How do You Build a Brand: Although you may not be selling products that are of your own brand, it’s important that you build a good brand name for yourself as an affiliate marketer. Your brand is how others will identify you as a standalone business from the brands which you are promoting, and is hugely important in ensuring that you build up your own client base and are recognized.
Take, for example, some of the more successful comparison websites out there. These websites are shining examples of affiliate marketing done right
– they make money off other companies’ products such as auto insurance, home insurance, or travel insurance – without having to sell a single product of their own. But, they have a distinguishable brand which customers can instantly recognize them by.
When it comes to branding, it’s important that your customers can recognize you straight away. Your brand isn’t simply your logo, though – it’s based on a whole set of different factors, with the most important being the qualities and values that your business stands for. What kind of experience do you want customers to have when engaging with your brand? What kind of values does your brand represent? Which type of customers do you want to engage most with your brand? These are all questions which you should be asking when it comes to putting together a memorable and reputable brand image for your affiliate marketing business.
Your Target Market
There is nothing more important than your target market when it comes to designing, creating and building a brand. Take into consideration the type of customers who are attracted to the products and/or services which you promote as an affiliate marketer. For example, if your affiliate site promotes baby items, you will want it to be attractive to new moms and dads who are looking to buy for their little one.
On the other hand, if you sell luxury items, you are aiming to build a brand which the people who buy these types of items can easily relate to. For this reason, it’s vital to research your target market and really get to know them.
Find out about the values that they hold, the way they engage with businesses, and the sort of things that they will find interesting. Once you have this information, you can then begin building a brand which will speak to them and appeal to them on a number of different levels.
Your Brand Voice
The best brands are the ones which the customers can really relate to. Think of your favorite brand – is it easy to see them as a ‘person’? Brands which have a human voice and are on the same level as their customers tend to be the most popular, and for good reason. Today, customers aren’t looking for advertisements that simply throw all the good points of an item at them – they want to know WHY they should be buying from a particular brand or buying a certain product, and what it can do for them in order to solve a problem or enhance their lives. Because of this, you should aim to
give your brand a ‘human’ side. This means forgetting the overly professional, robotic wording that some brands use and instead connecting with your customers on a human level.
Where does your brand voice come into play? First and foremost, your website should be the best representative of your brand and its voice. The way in which the content on your website is written can say a lot about your brand – for example, whether it has a sense of humor. Along with this, it’s important to remember to keep your brand voice consistent throughout all of your content, both written and non-written. This includes product descriptions, social media postings, emails, videos, photographs and everything else in between.
Visual Branding
Once you have taken all of the above factors into consideration, it’s time to start focusing on building a distinct visual brand which ties in well with the values and qualities of your business. Your visual branding consists of a number of different things, for example your logo, the colors that you use for your site, logo, social media pages and more, and any distinctive phrases or words which you use in order to describe your affiliate site. When de- signing your visual brand, it’s vital to keep your target audience in mind.
Create designs which will appeal to them based on what you have learned about them during your research. You may even wish to conduct surveys, focus groups or other research which gives members of your target market
the opportunity to choose their favorite of a series of brand imagery, helping you to decide which would be the best one to go with.
Brand Consistency
When creating and building your brand and brand image, consistency is absolutely vital. This is extremely important for affiliate marketers who use a variety of channels, for example a website, blog, email and social media profiles in order to promote affiliate products and services. A consistent brand enables customers to instantly recognize you and helps to keep any confusion to a minimum. As well as keeping your brand voice consistent throughout, it’s also important to make sure that other parts of your visual brand are also consistent, for example using the same logo on each channel that you use for promotion and customer engagement.
