5 Brand Building Strategies Every Business Should Use
A Brand Building Strategy is a way to build a solid reputation for a particular brand or product. It requires creativity and foresight because it is not always easy to know what consumers think of a new product or service. The brand building strategy can include any combination of advertising, promotion, product innovation, and service innovation, as well as the development of new markets.
A brand is one of the most critical assets in the market. It provides the foundation for a business’ identity and communicates its purpose to prospective customers. Every brand comes from a brand story, which includes:
- A unique name and a set of values.
- A powerful message that stands behind the business.
- A compelling logo that makes the business recognizable to consumers.
- A web presence that helps connect and engage with potential customers.
The more that a brand does to communicate its story, the more effective it will be at connecting with customers. Brands must carefully consider how their brand story should evolve, especially when new technologies and products are introduced. A brand missing a straightforward, concise story is at risk of becoming obsolete or irrelevant quickly.
Brand building is one of the most important aspects of any business. A brand is a promise to your customers of a product or service they can trust. When customers feel confident about a brand, they’ll be willing to buy from it over a competitor.
If you don’t build a brand, you risk losing customers to your competitors. And if you do build a brand, you’re almost guaranteed to reap the rewards of increased sales and profits.
But building a brand isn’t easy. It takes work, effort, and focus. But in this post, I’m going to give you five brand building strategies every business should use.
Why Your Business Needs A Brand
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of a brand identity is a logo. You know what a brand identity looks like if you’ve seen it. Most people also understand what the term “brand” means. So why do we need a brand identity?
Branding is vital for business. It helps to promote your company, products, and services. A brand identity can help you stand out from competitors and create an association that makes your company stand apart.
You may need a brand identity if:
- You want to attract customers
- You want to create awareness of your company among current customers
- You’re looking to make changes in your image or messaging
- You’re looking to create a stronger connection with your audience
- Your company needs a brand identity to help you build credibility and increase sales.
What Is a Brand Identity? (A Quick Definition)
A brand identity is how your company communicates to people. It includes your logo, name, slogan, color scheme, and visual style. Your brand identity is the sum of the details that give your company a unique and recognizable look.
Think of the brands that you’re familiar with. How do you identify them? Do you recognize a logo, a slogan, or colors? If so, then you know what a brand identity is.
Creating a Brand Identity
Developing a brand identity that works for you is easy if you start with a few key points to keep in mind:
1 – Start with your logo
Use your logo to represent your company. If you’re a small company, your logo should be simple, straightforward, and memorable.
2 – Consider your company’s personality
What do you want your brand to communicate? Who are you? How do you want to be perceived?
3 – Think about your audience
Who is your audience? What are they looking for? What does your audience want? Are you looking to attract new customers, change an existing relationship, or generate excitement?
4 – Create a strong connection
How do you want people to feel when they interact with your brand? What emotions do you want to trigger in people? How do you want them to feel?
5 – Focus on your company’s message
What do you want your brand to communicate? Is your company a pioneer or a leader in your field?
Do you have any questions?
If you’d like to learn more about creating a brand identity for your company, you can contact us or view our portfolio of work.
Top 5 Brand Building Strategies
1 – Define Your Brand
Brands are developed to sell products and services. They are used to differentiate and distinguish a product or service from competitors.
A strong brand helps consumers associate a product or service with your company. As such, you should spend time crafting your unique brand identity and building a unique story to communicate your brand.
It would be best to define your brand before building it. A brand is more than just a logo or slogan. It’s the totality of your business—the image, the voice, and the values of your company. When defining your brand, you are putting everything you need to market your business into words.
How do I define my brand?
Branding is often confused with logos. However, a brand is much broader than a logo or graphic. The total package tells customers, prospects, partners, and employees who you are and what you stand for.
A brand is made up of three parts:
- Brand Identity
- The visual elements of your brand. These include the logo, fonts, colors, imagery, etc.
- Voice
The language you use in describing your brand to others. It includes your tone, style, and personality.
Core Values
The things that you value most about your brand and how you want others to perceive you.
When building your brand, the goal is to create a unified, consistent message that resonates with existing and potential clients and customers.
What is the process of brand building?
There are several ways to build a brand. You could do it through advertising, social media, websites, or by creating a marketing strategy.
If you already have an established brand, you may want to examine your brand and how it communicates to your current and prospective customers. Are there any areas where you feel it’s outdated? Are there opportunities to expand and grow your brand?
Defining your brand is essential. When you do so, you’ll know exactly what you want your business to be.
You’ll also know what sets you apart from your competitors. This will help you identify your target customer and develop an effective marketing plan.
