What is your brand?
In business, a brand is the identity that your business develops with the public, or its general consumer population, through marketing, promotion, and long-term dedication to high quality service and/or products. A brand is what people generally think of when they are introduced to a logo or a business name.
One of the most famous brands in business is Nike. Their ‘swoosh’ design has become synonymous with athletics and athletic shoes. Nike spent millions of dollars and decades developing and honing their brand through print, radio, and television marketing, as well as sponsoring professional athletes, the most famous being Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
Branding the iron
When you take your business to the public, you want to develop a brand. Of course, your goals may include one day becoming as big and popular as Nike, but you have to think smaller, and more realistic, unless, of course, you have tens of millions of dollars stashed away that you’re willing to spend on advertising and marketing. Most of us, however, have very limited resources for creating and developing our business’s brand.
Which means that we will have to use any and all available tools at our disposal. The Internet has become a more level playing field and while the massive businesses continue to reign supreme, the rest of us can compete with just about anyone out there if we use our imaginations, have the dedication, and are resourceful.
There are many ways to develop our brand along the Internet. The first is branding with audio. The second is branding with video.
Branding with audio
The Internet is still dominated by text. Better than 90% of all content found on the Internet today is generated through words. This is due, in large part, to the way that search engines rank websites based on particular keywords. But the tide is changing and branding with audio is becoming a popular tool for many young businesses and entrepreneurs.
Through social media sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, we can build networks of friends and followers who are interested in what we have to offer. Creating a logo identity will be important to establishing an instantaneous recognition with the products or services that you offer, but reaching out by branding with audio can help drive home the business’s identity.
More and more people are turning to sound bites for their source of information. The time it takes to read an article about a topic or product, an audio recording can deliver the same message, with some entertainment value, two or three times over.
