Branding is one of the most important activities that your company can undertake. Building a strong, recognisable brand will assist you in connecting with current customers, selling to new ones, and encouraging loyalty and recognition. However, successful branding, like any other business task, necessitates careful planning and a sound strategy.
This informative article from DesignLab will help you improve your corporate branding activities.
Why is it critical to enhance your corporate branding efforts?
To remain relevant, organisations of all sizes, regardless of size, must invest in branding. If you're still wondering why, you should brand your company, consider the following advantages:
1) Make your company stand out from the crowd
With so many companies offering similar services or products, it can be difficult to stand out. This is where branding comes into play. Your values, story, brand promise, and other assets allow you to demonstrate your uniqueness. Using these to create a point of difference could help you stand out from the crowd.
2) Increase your visibility
Another advantage of investing in consistent branding is that it makes your brand more memorable. Customers become more familiar with your company when they can identify it based on physical, visual, and auditory cues. This builds trust, which 81% of customers rely on when making a purchasing decision. Customers' recall and engagement with your content, emails, or advertisements may also be influenced by brand recognition.
3) Increase customer loyalty
Powerful brands frequently have a devoted following, but this does not happen by chance. It stems from providing unique experiences and messaging to their audiences that they can relate to in order to form a bond. You will have more customers who will support your business and share their positive experiences as a result of this emotional connection. This advantage may result in repeat business.
4) Attract and keep employees
According to LinkedIn, companies with a strong employer brand will attract 50% more qualified candidates 1-2 times faster than others.They will also recruit at a 50% lower cost per hire. Moving down the line, your current and former employees' experiences, as well as how they spread the word, have an impact on your workplace reputation and employee retention rates.
Actively managing your brand is not an option if you want to hire skilled developers and other specialists or keep your best talent away from competitors. It is a requirement.
Steps to Branding Your Business
So, how do you go about establishing a consistent personality and style for your company? Let's divide it into seven steps.
1. Determine your target audience
The first step in branding your business is to identify who your potential customers are.This procedure consists of several steps.
- Examine your current clientele
Existing customers are a goldmine of information because they know what makes your brand stand out and what it lacks. Find out what their interests and needs are.
• What is their most pressing issue?
• Which companies do they buy from and trust?
• What do they want to see from your brand?
- Conduct market research
Market research can assist you in identifying industry trends, opportunities, customer preferences, purchasing habits, and discussions about your brand or others'. It's also an efficient way to gather information about your competitors. Take note of who their customers are, preferred channels, interests, and so on. Start your research with relevant social media channels, review sites, industry forums, or Q&A sites like Reddit.
- Develop buyer personas
Customers should be grouped into personas based on patterns or common traits discovered. Incorporate demographic, psychographic, behavioural, and geographic information.
2. Develop your value proposition
Your brand promise is your value proposition. It is more than a catchphrase or a slogan. A UVP describes how your solution is better than competitors' at solving the problems of your ideal customers. Consider the following when developing a strong value proposition:
• What does your ideal customer truly desire?
• How does your product or service address their issue(s)?
• What factors influence their purchasing decisions?
• Why do your current customers prefer your company to your competitors?
Using the voice of your customers, create a unique selling proposition based on the answers to these questions. Benefits, what you intend to deliver, and why they should choose you over competitors should all be communicated. Stick to the facts and avoid unnecessary embellishment.
3. Determine your mission statement and core values
What is the purpose of your company? This question is addressed by your mission. To create an effective mission statement, describe your company's purpose, who your customers are, the products or services you provide, and how you do it. To make it memorable, summarise it in a few words.
Your core values come next. They are the guiding principles for your goals, mission, and vision. These beliefs shape your company culture, which in turn influences the perceptions of stakeholders. Using generic words that do not define what your company stands for will result in a conflicting brand image. Instead, be specific, use your own words, and ensure that these principles are shared throughout the organisation.
4. Identify your brand's personality
Your brand's personality, like that of an individual, is a collection of qualities that your company possesses. Ideally, these characteristics will attract customers and shape their perceptions of your company. As a result, having a personality that connects with your customers can help you build an emotional connection and differentiate yourself from competitors.
