Marketing VS Branding
When starting a business, creating your first social media profile, or creating a logo, you may hear many terms, some include; marketing, branding, and aesthetic followed by many others, as the marketing world is a vast industry. For someone just starting their company’s journey, these two processes can sound very similar; while they are connected, there are some differences between them. However, as an entrepreneur, you must understand these two to utilize them together! “Marketing is comparatively simple,” an entrepreneur once contended. “It is plain common sense!” Common sense, however, is neither common, nor always is it always sensical. Common sense can safeguard you from immense mistakes. Common sense lets you have the ability to think and behave in a reasonable way and to make good decisions. If you think the answers to the questions of marketing and branding are a matter of common sense, think again. Sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts provides a clear explanation in his book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer.
We’ll start with branding.
What is Branding?
Branding is basically who you are and what your company values. Geoffrey James from Inc. stated, “Your brand is the emotion that a customer feels when thinking about your product.” To know what your brand encompasses, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions about what you envision your company’s presence to embody. These questions will help you notice that the answers are based mainly on your internal work culture. What you do on the inside will emulate out to the outside world. Some questions you can ask yourself are:
– What are your core values?
– What inspired you to create this business?
– What is your personal style?
– How do you want customers to describe you as a company?
These questions will help you on the road to choosing a color palette, a logo, business cards, and your social media aesthetic. By defining who you are to your target audience, your brand can utilize and go on with your marketing plan.
What is Marketing?
The official definition of marketing is “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” For all its multilayered levels of the business of entrepreneurship, at its most basic core, marketing revolves around four items: product, price, promotion, and place. These items are considered the marketing mix. Marketing tactics and channels change over time, but these are the models everything else revolves around, and these are the elemental principles that never change. So, with that definition and core function in mind and what we now know about branding, you can use these two tools together.
The promotion of selling your products or services ties your brand to your marketing approach; from what image or video you use for a social media post to how you type out the copy, maybe you even add emojis; that’s your brand speaking and your marketing selling. Marketing isn’t just one definition, though; it is the umbrella of different methods, for example, SEO, content marketing, social media, print campaigns, and email marketing. These methods being the most popular, there are still many ways to market, plus trends of marketing come and go, one thing will remain constant- Your brand.
Conclusion
Branding and marketing go hand and hand, they are two peas in a pod. If you have a brand but no marketing plan, no one will ever see your excellent products or services, and on the contrary, if you have a marketing plan but no real brand identity, people will wonder what you’re trying to sell. At Multimedia Marketing Group, we too are proud of the time and investment that we have put into our brand. We know the importance and significance of having a brand identity that you are proud and pleased to perpetuate in the market place. That’s why when working with a client, we take a deep dive into your companies values and culture. From that, we can create amazing content and a marketing plan that speaks your values to your audience. We encourage you to look at our Transmedia Marketing Page and our StoryBrand Page to get some insight into what we can do for you. Check out our Get in Touch with Us Page as well and let us know how we can help you with your marketing and branding journey.
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