Why is branding important to manufacturing companies? Clients and customers will decide whether to use your company versus a competitor based on cost and perceived quality. However, these two factors are often the same or roughly the same between two competitors. How do customers know to choose you over a competitor? They often make this choice in a way that is influenced by branding.
Clients will choose you if they know what they can expect from you and know that they can trust your business. Branding, then, is about creating perceptions of trustworthiness and communicating to potential customers what they can expect from you. Branding is vital, whether your manufacturing business is large or small.
Your Brand Must Be Perceived as Trustworthy and Believable
The goal is to create a brand that inspires trust. You can do this through creating the perception of being credible, constant, and consistent. On a basic level, this means that your products and services should meet the promises your brand makes.
For your branding to be successful and attract and retain customers, you must create the perception of being:
- Credible: Your brand should only make authentic claims that can be demonstrated with evidence.
- Constant: Your brand should be evident in each part of your marketing strategy.
- Consistent: You must deliver everything to your customer that your brand promises.
Your branding for your manufacturing business can only succeed in attracting and retaining new customers if you can successfully do these three things. If you cannot follow through on claims made or implied by your branding, it would be better not to make these claims.
Focus on Your Unique Capabilities
Part of what branding does is distinguish your manufacturing business from competitors. Your customers have many manufacturers to choose from. You must compete with these in terms of cost, logistics, service, and other capabilities. However, the fact is that you likely aren’t significantly different from competitors in some of these areas. Your costs and service are likely comparable.
Therefore, you must stand out by emphasizing your unique capabilities. Identify what you can do that your competitors in manufacturing simply cannot, and create a branding strategy that focuses on these capabilities. This is how you can make your brand unique from among competitors and attract new business.
If you look at your services, products, and capabilities and compare these to your biggest competitors, you are likely to find that there are areas in which you offer a superior product or service. Capitalize on these areas of strength by emphasizing them in your branding. This is a way to let customers or clients know what it is you do well and what you do better than your competitors. It is a way to set yourself apart from the pack.
Focus on Your Niche
Once you have identified what it is that you do or offer that is superior to your competitors, maintain a focus on these things. Emphasize them in promotional materials and market your manufacturing company to clients and customers who are looking for your unique set of capabilities. This allows you to create a targeted brand strategy and to attract and keep clients.
Focusing on what you offer that your competitors may not is a way to identify potential clients in a focused way. Basically, this allows you to create a targeted marketing strategy by knowing who you should market your manufacturing product or services to. You can target potential clientele by looking for new customers who seek what you, and you alone, have to offer.
Create a Visual Presence
Branding is composed of a variety of elements, but what you present visually is one of the most important. If you think of some major companies—Amazon, McDonald’s, FedEx—you can likely recall their logos and color schemes. To be memorable, a brand must have this kind of strong, easily identifiable visual presence.
Creating and implementing the visual elements you need (such as a logo, typeface, color scheme, and tagline) may take time. Certainly, it’s better to take the time to do it right than to rush. Be mindful of not selecting elements that may be reminiscent of competitors.
A big element of successfully positioning your manufacturing brand has to do with your visual presence. If your current visual presence does not accurately reflect your company’s values or your brand overall, it is time to rework your visual presence.
Keep in mind that while you do not want your visual presence to call competitors to mind, you also want to make sure that it fits with your brand and with what you can deliver. You don’t want a tagline that focuses on fast turnaround time unless that’s really what you can provide. In fact, you want to go further and make sure that your visual presence matches with your manufacturing company’s unique capabilities.
Use your visual presence as another opportunity to set yourself apart from competitors.
Increase Your Public Presence
While targeted marketing is important, you also want to consider the ways that you can have a presence in your field and in the larger community that surrounds your manufacturing business. Having a clear identity and a strong visual presence are important, but you should reach beyond your typical range of customers and followers to make yourself known to the world.
You can do this in a variety of ways. One easy way to begin to create a more widespread brand presence is through maintaining a blog. You can also post articles on other websites. Make sure that the information is, again, targeted toward emphasizing your niche. In part, this allows potential clients and customers to know what they can expect from you before they make contact.
