Advancements in technology around the world have significantly accelerated the process of building strong branding strategies earlier, particularly for digital branding. They have expanded to almost every aspect of a brand, from creating brand logos to blog content for brand awareness. Moreover, with the boom of AI technology, we are seeing more and more generative AI being used by companies for their marketing campaigns.
This article will guide you to the tested and proven branding tools experts have used to assert your brand as a leading expert in your industry.
What are Branding Tools?
Branding tools are a diverse resource that companies use to build and manage their branding across all aspects. They often come in platforms like software and programs, and their purpose varies depending on the brand's needs.
Branding tools help your branding team in a lot of ways, such as:
1. Streamlining
Some parts of branding can take a lot of time and resources to create, like writing blogs and websites, but these tools are often used to build them smoothly.
2. Designing
Almost all creative aspects of a brand, like its logos, are created through a branding tool in one way or another, as there are platforms and software online that could help you breeze through the process.
3. Researching
Important data, like website traffic, is often tracked by branding tools so that the branding team can gain insights for their branding campaigns.
4. Generating
With AI technology becoming mainstream, many brands often leverage generative AI or any other AI-powered tools to create their content, design, and campaigns for them; they are efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.
Here are some scopes that branding tools can help:
1. Brand Logo Design: Branding tools can help a logo's design be unique and recognizable, and convey the essence of the brand identity.
2. Website and Online Presence: Branding tools help create platforms to showcase products or services and engage with customers online.
3. Social Media: Branding tools can help marketers manage their social media campaigns to build brand awareness and foster a loyal community.
4. Brand Guidelines: Branding tools can help you ensure consistency in visual elements, messaging, and tone across all brand communications.
5. Public Relations: Brand tools can help you build relationships with the media, influencers, and stakeholders to help shape how people perceive your brand.
6. Email Marketing: Branding tools can help you to effectively stay in touch with customers and keep them informed about new products, promotions, and company news.
7. Analytics and Metrics: Branding tools like Google Analytics provide valuable data to assess the effectiveness of branding efforts.
Why are Branding Tools Important?
Branding tools help you by offering pre-designed templates and style guides that include standardized color palettes, typography, and design elements. These ensure that all marketing materials adhere to the same design principles, promoting a cohesive look and feel.
These templates and designs can be automated too. Not only does this make building your brand consistent, but the automation also makes it cost and time-efficient, giving you time to focus on improving your product or service.
Branding tools also assist your branding team in getting real-time data, consumer insights, and updates of your branding campaigns.
7 Essential Branding Tools Your Brand Needs
#1: Google Analytics for Brand Research
Brand and web market research enables informed decision-making, ensuring the brand aligns with its objectives and resonates with the target audience.
Google Analytics is a free tool that analyzes data from the online search engine with the most market share, Google, and evaluates your marketing performance using metrics such as website traffic and conversion rates.
It also allows your team to segment customer data, enabling them to determine the demographics that are more likely to be interested in your product. Customer segmentation is particularly useful as the valuable insights from the research data allow the branding team to make a guided decision on how the brand is supposed to be presented to the public.
Google Analytics is free, but it has a paid version with a steep price of $50000 per year. The paid version offers more gathered data, with 500 million hits per month, compared to the free version's 10 million per month.
The paid version offers more updated real-time data and more customizable options like segmentation. However, the free version should be more than enough for startups and small to medium businesses.
#2: Ahrefs for SEO Marketing
Invest in Search Engine Optimization to establish your authority in the digital marketplace. SEO marketing helps you increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website by optimizing various aspects of the site to align with search engine algorithms and user intent.
Ahrefs is a tool that even brand agencies use, as the platform is specifically designed for SEO marketers. One of its popular features is its keyword explorer, which provides users with valuable data when they input keywords, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and potential traffic if they target that keyword.
It also features Site Explorer, which provides in-depth data on your website's performance, including keywords you have ranked on the first page of search engine results. It also monitors brand mentions, the traffic each page generates, and other premium features, including which keywords your competitors target on their website.
Ahrefs starts at $99 per month, offering its most useful features, such as Keyword Explorer, up to the Enterprise tier, which is $999 per month and includes premium features like API, Single Sign-On, and payment through invoice.
#3: Canva for Brand Visuals
Marketers create brand visuals such as logos, color schemes, and design elements, as brand recognition relies on the powerful first impression of your target audience. It also differentiates your brand from your competitors and can write its own visual storytelling.
Canva isn't specifically created for brands, as students, freelancers, and hobbyists use it to make visual designs of all kinds, like images, presentations, videos, and color schemes. It is an accessible, free tool with a library of more than 250000 free templates for the marketing team to explore how the brand should look to the public.
Canva is user-friendly, allowing you to simply drag and drop existing and uploaded visual elements like fonts, to create comprehensive brand visuals across various platforms, including social media posts, website brand style guides, corporate videos, and other marketing materials.
Canva has a free tier, which allows you to get access to much-needed free templates to get you inspired, photos and a sizable 5g cloud storage, which is good enough for startups and small businesses. Premium tiers have the features from the free account, as well as AI-powered QOL's features like Magic Switch™, which allows you to resize your designs to suit your brand needs, as well as increased cloud storage of up to 1 terabyte.
#4: Wistia for Video Marketing
Videos' ability to inform, engage, emotionally, and entertain audiences is a powerful tactic for your marketing strategy. Moreover, video marketing can be a medium for storytelling and educational content for leads. However, videos might be effective, but making them is complex and tedious.
