Just doing business without any branding won’t let you get any desired result. Branding is an essential thing for your business without any doubt. If you are running a business, you must know about branding. But how to build branding for your business?
Don’t you have a clear idea? Then please read this article to get the details. Let’s have a brief idea about what a brand is first.
What is a Brand?
A brand is a concept of marketing or business that lets people recognize or understand an individual, company, or business. It’s not merely a name or logo. Brands let you distinguish your product or service or company from others in the industry or niche you are doing business. They help to shape individual perceptions regarding your product or service or company.
You can’t touch or see brands because they are intangible. As mentioned above, names, logos, and the like are not brands but tools used for branding. Brands will create a unique identity for you in the market by adding a competitive advantage over your competitors in the industry. Your brand means your reputation.
Nowadays, a prominent brand needs to be consistent or regular in experience and communication across all applications:
- Environment (office or storefront)
- Packaging, signage, and print collateral
- Content publishing
- Website and online promotion
- Customer and sales service
- Internal site (with employees)
Brand Building Process
Brand building means generating awareness regarding your business with campaigns and strategies to create a lasting and unique image in your marketplace that differentiates you from your competitors. So, you can express brand success with the following equation:
Brand success= Positive Image + Competitive Advantage
You can’t build your brand overnight. It will take a mentionable time for sure. You can break down the total brand-building process into the following steps:
1. Figure Out your Brand Purpose
2. Identify the Target Audience of Your Brand
3. Research Your Industry Competitors
4. Develop Your Brand’s Vision, as well as, Mission
5. Showcase the Unique Qualities and Offers of Your Brand
6. Form Your Brand’s Exclusive Voice
7. Turn Your Customers into Your Brand Ambassadors
8. Have Your Brand Story
9. Develop Your Brand Logo with Tagline
10. Keep Quality in Everything
11. Be Consistent
12. Choose the Exact Channels for Promotion
13. Utilize Traditional Marketing Techniques and Print Advertising
14. Be Courageous and Daring
15. Review and Control
Now, let’s thoroughly discuss all of the steps mentioned above.
1. Figure Out your Brand Purpose
All renowned brands have a strong purpose behind doing their business. You might be running a small business but you also need to have a purpose. If you don’t know what is your purpose, you’ll be going nowhere. You need to answer the following questions to get your brand purpose:
- What is the purpose of your existence?
- What makes you different?
- What problem can you solve and how?
- Why will people choose you?
If you can answer all of these questions accurately, your brand purpose will be well-defined. When it’s done, you’ll be able to go forward with it and let your audience know your purpose with effective content. For instance, if you want to promote your brand purpose on TikTok, you can use short videos. Research shows that over 50 percent of consumers buy based on a brand’s value or impact.
2. Identify the Target Audience of Your Brand
Suppose, you have a brand purpose but you don’t know who is your target audience, then you won’t be able to fulfill the purpose accurately. While doing business, first, you need to identify who will be your target audience. Because you can’t do everything for everyone, your attempt to satisfy everyone will let you please none.
Make sure you narrow down a large group of people into a small target audience according to your brand value. It will let you develop a customized strategy to easily turn your target audience into your paying customers. You need to consider certain demographic factors like age, gender, location, occupation, income level, preferences, dislikings, and the like to develop a buyer persona. It will help you target your audience exactly.
3. Research Your Industry Competitors
Don’t escape this step because it will let you know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Your goal is not to copy them but to learn from their mistakes and try to differentiate your products or services from them. Consider creating a spreadsheet of competitor research. Use Excel sheets, Google Sheets, or a simple notebook for it.
You can note down certain crucial factors such as messages and values, product/service quality, mentions and reviews, and marketing efforts about your mentionable competitors such as 2-4 competitors in your niche. You can have a look at that spreadsheet while developing any strategy to make a difference in the niche. Get inspired by your competitors’ websites and social media accounts. Ensure that you have an effective brand name that is catchy, simple, unique, and easy to remember.
