Advancements in technology have significantly made 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 companies use to build and manage their branding in every aspect. 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 branding tools are often used to build them quickly and efficiently.
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 make it easier and better.
3. Researching
Important data like website traffic are 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 campaign for them, as they are often efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.
Here are some branding aspects that branding tools can help the company with.
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. Content Marketing: Marketing tools help in creating and distributing valuable content, such as blogs, videos, and infographics, and help position the brand as an industry authority.
5. Brand Guidelines: Branding tools can help you ensure consistency in visual elements, messaging, and tone across all brand communications.
6. Public Relations: Brand tools can help you build relationships with the media, influencers, and stakeholders to help shape the brand's public image.
7. Advertising: Branding tools can help you with traditional and digital advertising methods to promote the brand to a wider audience.
8. Customer Feedback and Surveys: Branding tools can help you gather insights from customers to help refine the brand's offerings and messaging.
9. 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.
10. Analytics and Metrics: Branding tools like Google Analytics provide valuable data to assess the effectiveness of branding efforts.
Why are Branding Tools Important?
Brand consistency is one of the primary objectives for the branding team to make sure you don't alienate your audience. Branding tools help you out with this by offering pre-designed templates and style guides that include standardized color palettes, typography, and design elements. These templates ensure that all marketing materials adhere to the same design principles, promoting a cohesive look and feel.
Some branding tools also offer automation features that generate social media posts, email templates, or business cards that automatically adhere to the established brand standards. Not only does this make building your brand consistent, but the automation also makes it cost and time-efficient.
Branding tools also assist your branding team in getting real-time data and updates of your branding campaigns through important data like organic traffic, conversion rates, and audience feedback, which are efficiently generated through tools, as opposed to gathering them directly from platforms like social media sites.
7 Essential Branding Tools Your Brand Needs
#1: Google Analytics for Brand Research
Brand research is something a branding team should do first before creating the branding campaigns as it makes informed decisions about their branding strategies and ensures that their brand aligns with their objectives and resonates with their target audience.
Google Analytics is a free tool that sifts data through the online search engine with the most market share, Google, and checks to see how well is your marketing performance through metrics like website traffic and conversion rates. It also allows the branding team to segment customer data so that you can 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 what 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 $50000 per year. The paid version offers more gathered data of 500 million hits per month versus the free version's 10 million per month. The paid version offers more updated real-time data and more customizable options like segmentation. However, the free version should be more than enough for startups and small to medium businesses.
#2: Ahrefs for SEO Marketing
Search Engine Optimization(SEO) marketing is one of the effective strategies for digital marketing, especially if you want to assert your authority in the digital marketplace. What SEO marketing does to your brand is to increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website by optimizing various aspects of the site to align with search engine algorithms and user intent.
Ahref is one of the branding tools that even brand agency uses, as the platform is meant specifically for SEO marketers. One of its popular features is its keyword explorer, which allows users to get valuable data when they input keywords like search volume, keyword difficulty, and the potential traffic should you target that keyword. It also has other features like Site Explorer, which gives you in-depth data on your website performance, such as keywords that you have ranked up on the first page of the Search Engine results page (SERP), how much traffic each page contributes to the total organic traffic, and other premium features like what keywords can you target which appears from your competitor's website.
Ahrefs starts at 99$ per month, which already offers its most useful features like the keyword explore, up to Enterprise tier, which is $999 per month, but offers 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 also create its own visual storytelling.
Canva isn't specifically created for brands, as students, freelancers, and hobbyists often use it to create 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 branding team to explore how the brand should look to the public. Canva is user-friendly, as you can simply drag and drop existing and uploaded visual elements and build brand visuals in every aspect, like 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, photos and a sizable 5g cloud storage, which is good enough for startups and small businesses. But you can also get their premium tiers, which have the features from the free account, as well as AI-powered QOL's features like Magic Switch™, which you can 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. Luckily, there are existing video branding tools, and Wistia is one of them.
Wistia makes it easier by making the video editing into 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 has its essential features as well 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 allows marketers to create a customer content management system, in which you can create templates for repeatable pages like landing pages and blog pages to make them consistent and visually appealing simultaneously.
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, 150-page limit, and 2500 form submissions per month.
You can try first to get the free tier just to get a hang of what Webflow can offer, but we recommend taking their premium features should you wish to make a business out of your website.
#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 platform that gathers data from established social media platforms like Twitter, Google, and YouTube for valuable insights on how effective your social media campaigns are for your brand strategy. 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 branding tools like Canva, Zapier, Mailchimp, and Google Analytics to 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.
#7: SurferSEO for Content Optimization
Content marketing and content optimizations remain primary strategies for brands who want people to get interested in the 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 the branding campaign 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 as it allows content writer to create guided content through headings, keywords, and images that allows the content to rank up in SERP through their own content score. SurferSEO is also a useful tool to audit your existing content to determine which parts of it need improvement, like 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.
Not Sure What the Right Branding Tools 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 get the experts that can use them effectively, Evolv is for you. We are a team of branding experts on all of its aspects, and we use these tools to help companies like DMT assert their brand as a leading name in their industry. Let us know how Evolv can unleash your brand's potential.
You can also check out our blog and get updated on the latest trends in branding and marketing.
