Creating a solid brand could be the difference between your getting sales and being stagnant. It differentiates you from every other product or firm in the industry that may offer something similar to your offerings.
While many confuse the terms branding and marketing, they must be used together to achieve your success objectives. Marketing works to grow your target market but strong branding gives your company a humanizing essence that potential leads can connect and resonate with long-term – which can ultimately grow your bottom line for years to come.
So… how do you create your own strong brand?
Follow these five steps and take your time. Greatness doesn’t happen overnight.
Step 1: Define your Company Mission, Vision, and Values
How can you move forward without a roadmap to where you want to go? Taking time to nail down your company mission including what you’d like to accomplish, the vision for how your business and products will help your market, and what your company stands for is the vital first step.
Step 2: Conduct Thorough Research
In order to succeed, you have to know everything about the people you’re attempting to connect with through your brand (aka: your target audience) and learn what you need to outperform the competition by researching those who share your market.
Learn demographics or firmographics, and psychographics about your potential customers, what their preferences are, what makes them tick, their income brackets, what they do in their spare time – everything you can to be able to connect emotionally with them through your branding efforts.
Regarding your competitors, conduct a SWOT analysis where you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to both you and your rivals. Finding where they might be lacking could be the perfect chance to fill that void with your potential leads.
Step 3: Develop Visual Aspects of Your Branding
Many new entrepreneurs or those new to branding believe that creating a logo with some flashy elements that look good is enough but… that couldn't be farther from the truth. There is psychology that goes along with color choices, typography, illustrations, and taglines that accompany your logo. It should mean something to the people you’d like to see it.
Step 4: Devise a Brand Voice and Tone for All Messaging
Create a voice and tone for your brand – used in all messaging from social media posts and website content to ad copy and email marketing. It should be reflective of your visual branding (logo, illustrations, etc.) and align with your mission, vision, and value statements while creating that emotional connection with your target audience from the previously conducted research.
Step 5: Create Methods for Capturing and Measuring Success
How will you know if you’ve nailed your branding without measuring its success? Create KPIs (key performance indicators) that matter to your goals and objectives, and relevant capture success data. You’ll know when you’re on point with your branding or you’ll get a great idea that it might be time to pivot your strategy.
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