Ensuring a successful brand building process is vital for the prosperity of a business. Here are the steps to take to ensure a successful branding process.
There are over 30 million small businesses in the United States alone. With numbers like that, you’re going to need to get really clear on your strategy and to stand out.
It’s almost impossible to sell a product that no one else is selling. However, with the right brand strategies and techniques, you can grow your reach and attract your ideal audience.
This article will walk you through some tips you need to know when building your brand.
1. Define Your Core Brand Strategy
If you want to create a memorable brand, you’re first going to have to figure out what you’re all about.
- What is your purpose beyond money?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- How are you making their lives better?
- What makes you different from competitors?
- Positioning Strategy – what uniquely positions you to provide this solution to your customer? Why should consumers care about you? Apple is famously devoted to simplicity. This obsession drove them to create products, packaging, and stores that are all designed to move you through as quickly and easily as possible.
A clear manifesto — like Apple’s — will guide you through the rest of the items on the list and hence the rest of the branding process.
2. Audience Personas
A large part of your strategy will be to understand your ideal audience. A brand is an relationship between a business and a person, so you’re going to want to make sure you understand who it is that will value and benefit from your product.
It’s best to get specific. Trying to appeal to everyone is not a strategy.
3. Conduct Competitor Research
Before you go ahead with figuring out what your products, services, and staffing is going to look like, look into other businesses in your market.
You want to make sure you can define the unique problems you are addressing for your ideal customer, uncover opportunities to innovate, and how your brand can be distinct.
Just like people, brands have certain archetypes which are personalities that people instinctively know.
4. Use Brand Archetype’s
You can use these 12 Jungian archetypes to learn more about these standard Brand personalities. Defining a brand personality is a targeted way to define how to connect with your desired audience across all brand touch points.
If your brand seeks to promote a sense of spontaneity and adventure, you might seek to embody the outlaw or the explorer.
You can see that the difference between the two is that the outlaw seeks to provide liberation and leave a mark, whereas the explorer seeks to provide freedom and a spiritual journey.
5. Define Your Key Messages
The best and most successful brands are the ones who are able to consistently communicate their value. This includes slogans, tag lines, mission, vision, values, about us, and how to communicate your product and services. Additionally, what words should not be associated with your brand is just as important.
6. Identify Unique Storytelling Elements
Most businesses skip over this part. But uncovering unique narratives associated to your brand builds a deeper relationship with your audience and further differentiates you from your competitors. Storytelling brands make connections. The biggest brands tell stories not about their founders, but about their customers.
Spotify celebrate their listeners based on their music choices. Airbnb celebrate their hosts through community stories. Nike celebrate diversity through their athletes.
Use Brand storytelling to connect with and celebrate your customers.
7. Define Your Visual Identity
Your logo and colour palette aren’t the only branded content you put out. Visual elements help trigger recognition and memorability. The aim is to communicate your strategy and create visual assets that make your brand distinct.
Here are 5 other visual elements to communicate your strategy.
- Typography – creates cohesiveness and leverages associations
- Patterns – communicates broader brand attributes, showcases personality, and evokes emotion
- Imagery – evokes emotion, communicates values, and contextualizes content
- Graphics & Iconography – provides consistent brand experience
- Animations & Illustrations – Elevates brand experience and great way to enhance differentiators
Defining how your brand shows up isn’t just about looking good.
8. Refine Your Experience
Take it one step further and define your brand experience. Bring your core brand strategy, a key message framework, and brand identity all together to define other brand experiences across other touch points.
If you have a physical store, how do all these elements play into each other to create a memorable interaction with your customer? If you have an e-commerce site, what is the overall experience across the entire customer journey?
If you have a monthly e-newsletter – what elements do you choose to focus on to create a cohesive experience that ultimately influences the perception of your readers to that of trust and therefore build brand love?
If you want to be top of mind and memorable – spend time to define your brand experience.
9. Be Convenient
Once you’ve put all of the elements of your brand strategy, it’s time to build brand awareness and put your brand out there!
Where is your ideal audience hanging out? What channels are they already on? Who can you partner with or associate with to amplify your brand awareness? What does a digital footprint look like? How can you make it really easy for your customers to find you?
This bring us to the next step, building a marketing plan.
10. Marketing Plan
Most businesses focus on the executing tactics versus clearly communicating their positioning in the market which results in short-sighted marketing that end up sounding and looking like their competitors and frankly disappointment.
Your brand strategy should inform your marketing plan. Leverage the audience personas, key messages, visual elements, and competitive analysis to roadmap a marketing plan that ties back to your strategy and business objectives.
There are 3 main focuses in building brand growth to help you understand where to focus on within your marketing plans.
They are:
Brand Awareness
Measures the growth recognition and recall
Brand Adoption
Measures the growth of converting your audience from knowing about your brand to making a purchase
Brand Advocacy
Measure the growth of advocacy over time like repeat buys, converting to reward programs, and referring your brand
Understand Brand Building
Brand building isn’t easy. If your business is something that feels tangible, that people feel like they can interact with, you’ve done your job right.
Follow all of the above tips, and you’ll have the right framework to building your brand.
For more information on brand building and creating the best branding strategy, contact us today.
