How to Successfully Create a Brand in 6 Easy Steps
How to Successfully Create a Brand in 6 Easy Steps
We’ve talked previously about the importance of good branding for your business and why you must invest in branding for the long-term growth of your company. Today, we’re going to provide you with some easy steps that you can follow to successfully create your brand.
Whether you’re building a new brand from scratch or rebranding an established company, these tips should have you well on your way to developing not only your own unique brand but also, a strong one.
Just remember that, as with anything good in life, effective branding takes time. Branding is an ongoing process, so some steps you’ll want to repeat and other steps you’ll need to adjust as your brand grows.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
We’ve talked about the reasons behind building a strong brand here, and some of these include raising awareness about your company, building up recognition and trust in the market, and increasing sales. You want a strong brand to attract loyalty and the best talent amongst your employees, and to improve your chances of gaining good investors.
But the ultimate aim of any good branding strategy is to bring in new customers and to keep existing ones. And to do that effectively, you want your brand to appeal to your ideal customer.
To better define your ideal customer, ask yourself some simple questions:
· Who do you want my brand to speak to?
· What kind of customer are my products or services targeted to?
· What need in the market did I create my company to fill?
· Whose needs does it serve?
The answers to these questions will inform all future branding decisions, so make sure you take the time to research your target market and buyer personas thoroughly. If this feels like something you’d rather get some expert advice on, you can contact our team to discuss.
2. Make a Mission Statement
Once you’ve found your company’s reason for existence (it’s not always that simple, we know!), it will be easy to establish your mission statement.
A good mission statement will define not only your purpose but will also explain your passion as an organization, in addition to supporting your company’s vision. The whole point of a mission statement is to communicate your intended purpose and direction to not only your employees and stakeholders but also to the public you intend to serve.
This step is the foundation upon which your branding efforts will sit.
So, before you start creating a brand that can be recognized, valued, and trusted, you need to first communicate your purpose as an organization.
Once this fundamental stone has been laid, your entire brand (from your logo to your tagline, your voice, personality, and color scheme), can be built to reflect your company’s core mission, vision, aims, and values.
3. What Makes Your Company Better Than the Rest?
Each step that you take on the path to branding your company helps inform the next.
So, now that you have defined who your target audience is and created a mission statement to explain your company’s purpose to them, now is the time to come up with all the reasons why YOUR company can do it better than anyone else!
· What are the combined qualities, values, and/or products or services that make your company unique and set your business apart from your competition?
· What benefits do buying your products or services bring to your customers?
· Why should they trust you over any other brand?
4. Create Your Brand’s Visual Design
Once you’re sure that you’ve successfully completed steps 1 through to 3, you get to reward yourself with a fun one: creating your visual assets!
When we talk about the visual design of a brand, we mean those elements such as your logo, your chosen color scheme, your preferred fonts, and the kind of visuals you want to use.
These combined elements will form your brand style guide. Your brand guidelines will be used by all your employees or any other company you choose to work with. This will ensure consistent branding on anything associated with your company, from internal communications to packaging, promotional material, or social media posts.
You may find this step a little daunting even if it’s a fun one. If the whole idea of visual design scares you, you could consider hiring a team with design experience to help.
A lot goes into successfully creating the right visual identity of a brand, from the psychology of color in web design to ensuring that you stay on-trend with contemporary design practices so it helps to have an experienced team involved at this point to get this step right.
5. Finding the Right Voice for Your Brand
Try to imagine your brand as a person. No, don’t laugh, hear us out.
If your brand could talk, what would they sound like to you? If you got an email from it, what tone of voice would it have?
Your brand voice is just as crucial to successfully creating a strong brand as your visual design. And both form the backbone of your brand guidelines.
To imagine how your brand should sound, go back to Step 1 and imagine what voice would best appeal to your ideal demographic and help you to connect with them.
Just as with your visual design, if you don’t get this important step right, your brand won’t resonate with your intended audience, and you won’t get the recognition and trust that you seek to engender through branding your company.
Consistent branding is key. This means that you need to maintain a common design theme and tone of voice throughout all content associated with your brand. From your marketing material to your Tweets, your social media posts, your website content, and all blog posts need to have the same personality.
If you can make your brand sound human, even better. And if your brand’s voice can be funny, authentic, and accessible while remaining in line with your core mission and values, even better.
Some brands are masters of this, and their Twitter feeds have huge followings. Take Innocent Smoothies for example – their fans can’t wait to see their next tweet or social media post. They have truly personalized their brand with humor and fun.
6. Display Your Brand Proudly
If you’ve diligently worked through Steps 1 through to 5 and are positive that they’re working well towards your company’s vision and aims, you can be proud.
Now it’s time to make sure it’s integrated across all areas of your business and that your employees and sister companies understand your brand’s core mission and aims and can follow your brand guidelines consistently and faithfully.
Make sure that you have double-checked the following:
Branding Your Website:
If you haven’t done so already, make sure your website truly reflects your brand’s identity, using your brand guidelines to adjust the color scheme, the fonts used, and the voice in all posts and pages on the site.
Brand Your Social Media:
Just like with your website, your social media channels are often the first introduction new customers will have to your organization, so it’s essential that they truly reflect your brand. Make sure to splash your logo across all your visual content, develop hashtags that you use for all your posts, and keep your voice consistent across all content.
All of this will work towards better recognition for your brand and done right, increased trust in your company.
Don’t forget about Packaging
Make sure your packaging, if you are a company that sells physical items, also reflects your brand, from its feel to its colors, and your logo wherever applicable. Even if you’re not in the physical products industry - think about how you could apply your branding to any merchandise you give out to clients or employees.
Also think about the message you want your products, packaging, or branding merc to say about your company? Is it ethical? Is it produced environmentally? What does it say about your company?
Make Sure All Departments Adhere to Your Brand’s Overall Vision
Ensure that the people who are working for you are putting your brand to work. Whether this is in informal social media posts where they tag your company and use your preferred hashtags (in line with your branding, of course), or any advertising material your marketing team produces.
Don’t forget to train your sales and customer services team to ensure they engage with customers in line with your branding guidelines. Whether this is creating a sales pitch, or answering customer complaints or inquiries, encourage them to use style guides, consistent branding, and most importantly, your brand’s voice.
Well done! You did it! You must be well on the way to successfully building a strong brand for your company!
As with any goals that you make, from your social media marketing strategies to your overall company vision, you will need to revisit your branding guidelines from time to time to ensure they are still working for your company and are following the direction in which it is growing, as well as checking that they are regularly updated in line with current trends.
If you need help with any aspect of branding your business, from market analysis, to brand strategy or design, we have the right team at hand with all the experience and expertise necessary to help you grow your company and keep it at the top.