Intro
In growing your business, branding plays an essential part. Making your brand consistent and credible has the potential to increase brand perception and awareness. Also, it may look overwhelming to many business owners, but it doesn’t have to be. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed really quickly, so you can become a brand-building expert too.
How do we define a trademark?
By brand, we mean a set of features or characteristics that distinguish your business from any other business. It includes concrete aspects such as the name of your brand, logo, design, voice, and slogan, as well as more trivial categories such as ‘what people think of when they think of your brand’ and ‘how they feel when they interact with your brand’.
Do you know what branding is?
This is a process of researching and developing the set of traits and characteristics that distinguish your brand from others and then implementing them. Branding is a paradoxical process, in that the best branding maintains consistency, but at the same time is continuously evolving to ensure that the brand messages and offers you provide connect to your customer base as well as possible.
Because of the somewhat ambiguous and often unclear definition of branding, many businesses have surely walked into the trap of taking an “I know it when I see it” approach. Similarly problematic is the tendency to call everything ‘your brand’. The contrary approach seems to serve small businesses better. Be as concrete as you can. Adopt only what you can actually implement. Test. Adjust. Repeat.
Are you unsure how to do these things? Below we’ll cover it all so you have that needed information to implement the strategy into your brand strategy.
What is brand strategy?
A brand strategy represents a long-term plan for growing a brand in order to achieve particular, clearly defined objectives. These objectives can include such goals as reaching a new audience or taking over market leadership from a competitor. While creating a brand strategy, it is best to decide first what you are aiming to achieve. In fact, this strategy is what helps you figure out how to get there.
Corporate vs. personal branding
Corporate branding concerns the features and characteristics that are related to a business, in contrast, personal branding is about identifying the associations that people have with a person so that you can more efficiently convey your message and better value yourself as an individual.
In this guide, you will be introduced to everything you need to know about business branding. For additional information on personal branding, please consult our guide.
The importance of branding
An effective branding strategy can help you grow your business in 6 key ways:
- Makes your brand more memorable.
- Attracts more new customers.
- Boosts the number of loyal customers.
- Enhances the value of your business.
- Builds a business brand trust.
- Helps to recruit and retain employees.
How to develop your brand?
So there are 3 ways you can handle your branding work. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. All of them will be analysed so you can make an intelligent decision for your business.
Develop it by yourself
Many small businesses would be best advised to develop their own brands. By being the people closest to the brand, you know what your customers react to. For instance, you know that they come to you because your service is fast. As well, you may have noticed that people tend to relax in your lobby or boutique. That is a hint that the customers find it cozy and perhaps even luxurious.
For many business owners, hiring branding agencies or branding teams is because they feel they don’t know how to do branding, but there is a compromise. Branding teams won’t know your business as well as you do and, of course, they are very expensive.
Once you come to the decision of whether or not you need to create a brand for your business yourself, go back to your goals. What are the goals you want to achieve? If you want to reach a new market, think about your conservative estimates of the profits you will make. Now compare them to the branding costs of working with an agency and then consider the ROI.
Work with an agency
The branding agencies focus on creating, launching, and rebranding brands. Once you hire a branding agency, the agency will be fully in charge of creating and planning your brand strategy. This includes elements such as your visual identity and brand identity.
With the advantage of hiring a branding agency, you can rely on branding experts to get your brand up and moving. This can be particularly appealing to an entrepreneur entering a saturated market where your branding will be essential – or if you plan to do most of your business through social media (in which case you’ll want people to be able to quickly connect with and remember your brand). The downside of hiring a branding agency is that it’s expensive and can be cost-prohibitive for many entrepreneurs who are just starting out.
Engaging a branding agency means you can rely on branding experts to set your brand on track. This can be especially valuable for an entrepreneur entering a highly saturated market where your brand will be critical – or if you plan to do most of your business via social media (in which case you’ll want people to be able to quickly connect with and memorise your brand). The cons of using a branding agency are the price tag, which can be unaffordable for lots of startup entrepreneurs.
Get an in-house team
A third alternative is to hire an in-house branding team. This option is only recommended for big companies – like McDonald’s – that need to create a strong message for their global presence. But for the majority of small businesses, it’s an expensive option that doesn’t have a strong return on investment, since a branding team will likely just tell you what you already know about your company.
Finding out how to create your brand
Have you decided to create a brand by yourself? Are you curious about what it would look like? Here’s what you need to know about creating a small business brand.
Identify your goals
What are your main reasons for creating a brand? Do you want to get access to new audiences? Maybe you want your marketing to be more effective? To deliver a smooth and consistent customer experience? Identify your goals. Be specific.
Decide on the strategy you intend to use to achieve this
Secondly, you must identify the “how.” What are you going to do to reach your brand’s goals? This is your brand strategy. It will fluctuate depending on the goals you set, however, a common brand strategy is described below.
1. Identify “your personality” as a company
For what do you want to be recognized? How do you want to impact your industry? As a company, what is most important to you? The more explicit you are about your identity, the more dynamic and consistent your brand will be.
2. Establish your different feature
The point of difference (POD) is what sets you apart from all your business competitors. What makes your customers choose you over another company? It could be something as big as “We use the newest technology” or something as small as “Our avocado salad is the best in town.”
3. Use questions to build your brand
As you start your branding path, these questions may help you get an initial sense of what your brand looks like. Ask them about yourself and key stakeholders.
- To whom do you want to address?
- How might the information from your market research be useful in this process? Hint: if you have created a buyer persona, you may want to find it.
- Who are you as a company and what do you stand for? It is not a joke! This happens in step one. This is very important and you need to ask yourself again and again “What brand values can I promise and actually deliver?”
- What do you want your brand to stand for?
4. Develop brand awareness
Design your brand’s visual identity, your brand voice, your logo, etc. These are all part of your brand identity. If you make it by yourself, you do not necessarily have to do it all at one time. If you take an experimental approach to branding, you can launch different marketing messages first to experiment and see how they perform. Elements of your brand that are more complicated to change, such as your website design or logo, are best saved for the end of the process. At this stage you assume that you already have a working version, so they can be designed based on the information you get during the testing.
Keep testing your brand
Stay on top of every step of the branding process. Measure your results. A well-tested brand strategy will always be more valuable than an untested brand strategy (no matter how delightfully witty the slogan). Both social media and content marketing can be amazingly efficient and cost-effective tools for testing brand strategy. Due to their very nature, social media and content marketing call for customers to engage.
When thinking about visual identity, you may want to try out images that correspond to that visual style on your Instagram. See how they perform. Well, what kind of engagement did you get from your audience? If you don’t get a single like, that will tell you that it’s probably the wrong message for your audience. If the post explodes, it’s a good sign.
A similar thing can be stated regarding the message. If you’re trying to determine what are your company’s values or product offers that you need to emphasise, the engagement metrics from a blog post on that topic can offer you a lot of data on this.
In comparison to other branding methods, testing through social media and content marketing is much cheaper and gives you instant feedback.
Conclusion
Have you found something that didn’t work? Try it again and test it again. The process of branding is one of continuous change. Having clearly defined your brand, you will be able to handle the continuity of your brand. However, as the market changes, you will need to keep updating your brand.
Once again, your branding is a complex process of maintaining coherence through ongoing development. This process is like a huge sea, constantly moving and never in one place, but always recognizable.
Enjoyed the reading and would like to discover more? Read our latest article: 8 Easy Steps To Recruit Employees For Small Businesses
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