You’ll be able to promote your brand to others to encourage them to choose you.
Your brand identity is the first step in a long journey that will make or break your business. We’d love to work with you if you’re ready to start planning your brand.
2 – Differentiate and Position Your Brand
When you start a company or launch a product, it’s essential to know who your customer is, why they will buy your product, and how they will use it. This information guides your strategic decisions around marketing to design and ensures your product or service meets your customers’ needs.
Understanding your target market is the first step to creating a brand strategy. Knowing what consumers are looking for, how they use products, and what makes them tick helps you determine what products or services they’ll enjoy and what features they’ll be willing to pay for.
You can learn a lot about your potential customers by examining what people are doing today, but it’s also essential to think about what they might do tomorrow. By asking yourself, “Whom am I targeting?”, “Why will they want this product/service?” and “How will they use it?” you can identify the traits associated with your brand’s most successful consumers.
You can also consider using these questions to understand your competition. If you’re selling something similar to a competitor, you may find that they’ve already done a great job of connecting with their consumers. However, if you want to create a unique, differentiated brand that will stand out from the crowd, it’s critical to examine your target market closely.
Understanding how consumers use the products or services you plan to offer and what they expect from a brand is essential. While you should define your target market in terms of demographics, such as age and gender, it’s equally important to look at your customers’ psychological characteristics. By understanding the emotional drivers that influence your customers’ buying decisions and the actions they’re willing to take to achieve specific goals, you can identify what brand they’ll respond positively to.
Once you’ve identified your target market and the personality traits that define your ideal consumer, you’ll be able to position your brand more effectively. In particular, positioning your brand for success means answering the following questions:
- What problem does my product/service solve?
- What value does it deliver to the end user?
- What are the core benefits that are unique to my product/service?
- What promise does it make to the end user?
- Who is my target audience?
- What are the reasons they’ll choose me?
To answer these questions, you may need to dig deep into the habits and attitudes of your target market. This is because a brand’s positioning can differ based on how closely it aligns with the beliefs and desires of your customers.
By examining the unique traits that make your target market tick, you can create a positioning strategy that perfectly aligns with their motivations and the actions they’re willing to take to achieve their goals.
Positioning the Brand for Success
Positioning a brand for success requires understanding precisely what your customers need and how you can deliver that need. To position your brand effectively, it’s essential to understand the following:
- What problem does your product/service solve?
- What value does it deliver to the end user?
- What core benefits does it offer that is unique to your product/service?
- What promise does it make to the end user?
- Who is your target audience?
- What are the reasons they’ll choose you?
- How are your products/services different from your competitors?
In the following two sections, we’ll examine how to apply the principles of positioning to your business.
How to Position a Brand for Success
The first step in developing a positioning strategy is understanding your target market’s unique attributes. Once you’ve examined what people like and dislike about your brand, you can build a positioning strategy that offers a solution to a real problem, delivers value, and makes a promise.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be able to articulate the traits associated with your ideal customer and create a positioning strategy that will deliver the same benefits and promises to those same customers.
When considering what products or services are available in the marketplace, it’s essential to understand what drives your target market to purchase certain products or services and what keeps them coming back. By doing so, you can craft a positioning strategy aligned with their motives and actions, resulting in an effective brand strategy that meets your customers’ needs and helps you stand out from the crowd.
Brand Positioning Explained
Brand positioning, or how to put a company’s name on the front of a product, is a standard business practice. Companies spend a lot of money on marketing to build their brands and sell more products.
One way to do this is to market products that consumers already know and trust. This is known as brand awareness or brand identity.
If you’ve ever been on a website with a company’s logo, you’ve probably noticed that most of the pages have the company’s name in some form at the top. This is brand positioning.
For example, the Nike swoosh logo is often on athletic shoes, and the Adidas stripes are on clothing. These logos are part of their brands.
Branding a product is usually an intelligent way to get consumers to know and trust your brand. If you want to see the same effect, you can add your brand’s name to your products and services.
As a marketing consultant, I often see clients struggle to understand how to market their products. They think they need to be a celebrity to get attention or believe that just having a logo is enough.
This is brand positioning.
To increase the success of your brand, make sure that the name is prominent. Make it stand out in any way possible.
The key is to keep the name simple and easy to remember. When consumers read your name, they’ll immediately recognize it and begin associating it with your brand.
The trick is to make your name so recognizable that consumers will start saying it out loud.
3 – Build and Expose your Brand
A strong brand image is a critical component of any successful business strategy. It’s good for your business, brand, and image. However, developing a brand can take time and effort. Here are a few tips to help build and promote your brand.
