There are many areas of business marketing that contribute to business success, but only a handful of those areas significantly impact truly long-term business growth. Effective business branding is one of them.

Whether you're a company that already has an established brand, or a new business that still needs to identify a clear brand message, there is always room to improve upon your business' brand identity. Here are a few great branding tips you can learn from some of today's most successful brands:

1. A memorable image or persona

A branding strategy that many forward-thinking companies use to establish their industry position and to gain strong brand name recognition is a memorable image or persona. This image or persona could be built into the company's brand logo or it can be a separate story told through marketing channel campaigns such as in television ads, online video, or poster boards.

A great example of one company's massively successful use of a memorable persona is Flo from Progressive Insurance. Her persona has become such a public favorite that Progressive has featured her in over 100 of their promotional ads as of today and she has been instrumental in making Progressive one of the most recognizable brands in the insurance industry. She is now the first thing that welcomes you on their homepage.

2. Proof of value

Another highly effective branding tip that the most successful businesses of today focus on is capitalizing on what makes your product or service highly valuable. Whether your product or service is faster, easier to use, more affordable, or of better quality than any other company or brand in your industry, you should want your brand to communicate this message to your customers clearly and consistently.

A great example of one company that does this flawlessly is Amazon. With their Amazon Prime service, Amazon delivers on the promise of providing faster and easier service than arguably any of its online retail competitors, which has made them one of the leading companies online today.

3. Distinct appearance

And finally, a branding tip that many successful businesses today and throughout history have used to the benefit of long-term business growth is having a very distinct and recognizable appearance. The ways you present your business' appearance will depend on your industry, such as whether you have a physical product versus a service, but in general, you can always rely on a strong color scheme to advance your brand identity.

Some of the best examples of where a distinct appearance has helped shape a business' brand identity is the red in Coke and the blue (and red) of Pepsi. Both companies have leveraged these color-specific brand identities over decades of marketing, which has catapulted them to permanent household name status. So long as you have a great quality product or service, having a distinct brand appearance is sure to help you reach your goals for business growth.

If you'd like to maximize your business' branding and online marketing efforts, contact us to see how our SEO, mobile app development and custom Wordpress responsive web designs can help you reach your goals.