Wistia makes it easier by making the video editing a simple drag-and-drop process. It is a platform that is built for marketers, as most of its features are useful for the company.
It can streamline webinars and live event recording so that they can be made into content. Wistia also has SEO optimization features to make sure that your audience sees the video content. They also have analytics and reporting features for A/B testing, measuring ROI.
Wistia's pricing starts at $19, which includes its essential features, such as lead capture forms, email integrations, and basic CTAs. The higher tiers, priced up to $319 per month, have other useful features like video heatmap, live-streaming, and single sign-on for unlimited users.
#5: Webflow for Brand Website
A brand website is the most important asset you have in your digital branding. It shows everything you need to show to your target audience, such as your content, brand style guide, brand voice, brand story, brand messaging, and pricing for your products and services.
Webflow is a no-code website designer platform built for branding, with user-friendliness and accessibility in mind. Instead of hiring a back-end and front-end website, you can simply drag and drop website elements like CTA, images, and content text.
It also enables marketers to create a customer content management system, allowing them to create templates for repeatable pages, such as landing pages and blog pages, to ensure consistency and visual appeal.
Webflow has a free tier for entry-level sites for personal and hobby use. But they also have a premium tier that increases the CMS items up to ten thousand items. The tiers also allocate up to 400 GB bandwidth for higher traffic should your website become successful, as well as a content editor feature, a 150-page limit, and 2500 form submissions per month.
You can start with the free tier to get a feel for what Webflow offers. Premium features are recommended if you plan to turn your website into a business.
#6: Buffer for Social Media Marketing
Social Media marketing remains one of the most effective digital branding strategies, as it allows you to engage closely with your target audience, as well as gather valuable data like feedback, social media impressions, audience reach, and conversion rate.
Buffer basically handles everything you need to manage your social media channels. It is a social media management solutions that monitor data from established social media platforms like Twitter, Google, and YouTube for valuable insights on how effective your social media campaigns.
Buffer also has an AI-powered content creation feature that allows the creation of content quickly and efficiently through generative AI. It also has integration with other tools like Canva, Zapier, Mailchimp, and Google Analytics, so you can have a seamless analysis of your social media campaign performance throughout multiple social media platforms.
Buffer has a free tier that can only handle three channels and has a limited scheduled posting of 10 posts per channel. Buffer's premium tiers, which start at a monthly $6 per channel, have a much more in-depth overview of analytics like hashtag performance, Shopify performance, and exportable reports, while also making the scheduled posting per channel unlimited. Buffer's premium also increases the limit of content creation ideas and social media graphics.
#7: SurferSEO for Content Optimization
Content marketing and content optimization remain primary strategies for brands that want to attract people to their brand, which is what we call leads. Content optimization, in particular, is important as doing so makes your existing content relevant, consistent, and valuable for campaigns as a whole. Plus, you don't have to create fresh new content when repurposing an old one can provide as much, if not more, organic traffic to your website, which is quicker to do.
SurferSEO is a powerful tool for content marketing, enabling content writers to create guided content with headings, keywords, and images. This allows the content to rank higher in SERP based on its own content score.
SurferSEO is also a useful tool to audit your existing content, knowing which parts need improvement, such as internal links, keywords, and word count, to increase its content score. They also have Google Docs integration so that you can seamlessly optimize your content in the Google Docs platform.
SurferSEO pricing starts at $69 per month, but it can already optimize up to 180 articles annually. The content editor article can also increase up to 1080 articles per year for $249 per month. SurferSEO's higher tier offers features like SERP Analyzer, Surfer APIm advanced auditing, and custom branding.
FAQs:
Is branding a marketing tool?
Yes, branding is a powerful marketing tool because it shapes how people perceive your business, organization, product, or personal image. Logos and slogans are about building recognition, trust, and emotional connection with your audience.
How do you brand a product?
Start by identifying your product’s positioning, what makes it different and better.
Develop a brand name, logo, packaging design, and messaging that reflect its personality. Then, ensure every touchpoint, from advertising to customer service, reinforces that brand identity so customers have a clear and consistent impression.
How do you brand yourself?
Branding yourself means intentionally shaping the way others see you, often for career or business purposes. Identify your strengths, values, and unique selling points, then express them consistently across your online presence, networking activities, and professional materials.
What are the types of branding?
The main types of branding include:
- Corporate – Defines a company’s overall identity and values.
- Product – Focuses on creating a unique identity for a specific product.
- Personal – Builds a recognizable image for an individual.
- Service – Highlights the experience and quality of a service.
- Cultural or geographic – Promotes a place, region, or culture.
Each type uses different strategies but shares the goal of creating a strong, memorable impression.
Not Sure What the Right Tools are to Get?
Branding tools are useful, but considering that some of the much-needed features they have are locked behind higher pricing, this could be an investment that you have to consider, especially on how valuable a tool is to your company, especially concerning your size.
Moreover, a tech stack could be an issue if you have a tight budget.
But if you want to leverage these tools on a single pricing, as well as the experts who can use them effectively, Evolv has you covered. We are a team of experts on all aspects of branding, and we use these tools to help companies like DMT assert their brand as a leading name in their industry. Contact Evolv to unleash your brand's potential.
You can also check out our blog and get updated on the latest trends in brand-building and marketing.
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