Brand building is at the heart of expanding a corporate business. Often, companies look to only business growth to increase the top and bottom lines.

Focusing only on the top and bottom line often leads to managers seeking to cut corners to improve project profitability. This opportunistic model of growing a business rarely leads to long-term and sustained growth.

Brand building is all about building customer trust. Trust generates repeat business. Companies that feel for their customers and go the extra mile can win customer trust and build their brand.

Brand building entails taking a company’s value system to the market. If the company’s ethos is to make a fast buck, this will rarely lead to brand-building. Often companies seek brokers to fix deals for them. Word travels and impacts the brand leading a company to either stagnation or a downward growth path.

Company vision and ethos are not just holy statements that are put out on the front page of a company website, but it is a window to the entrepreneur’s thinking.

You begin a brand-building process by identifying your customers and profiling each segment. Google Analytics is a good tool to initiate the process. It captures visitors’ demographics, location information, and mode of interaction (mobile, tablet, or desktop) to your website.

Based on the profile of your customers, a company can choose the optimal campaign that will help target each customer segment using digital and conventional tools. In digital marketing, the common tool can be SEO for improving the ranking and visibility of the web pages to which you look to draw the attention of your customers.

Other tools commonly used are Social Media Marketing and social media advertisement. Choosing the most appropriate social media platform that resonates with your customer profiles is critical. A messaging campaign in the form of short or long content can be directed. Organic and paid marketing options both are available in social media marketing. Influencers are also used to spreading the message.

Email marketing is another popular method of customer outreach. If done innovatively, email marketing is an effective and low-cost mode of communicating with the customer. Running ad campaigns on Google, Bing, and  Amazon are other popular modes of customer contact.

In the end, the objective of brand building is to connect with your customers and gain trust so that you can convert them into loyal followers of your brand. Analog tools like running campaigns on print, radio, and television are also helpful in building the brand. It is important to monitor the result of your campaigns regularly. It will help you make mid-course corrections and track your marketing and brand-building expenses.