Consider the qualities you want your brand to be associated with. Do you want to be known for your vision, competence, or charisma? Choose your characteristics and the voice with which you will communicate. If your brand personality is rugged, for example, your brand voice could be confident and strong.
5) Outline the key features and benefits your brand provides
The key to developing a strong brand is to emphasise the key qualities and benefits that your company provides to customers. There will almost certainly be larger brands in your industry than yours, which is why your primary goal should be to differentiate your business and brand from the competition.
If you can identify aspects of your products or services that no other company in your industry provides, you should be able to begin developing a memorable brand. Perhaps your company offers a more affordable product than others or is known for providing excellent customer service. Avoid making a simple list of the features that your services or products offer to customers.
6) Think about who your customers are
If you want your brand to succeed, it's critical that your target audience finds it appealing. It is recommended that you revisit who your customers are by conducting extensive customer research to ensure that you create the right brand. After completing this research, you should have a better understanding of your customers and what they want.
If your primary audience consists of young adults who have recently graduated from college and are entering the job market, they will most likely want a brand that is modern, bold, and takes a stand, which can range from being at the forefront of sustainability to combating income inequality. Create buyer personas to identify your target audience. These personas can help you learn more about your customers and their points of view. Buyer personas should identify customer goals, challenges, and likes based on the data you've gathered.
7) Increase the visibility of your website in search results
After you've created a strong and memorable logo, as well as other branding elements, it's critical that prospective and current customers see and become familiar with your branding. It is recommended that you improve your site's visibility in search results to accomplish this. Approximately 75% of internet users will never look past the first page of search engine results. If you want to attract visitors to your website, you must improve your ranking in relevant search results.
If you can get your website to appear among the first three results for relevant queries, you should notice a significant increase in the number of visitors to your website. You can increase the visibility of your website by implementing search engine optimization throughout it. You can increase site traffic and organic traffic by increasing the speed of your site and incorporating keywords into blog articles.
8) Multi-Channel Marketing Can Help You Build Your Brand Online
Multi-channel marketing, which involves reaching potential customers through a variety of online channels, is an excellent way to build your brand digitally. Social media, email marketing, and display ads are the most common online marketing platforms.
It's critical to understand that some social media platforms differ significantly from one another when marketing on them. Certain channels may be more effective than others at reaching customers at the beginning of the buyer's journey. While Instagram and Facebook serve very similar markets, being in multiple locations will almost always allow you to reach a larger number of customers.
It is recommended that you create company profiles on the major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, to get started with multi-channel marketing. Following the creation of these accounts, you should conduct extensive research on each platform to determine what users typically look for. Before you begin, it is critical that you understand how to communicate with customers via social media platforms. If you can successfully build your brand digitally, you should begin to see significant returns on your investment.
9) Create a brand style guide
Consider developing a written style guide for your brand, which can be addressed in the future and distributed to your employees. This document can assist you in aligning your future digital branding strategies. A style guide is most likely required.
Your colour palette, font sizes, font styles, logo, slogans, outreach channels, patterns and backgrounds, a standard call to action, animation and video styles, and language style should all be included in this guide. This style guide can be used to ensure consistency in your branding across all digital materials and future marketing campaigns. If you can't refer back to this guide, you might find yourself straying from consistent branding too often.
10) Include Your Brand
After you've fully established your brand, it's critical to begin incorporating it into all aspects of business. When customers read, hear, or see something about your company, your brand should be prominent. For example, any video you post on Facebook or YouTube should clearly display your logo and other distinguishing brand elements.
The same is true for any social media profiles you create on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Your logo and company name should appear on business cards, packaging, and physical products.
Defining and Developing Your Brand for Commercial Success
The brand you create should encompass everything about your company. Once you've established your brand and begun to incorporate it into everything your company does, you'll be able to influence how people perceive your company. A strong brand is one that customers remember even when they aren't looking at your marketing materials. There are numerous effective ways to build and improve a brand, ranging from creating branded content to designing a brand logo.
While following each of the aforementioned steps for building a strong brand can take time, it will pay dividends and should help you increase customer conversion rates as well as overall profits. If you've recently begun to grow your brand through financing and product development, building a brand will be critical to your future success. We hope you learned something new from this blog, and please contact DesignLab if you have any concerns.