4. Develop Your Brand’s Vision, as well as, Mission
This is yet another crucial step while branding your business. Vision means a future destination that your business wants to reach in the coming say ten years. You need to visualize where you want to see your business shortly or ten years from now. Whereas mission means your present activities or actions you are taking to attain your vision. For instance, world-renowned brand Nike’s mission statement mentions,” Just do it.” Their vision is to manufacture supreme quality shoes. Their focus is on each type of athlete and offering the best shoes to them. They have created a huge global customer base with YouTube marketing and strong branding.
Everything related to your business such as its message, tagline, logo, and the like needs to reflect your vision and mission.
5. Showcase the Unique Qualities and Offers of Your Brand
When you want to build your brand, concentrate on developing a competitive advantage i.e. something special that your competitors don’t offer. Review your products and/or services and the unique qualities and advantages that only you offer. Showcase them and let your target audience be tied to your business because of them. Think carefully about how you can make your customers' life easier and add value to that.
Some examples can be:
- Authentic and supportive customer care
- Attractive offers
- Beautiful and useful gifts
- Discounts
- More affordable choices
- Saving time on your daily activities
6. Form Your Brand’s Exclusive Voice
Develop your exclusive voice while building your brand because this is another thing that will differentiate you from others. A brand voice can be of various types such as promotional, friendly, authoritative, professional, service-oriented, conversational, technical, and informative. For example, the self-care and beauty brand Dove has a powerful and uplifting brand voice that stimulates customers to cherish their inner beauty.
One thing that you need to keep in mind is “be consistent with your brand voice.” The voice you use needs to be consistent everywhere, for instance on ads, print media, social media, and the like. This voice depends on the industry, the audience, and your business’s mission.
7. Turn Your Customers into Your Brand Ambassadors
Don’t think of your customers as merely your regular buyers, rather change your point of view and view them as your brand ambassadors. Because each of them will be your brand’s walking representative. So, not only keep them satisfied and happy but also build a friendly relationship with them. Make sure you always encourage your customers to avail of your service time and again by giving special discounts, offers, loyalty programs, gifts, and the like.
Usually, clients like to be a part of a club and to get recognition for their actions, let it be a mere purchase.
8. Have Your Brand Story
Tell your target audience what is your identity, and how you started your journey. Apply your brand’s exclusive voice here and make it exclusively related to your brand. If writing is your passion and you are a unique storyteller, you can also think of starting a content writing service, well it’s just a business idea from us. Having your brand story here indicates that now you are in that phase of brand development where you have to tell your audience more than your logo or tagline. Telling your brand’s story is the best way to communicate with the clients, and it should be in a way that they can relate to it. So, keep it straightforward when you explain why this brand is crucial and special to your clients.
9. Develop Your Brand Logo with Tagline
Whenever you think of branding, naturally, visuals will come to your mind at first. You’ll need to create a logo that is aesthetic, simple, and unique. The audience should recognize it easily. This logo will be visible on everything associated with the business to represent your brand, so, it needs to be catchy, as well as, visually attractive.
Some popular kinds of logos are as follows:
- Logotypes: Google, Coca-Cola, Casper
- Abstract logos: Adidas, BP, Pepsi
- Logo symbols: Shell, Apple, Target
- Monograms: NASA, CBS, HBO
- Emblems: BMW, Starbucks, Warner Bros
- Mascot logos: KFC, Pringles, Wendy’s
You also need to write a meaningful tagline along with creating the logo. Take your time to research and create a tagline that your audience can easily remember. Logos, taglines, graphics, and typography play a crucial role in the branding process, so ensure that your job is awe-striking!
10. Keep Quality in Everything
If you want to make your brand outstanding, you need to focus on quality. Because at the end of the day, people will remember your brand for the quality of its service or product. You need to offer a quality in which you can take pride. Your product quality should match its price.
