Brand Management in Tech Companies

Running a tech company is a difficult task. It’s not like manufacturing shoes where the business hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. Technology changes every day, and people working in some of these industries must keep themselves up to date at all times.

Brand management is challenging for everyone working in the tech industry. Dealing with situations that might turn around every moment is stressful and demands a lot of predictions. People preparing marketing strategies for a particular tech brand must be aware of the competition and, at the same time, pay attention to all the new developments on a day-to-day basis. 

In this article, we’ll talk more about brand management in the tech world in general. How it’s done, what are the best ways to achieve success, and so forth. If you’re interested in finding out more, keep on reading. 

What Is Brand Management?

Brand management is a process that focuses on raising brand awareness and improving brand reputation. It requires a careful and thorough analysis of how the public perceives a particular brand. It’s crucial to determine how the public sees the brand, how it should be seen, and what needs to be done to achieve a specific goal so that consumers can be loyal to that brand.

Customers Should See Your Brand the Same Way You Do

The perception of the brand from an owner’s point of view and from the consumers’ point of view is not the same. Lots of cases in the marketing world show that business owners have one vision of the brand while the customers see it in a different light. That’s completely normal because we all perceive things differently, and we can’t expect that the rest of the world perceives things the same way we do. 

Still, it’s crucial for your understanding of the brand to be the same with the rest of the world. The best way to see if this is so is to think of a couple of words that describe your business. Ask those around you to do the same. If most of them are in line with your understanding, that means you’re on the same page, and your idea is perceived the same.

Being on the same page is important because depending on the customer’s perception about the brand can make significant changes in the growth of the entire company. This is why specific branding is often made. It makes brand awareness, changes customers’ perception, and drives more business.

Select a Target Group of Customers

You can’t sell everything to everyone, right? You need to understand your brand and what it’s aiming for. More importantly, you need to understand your customers and know what they are looking for. That way, you’ll see if you have a chance of selling your product.  

For example, if you take a look at the Instagram stats, you’ll see that 96% of US fashion brands use Instagram. Almost everyone has chosen this company to be the place where they’ll promote their products.

Instagram is already recognized as a brand that’s perfect for fashion companies, and that’s why it’s not changing direction as a company. Customers who are into fashion know that the best place to search for a particular product in this field is Instagram. Not Twitter, not Facebook, but Instagram. 

With that in mind, you need to select a target group. If your business is in the gaming industry, you’ll want to create something that will attract the younger generation. If you’re in the SEO business, you’ll try to reach out to the millennials as they are most likely to be your customers.

Listen to Experts but Don’t Forget to Leave Your Mark 

Like we said at the beginning, the tech industry is moving incredibly fast. No one can keep up with it, but the more you do it, the better it’ll be. 

Experts in your field are important to be heard, but they are not crucial. Just remember what some of the most popular at the moment did with their brands. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example, who made a social network rise from zero to hero. He didn’t really obey the rules of the internet but he managed to build a social network that grew from half of the Harward students in a month to 6 million in a year and a half. Today, it’s the leading social network on the internet with over 2.45 billion active users worldwide. 

In other words, whatever your tech company is doing, it’s wise to hear what experts have to say. Still, more importantly, building a strong and recognizable brand is about having your own vision about it and how it should be dominating the market in the future. 

Social Media Should Be Used With Extreme Caution

Today’s marketing relies on social media and the internet. With their help, brands raised to heights that would’ve been too hard to reach. However, promoting and posting on them should be left to professionals as one wrong move, and everything can be ruined.

What does that mean? It means that once you post something out there, it goes viral in a matter of seconds. Of course, if there’s something interesting for the public to share and reshare.

A great example of this is the German Foreign Office Twitter account, which posted a lousy joke that provoked thousands of reactions. Understanding the damage they did, they tried to pull out with another post apologizing, but it was too late, the damage was done. 

They say there’s no such publicity as bad publicity. However, a national institution is not aiming for bigger reach on the internet, and they only got a bad name off the situation.

Some companies are deliberately trying to pull something like this, just to get their brand go viral. However, this brave attempt is often taking a wrong turn, and more damage is done than the brand actually gains fame. 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is getting bigger and bigger lately. Studies showed that 96% of customers don’t trust ads. Most people also don’t like it when they see experts on their timeline and in the TV commercials. Instead, they trust ordinary people who shop just like them. Their friends, colleagues, family members, and even total strangers are more reliable than brands and their employees.

This is where influencers come into play. Influencers are people who are popular on different social networks. They have lots of fans and followers. Sometimes they are skilled and professional in one area, and sometimes they are just famous for being famous. 

Either way, their brand-building can be much more beneficial than all the other efforts a marketing team of some brand is going to do. Christiano Ronaldo has 210 million followers on Instagram. In the first 20 most popular accounts, only 3 are brands, and except for the official Insta account of this social network, there’s no tech company among them.

Still, there are lots of influencers who have thousands, if not millions of followers, and are ready to do a campaign for a certain product. If marketers come up with a great plan and prepare an excellent strategy, influencers can make their brand become a huge success.

Define the Brand and Be Consistent in Building It

A brand never stops growing. It’s a living organism. Once you have realized what you want out of it, you need to push this idea constantly. It doesn’t matter what it is, be sure that there’s an audience for your product or a service. 

When it comes to technology, the world is an open door now. There are 7.5 billion people in the world, and they all depend on technology in one way or another. There are 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world and over two billion PCs in use. These numbers are huge, and they are only going to grow in the future. 

It’s essential to be consistent in what you do. You can’t rebrand the products every month. Of course, rebranding is an important part of the marketing business, but it needs to be done with a lot of analysis, preparation, and market research. 

Follow the Trends

This decade is going to be extremely interesting when it comes to technology. 2020 is the year when the 5G network and fast data transfer are introduced. They are going to revolutionize the smartphone industry. 

Artificial Intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, drones, IoT, voice search, all kinds of things are going to be our daily routine in the years to come. For example, it’s expected that there will be 63 million smart homes in the US by 2022. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what industry you have chosen to work in, there’s a place for everyone, but depending on how you’re going to build your brand, that’s how important your company will be on the market. 

Customers care about brands. Research shows that companies make 65% of their income from existing customers, and 43% of them are going to spend more money on a brand they are loyal to. To make them loyal, you must build and maintain a brand that will be important to them.

Conclusion

Brand management for tech companies is a process that takes a lot of research, analysis, data entry, insights, and all those things that happen behind the curtain, and customers never see. 

The points above are just a small portion of how a brand is built and what needs to be done to be maintained. It’s a science of its own and needs true professionals who will create a team taking care of all aspects. Still, these few points are great for understanding how it should be done.