Your brand is more than the name of your company or the products and services that you provide. Building your brand is the identity of your organization, which can include its origin story, its reason for existing, and the experience that you want customers to have when they interact with your organization.
The process of brand building includes its image, strategy, and marketing efforts that will work in unison to leave a lasting impression on consumers. Brand colors like the bright red and yellow of the famous fast-food franchise McDonald’s, the apple-shaped brand logo for tech giant Apple’s iPhones and MacBook Pro laptops, and the brand slogan of “Just Do It” for athletic apparel company Nike are hard to forget and have been embedded in our minds repeatedly.
How will you get your own brand to become unforgettable when it is viewed outdoors through effective street furniture advertising or recognized when you scroll past the logo online? You can start that brand-building journey immediately with these six steps.
1. Understand Who Your Competition Is
Knowing how to properly position your business in the realm of your particular industry, rather locally, nationally, or globally, requires research.
Build your brand so that you can efficiently compete by:
- Analyzing business competition strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Discovering who your direct competitors are
- Figuring out who your indirect competitors are
- Identifying potential future competitors
- Rating your brand and your competitors
Discovering who your competitors are helps you to focus on strategies that are working for them and ways to improve upon them to differentiate yourself in the eyes of your target audience.
2. Identify Your Brand’s Purpose
Knowing what the purpose of your brand is in both the short-term and the long-term is key for all the decision-making that will follow. For instance, if you are operating an educational toy company for children, you will have to identify the lessons your toys will teach, the ages that they will be geared for, and how they will integrate with parents and teachers.
If your ideas are fairly foggy as to what your brand’s purpose is, don’t panic; simply ask yourself these questions:
- Why was your brand created?
- What makes your brand stand out from the competition? y
- What difficulties does your brand solve for customers?
- Why should people trust your brand?
Not only will the answers to these questions help solidify your brand’s purpose, but they can also be used to create ideas for advertisements, taglines, and product upgrades.
3. Aim for Your Audience
The next part of the brand-building process is to determine who is the audience that your brand will best serve in order to customize your messaging and services to meet their particular needs.
Conducting market research helps you to recognize important information about your core audience, such as:
- Buying habits of your customers
- Competitions
- Demographics (age, gender, income bracket)
- Location
- Market trends
- Motivations
- Pain points that you assist customers with
- Personality of your core customers
4. Make Your Mission Statement
A brand’s mission statement not only allows consumers to understand what your brand focuses on, but it is also a constant reminder of why you are in this business, to begin with. Having a clearly outlined mission statement gives you a daily objective to fulfill and quality standards to adhere to.
Your brand’s offerings, logo, tagline slogan, messaging, and commitment to your customers all make for a strong mission statement that informs a new audience and builds upon the trust you have already secured from satisfied customers.
5. Figure Out Your Brand’s Benefits
Having a unique and magnetic brand image is important to draw in new customers. But if you lose sight of having useful products and services, you may also lose the customers you have already engaged with.
Give consumers good reasons to pick your brand over the bigger brands that have already penetrated the marketplace. Make it clear to customers why your brand is beneficial by solving problems, showing what makes you different, and offering something that no one else is.
6. Communicate in Your Brand’s Voice
The language that you would use to talk to your two-year-old son is not the same way you would communicate in a corporate business meeting. The same is true when it comes to making sure that all of your marketing messaging is expressed in the voice of your brand.
You can look at your brand voice as the way you speak to your customers, whether verbally or visually, and it must remain true to the values that your brand upholds. You wouldn’t want to use playful language for the marketing materials for a law firm, and you wouldn’t want to use a serious tone for an amusement park.
Make sure that once you establish the parameters and boundaries of your brand voice, you keep it consistent so that it becomes easily recognized and understandable from ad to ad.
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