Business

Brand Advertising: How to Build a Brand Advertising Plan

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Mar 18, 2022 • 2 min read

A practical approach to brand advertising can have significant benefits to a company.
Some of the world’s most successful brands use brand advertising to maintain and build their customer base, sales, and overall reputation.

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What Is Brand Advertising?

Brand advertising is an advertising technique that aims to raise public awareness and build positive brand value to increase sales. Unlike product advertising, which focuses on selling specific products, a brand advertising strategy has a bigger-picture goal of growing and improving the company’s identity and market presence.

Brand Advertising vs. Direct Response Marketing

Brand advertising and direct response marketing are the two main types of digital advertising. The strategy and end goal of these advertising techniques differ:

  • Brand advertising: Brand advertising focuses on building brand awareness, increasing outreach, boosting customer loyalty, and creating an emotional connection to the consumer. Usually, a company will undertake a brand ad campaign after establishing brand recognition with a target audience.
  • Direct response marketing: Direct response marketing aims to achieve a specific goal with potential customers. Direct marketing is a focused strategy, and the metrics it produces, in terms of leads, conversions, and sales, are easier to quantify than brand advertising.

How to Build a Brand Advertising Strategy

Depending on the size of your company, the target audience, and your budget, brand advertising can generate leads and increase sales significantly. Follow these steps to enact an effective brand advertising campaign:

  1. 1. Set goals. Identifying your goals before undertaking a strong brand advertising campaign is essential. You might want to grow your audience by a certain percentage or introduce a new product. By carefully articulating your objectives, it will be much easier to measure your success down the road.
  2. 2. Build a strategy. A good brand marketing strategy takes time and effort. Research is a crucial component: Identify your target audience, examine the marketplace, study the competitors, and so forth. Strategy is also where brand positioning comes into play: What is the general perception of your brand at present?
  3. 3. Implement your plan. This is where you carry out your campaign, which might involve digital marketing, billboards, social media outreach, public relations, and other means of reaching the target audience.

5 Elements of Branding

A brand is essentially a company’s identity, and brands seek to establish a connection between the company and its customers and even the public at large. The major aspects of branding include:

  1. 1. Name: In the competitive marketplace, the company name can be essential to brand identity. This is the word or words that will be associated with the product or service in perpetuity—unless the company rebrands—and a major part of the brand’s overall identity.
  2. 2. Logo: A logo is the brand image that represents the brand’s story. A successful logo design will lead consumers to visually recognize the brand without the brand name.
  3. 3. Packaging: Depending on the product, the packaging can be a distinctive aspect of the brand messaging and can create instant brand recognition.
  4. 4. Tagline: A well-chosen tagline can have lasting associations with a brand going beyond a specific marketing campaign. Seeing the tagline will instantly call the brand to mind.
  5. 5. Design: The visual style of products and the visual elements of promotional materials, including the font styles and color schemes, can maximize the impact of brand advertising.

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