Branding: What is it?

When you begin marketing your company, you should work on building a brand. Branding is building confidence with consumers. It allows new products and services to be quickly accepted and trusted.

Many businesses offer great services at great prices, but obtaining new clients is often difficult for these businesses because they are unknown to the buyers. Risk puts the brakes on many purchases.

Large corporations use branding to get consumers to quickly trust their products and services. Consumers will choose higher-priced brand-named goods to not gamble on the unknown.

Branding and Government Purchasing

If Tide detergent and the generic version were the same price at the store, which one would you buy? The government has the same thought process and will choose based on an established brand and known reliability.

A government buyer looks for the best price with the least amount of risk. Nationwide, the federal government has somewhere around 20,000 active buyers so the market to brand is small compared to Tide, for example, which markets to over 100 million Americans that will, at some point, be in the market for detergent. Branding in government contracting is the main key to success.

Buyers are not compensated based on how much they pay for a good or a service, but on how they undertake the project. Building a strong image of your organization is necessary to let the buyers conduct business with your company. Government buyers must understand your company, products, and services as well as trust that you will fulfill their contracts in the long term.

How to Brand Your Business

Branding is nothing without repetition. It is known in marketing that you should repeat something at least three times to get your point across. If I need to see something three times to understand my message, how many times must I see something before I know of the brand? It is safe to assume it takes more than three times to develop a brand but the key to branding is executing a long-term branding strategy.

A great branding strategy is going to vary based on many factors but it will depend on the level of branding that your competition employs. If your competitors are doing branding once a month through email and you execute this same strategy over time it would be safe to assume you would gain the same brand awareness.

The Solution

Brand your business for the long term by getting professionally designed marketing pieces sent out to an accurate audience and by submitting bids.

Include stats on your business within your marketing, especially if you are a small business. Small businesses that have developed a brand are more likely to be rewarded since the government has a goal to spend 23% on small business concerns.

Once you have won your first contract, your marketing will help carry you forward to yield more referrals and new ventures with other government agencies.