – the single graphic that may be the most important tool you have for building a memorable visual identity: