Online Marketing

How to create a better brand for your business

September 2018
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Small to medium-sized businesses often fall into the trap of investing the majority of resources in the marketing of their products and services while neglecting their branding. As conversations around achieving a customer-centric digital transformation increase, it’s time to restore the balance.

Essentially, branding is not only responsible for building your company’s identity, but it also develops credibility with your consumers. In a digital world of Instagram Stories, it is becoming crucial that the image behind your products or services aligns with the needs of your target audience and also stands out from your competitors.

The identity of your brand is what makes is recognisable, attractive and appealing to your customers. In the same way that Netflix provides the same seamless experience across a myriad of devices, your business needs to step up and offer the same level of consistency to meet the rising expectations of your audience.

Everything from your web page, social channels to crafting your emails needs to showcase a clear rather than muddled brand identity. If you cannot illustrate precisely who your company is and what its product stands for, tech-savvy audiences could view your company as both disjointed and inauthentic.

In a digital age of continuous change, brand identities must also evolve with your company. But, where do you start to build a better brand for your business?

Who Are Your Customers?

According to ITSMA, 82% of companies using personas have managed to create an improved value proposition. By building a series of profiles of semi-fictional “characters” will help you understand exactly who your target customer is and adjust your brand to match their needs and motivations.

This exercise does not need to be painful or costly. The free online tool MakeMyPersona will help you build a picture of your ideal customer by guiding you through a series of questions.

Find the Voice of Your Brand

Only when you thoroughly understand precisely who your customers are can you begin to create the voice of your brand. To meaningfully engage and resonate with your online audience, it’s imperative that you maintain a consistent tone of voice across all of your online and offline channels.

It’s also essential to ensure you use the same colour scheme, fonts, slogan, and logo across all of your blog articles, social media posts, and web pages if you are serious about bringing clarity to your brand. By maintaining a consistent voice, you will enable your brand to be viewed in the same way across multiple channels.

Bring Your Brand Identity to Life

To bring our brand identity to life, you need to think about investing in an engaging suite of brand ware that includes logo design, print, point of sale material, email templates and, of course, your website. To do this effectively, you may want to consider working with a team of experienced brand creators.

Helping them understand who your audience will enable them to build your brand from the inside out if needed. But, ensuring that you embed your principles, values, and voice to the visual elements of colour, line, and depth are all critical to creating a better brand for your business.

Be Creative, Authentic and Approachable, But Offer Value

When creating your logo and brand aesthetic, how does it make you feel? And how will it make your target audience feel? The best company branding is much more about your audience than your business.

The inconvenient truth is that your visitors don’t really care about your long list of accolades, testimonials, events, and amazing clients. Can you solve a problem that haunts them? Can you address their burning need? And do you understand what they want from you?

Rather than using your online presence for shameless self-promotion, try branding your company to deliver a message of how you will solve their problems in an authentic voice. By positioning your brand as approachable and go-to-person in your industry, you will quickly stand out from the crowd when your prospective customers drop by.

Things to Remember When Branding or Rebranding

Branding is not something you can implement and forget about. It should be something that continuously evolves with your company. Former Nike & Starbucks executive Scott Bedbury perfectly highlighted the importance of branding when he said, “A brand is a story always being told.”

The brand identity of your company is more than just the logo. It represents who you are, what your business stands for and the message that it communicates. Giving your brand a personality and authentic social voice that resonates with your target audience is possibly the easiest way of standing out from your competitors.

Would you like help in building a better brand for your business? Contact us now and start a conversation with our team of creative experts who are waiting to help you to find the voice of your brand.

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