Satisfy your clients with your amazing offers, and make them come to you time and again to take or purchase your service or product. Your product or service should be different and like fresh air amongst the collection of so many poor or average-quality products.
11. Be Consistent
Stay consistent in whatever you do about your brand. It means you need to have a consistent brand strategy.Your campaigns should contain the same message everywhere. It means you need to have the same message on your website and other marketing channels such as Email marketing, SMS marketing, and social media like Facebook, Instagram, and the like.
Especially, at the very initial stage, you can’t have frequent changes in anything like logos, taglines, or messages. Because in that case, people will find it hard to believe your brand, and they will sense these frequent changes as signs of weaknesses. So, you need to be confident and consistent.
12. Choose the Exact Channels for Promotion
It’s quite tricky to choose the exact channel for your brand promotion among so many digital marketing channels. You need to research your target audience about which channels they are most prone to use, and use that channel for your brand promotion. Try choosing the channels that can be the most cost-effective. The following are some of the most common digital marketing channels:
Email Marketing:
This can be one of the most cost-effective channels for creating a brand identity for small businesses. You just have to prepare an email list of your prospects and clients. You can either send the emails manually or can also use any automation platform like Mailchimp or Moosend. Target your audience with personalized and relevant content.
You can earn an approximate ROI of BDT 42 for each BDT 1 you invest.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
Utilize social media channels for your brand promotion because nowadays people spend a mentionable part of their time on social media. The most popular social media channels are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This also requires some research because you need to find out the target audience is more likely to use which social media channel and when. Then prepare your media posts and ads accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO is a suitable tactic to get your potential customers by ranking your business page higher on search engine results pages. Here, on-page SEO helps you to get your visitors on your website with useful content and attractive website design. Off-page SEO is the things you do outside of your site such as backlinks. SEO will help you in branding by optimizing your brand’s digital presence.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing will also help you to promote your brand. Your content shouldn’t look like an ad for your brand. You need to provide content to your audience that will instantly answer their queries so that they can solve their problems and find your brand helpful. Your content can include blogs, webinars, e-books, online tutorials, podcasts, and infographics.
Video Marketing:
Video marketing is getting immense popularity nowadays. Specifically, short videos are quite popular among the young generation. So, if your target audience is the young generation, try using short videos on social media like TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to promote your brand.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC):
PPC ads or search ads are the means to promote your brand where you need to pay only to the people who click your ads. PPC ads will include thorough relevant keyword research and analysis. You can do keyword research with applications like Google Keyword Planner, and Google Ads.
13. Utilize Traditional Marketing Techniques and Print Advertising
You can use some traditional marketing methods and print advertising to build your brand. You might think that they have become obsolete, but they can also be useful because people may not always have access to the internet. You can use phone calls, SMS marketing, SMS reminders, and SMS notifications to let people know about your services, products, discounts, and offers.
Print advertising also can help you to build your brand. Because who doesn’t love to receive some gifts? So, get your logo printed on mugs, pens, notepads, notebooks, USBs, and the like. This sort of gift will remind people of your brand, and they can contact you to get your products or services.
14. Be Courageous and Daring
If your product quality is remarkable, it will take you far for sure. Similarly, if you are courageous to express your product’s quality, it will get you farther. It means you need to be confident about your product’s quality and speak straightforwardly to your clients about it in your brand’s exclusive voice.
15. Review and Control
Review the whole process of brand building now and then to find out the gaps, and take corrective actions. This will help you to be in the race because in this era of technological advancements everything changes so quickly, and you also need to cope with these changes.
From the above discussion and brand-building examples, you must have gotten your answers to the questions:
- How to build a brand?
- How to brand your business?
- How to create a brand image?
- How to create a brand identity?
- How to brand your business logo?
Final Words:
Now, you must be confident about how to build branding for your business. So, start working on this process immediately, and keep all the accounts of your business with the HishabPati app to keep your business ahead of your competitors.
