Great branding is a core component of every successful business. A significant percentage of the branding advice that can be found online is centred around ensuring that your marketing efforts are consistent and have been designed to appeal to the wants and needs of your ideal audience. This is great if your brand is already established but it isn’t necessarily always helpful for those looking to build a brand from scratch.
Brand building is not an easy process but putting in the effort early on will pay dividends in the long term. So, without further ado let’s take a closer look at some of the core considerations that will help you to build a strong brand with the power to withstand the complexities and competitiveness of bustling marketplaces.
1. Identify your target audience
If you don’t know who you want to market to, you are really going to struggle to gain any kind of traction in your marketplace. Attempting to appeal to everyone is a futile strategy because although you may well successfully cast a much wider net, you will ultimately end up appearing much less relevant to the individuals that you most need to engage.
When establishing your core demographics, take the time to really think about:
- Who your audience are
- What they need
- What they want
- How they act
- What they like
- How they like to be spoken to
2. Evaluate your competition
It is possible to gain a lot of valuable insight by observing the actions of your competitors. Specifically, you might find it particularly valuable to study:
- What their logos look like
- The primary differences between each competitor brand
- How they talk to their audience
It is essential not to simply take any of the qualities that most appeal to you and integrate them into your own approach. Instead, you should carefully consider the motivations behind the decisions that have been made and utilise this information to create a strong and unique brand identity with qualities that you know will appeal to your ideal audience.
3. Identify what makes you unique
Your brand needs one or more unique selling points (USPs). Now, this might stem directly from your general business plan, such as focusing on delivering lower prices but this isn’t the only way that you can make an impression in your marketplace.
Let’s take Nike as an example here. Not only does it have a strong tagline: “Just Do It” but it also has a clear mission statement: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” Nike uses this to inform everything it does and to understand how to tailor its communications to appeal directly to its ideal audience in an immediately recognisable way.
4. Personify your brand
If you think about it, we all have a brand. We all have a name, a unique face and a particular way of communicating. So, if your brand were a person, what type of person would they be? Are they old or young? How do they talk? What do they look like? How do they choose to present themselves to the world? We call these brand archetypes and they can be very useful tools in defining who you are and how you want to come across.
Understanding these nuances will help you to create a far more defined and recognisable identity that will appeal to and successfully engage the right audience. Ultimately, you need to craft a persona that your audience would be happy to see if they approached them on the street to say hello.
5. Translate your identity into tangible elements
When you understand your brand personality, the next step is to think about how these traits will translate to your logo, your colour story and your voice, you can do this by hiring professional UI design agency. To do this, you might find it helpful to imagine how your brand would approach your audience, engage them in conversation and successfully gain their loyalty.
These are undeniably challenging questions but if you can establish clear answers, you will find it much easier to create firm foundations upon which you can build a powerful brand identity. This information will be used to inform everything from the copy you place on your website to the brand films you create to market your business online, so the more detail you can establish, the better.
6. Ensure your team are on board with your brand identity
The communication of a clear brand image can only occur if every member of your team understands the nuances of your identity and are applying this information correctly at every opportunity.
Remember, the fundamentals of a great brand stretch far beyond a recognisable name and logo. Your brand identity is the perception your audience has of your business when they are interacting with you. Within this, there are things that you can control and things that you can’t but it is essential to remember that it is impossible to build a successful brand without being consistent in your approach.
Fundamentally, your brand needs to resonate with your ideal audience and working to create a positive first impression will always stand you in good stead.
