Create a Contagious Brand

Something that's contagious spreads rapidly, catching on from person-to-person almost instantly. In a marketing context, the advent of the Internet has made it easier than ever for something to become contagious. Social networks like Twitter and YouTube are breaking down boundaries between countries and continents to create the global village, a term first coined by author Marshall McLuhan in 1964.

Five decades later, the global village is upon us. As is the case with any type of contagion, the more people who are accessible, the larger the spread may be. For skilled marketers looking to create a contagious brand, the global village makes spreading a brand much easier.

Best Practices for Building a Brand

Your brand is what you are known for, one of the first things that comes to the minds of your prospects and customers when they think of your business. The process of growing a company brand involves several different steps, such as:

• Defining your brand: before you can even think about how to create a contagious brand, your company's brand needs a strong identity. At the HubSpot Blog, Steve Hall divides developing a brand identity into five parts: a vision statement, a mission statement, the essence of your organization boiled down to one word, your company personality, and your value proposition. Thinking about all five of these elements is a great way to come up with a few overarching sentences that define your brand.
• Unifying your messages: whether you are sharing an update on social media or writing a blog post for your company website, you need to keep your brand consistent. When you are getting ready to share marketing content, look it over while you keep your brand statement or definition in mind and ask yourself whether or not the content aligns with your brand.
• Using colors consistently will help keep your brand successful and will help other identify your brand easily. You need at least one major color to design your marketing materials around, but you can also include up to two supporting colors. But always keep that one major color that you have chosen as your focal point on all materials and content that you produce.
• Identifying the right channels: depending on what type of brand you are, there will be different kinds of mediums that are most effective for promoting your brand. For example, did you knowthat over 40% of Pinterest users and over a third of Instagram users share branded content? If your company is the kind that would attract the type of demographics that populate these networks, information like this will help you identify your ideal medium for brand messages.

With these steps in place, it will be much less of a challenge for your company to build its brand using the power of the Internet.

The Internal Branding Process

It should be noted that when you are creating a brand, you also need to make sure that it is congruent with your internal messages. John F. Marshall, a senior executive at brand consulting firm Lippincott, says in an article for Forbes that the best brand positioning strategy is the one that involves your internal team and gets them motivated to carry this message themselves. Marshall goes on to list how brands like Starbucks and Wal-Mart have distilled their internal branding down to a number of pillars or mantras that create the comprehensive picture of their brand.

No matter what type of brand you are looking to build, these strategies will help you increase its growth exponentially. By taking steps to create a contagious brand you will help your products or services stand out from other unknown competitors in your industry.

Photo credit: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com