1 – Identify Your Brand Purpose
How do you want to be perceived? What is the promise of your brand? Are you creating a brand with integrity or just a logo?
When working on your brand identity, you need to consider whom you want to be and what you want to represent. What does your brand stand for? Does it reflect a core value? If you’re just starting, you may want to build a brand with integrity. But, if you’ve been around awhile, your brand should reflect your core values.
2 – Choose a Core Value
Once you know what your brand will be, choose a core value. It could be honesty, reliability, creativity, service, or something else. It should reflect the way you want to be perceived. Once you have a core value, you can develop a brand identity that reflects that value.
3 – Brand Personality
After defining your brand’s purpose and core value, you can work on creating a brand personality. This is the emotional side of your brand. It’s how you want people to perceive you. For example, your brand personality could be happy, friendly, trustworthy, caring, or whatever fits your brand.
4 – Design
Once you’ve defined your brand’s personality and purpose, you can start designing your brand. This may include logos, colors, fonts, and everything in between.
5 – Marketing
Finally, once your brand is complete, you can start marketing. You can market through traditional marketing channels like print, radio, television, and online. You can also market through non-traditional channels like word of mouth and referrals.
To create a strong brand, it’s essential to focus on building your brand’s image, purpose, and personality. Once you’ve built a brand with integrity and authenticity, you can start marketing it to get more customers and create brand loyalty.
4 – Personalize your Brand
According to research by the International Association of Advertising Agencies, consumers tend to perceive the products of large corporations as impersonal and less trustworthy than smaller companies products.
Smaller companies are more likely to offer personalized customer service and be more transparent, creating a positive perception of their products and brands.
You can develop your brand to reflect your values, personality, and mission to build trust and earn repeat business. Here are three ways to incorporate a brand building strategy into your branding plan:
1 – Create a unique persona that reflects your values and personality
Incorporate a unique brand voice into your brand that is more relatable than the corporate brand. The difference is in how you talk, write, and interact with your audience. This includes your tone of voice, your vocabulary, and the images you use.
A brand should reflect your personality and values. Make sure that your brand matches the values of your organization. For example, a nonprofit might want to share its mission and values with the world, so its brand may be focused on charity and giving.
2 – Use your brand to create a relationship with your customers
People will remember your brand when interacting with you, whether online or in person. So, don’t use generic language on social media. Instead, include your unique voice to show the authenticity of your message.
3 – Create a personal brand that builds your reputation
When your brand becomes known, it gives others a reason to trust and connect with you. Being well-known for your kindness and compassion makes you seem like a trustworthy human being.
Create a platform for your brand by sharing your stories and promoting your accomplishments. A platform allows you to share your experiences, skills, and knowledge on the Internet.
A platform can be a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast, or a Facebook page.
Create a personal brand that builds your reputation and provides a solid connection to your customers.
5 – Review Your Brand
We’re asked about the importance of branding daily, so we thought we’d share a few tips about why this is important for brands and business owners.
We live in a world where brands rule. From clothing to cars, from toothpaste to coffee, companies build their entire business around brand identity and the promise of customer satisfaction that that brand represents.
And yet, we also know that the brand isn’t everything. Consumers have many choices and are increasingly aware of the value of price, service, quality, and many other factors when deciding whether to buy something.
In the end, branding matters because it helps define your brand. When consumers hear or see your brand name, they immediately think of the experience they’ll get from interacting with your business, from the service to the quality of products and services and even the way you treat customers.
Branding matters for a simple reason: it’s the way that customers identify with your company. It’s your unique, memorable message that tells customers that you’re the right choice.
Brand strength is often the single most significant predictor of success or failure for a business. According to the Harvard Business Review, the strongest brands are consistently associated with positive emotions, such as fun, trust, and safety.
This means that the more consumers associate your brand with these emotions, the more likely they want to work with you. That’s the power of the brand.
But before you start spending a ton of money on a logo or redesigning the interior of your store, it’s essential to recognize that your brand is already present. For example, if your company is called “Candyland”, people are already thinking about what they expect to see in the store. If you’re a clothing retailer, your logo will probably include the words “clothing,” “shirts,” or “dress shirts.”
There are a lot of great brand builders out there, but they won’t help your brand if they don’t build it. And if you aren’t building your brand, you’re limiting the opportunities you have to create a brand synonymous with your business.
So how do you build your brand? First, take inventory of the things that define your brand. This could include the colors that make up your logo, the types of merchandise that appear on your website, and even the look and feel of your stores and website.
Understanding your brand is essential before you begin creating or redesigning anything. Once you do, you’ll be able to create a brand authentic to your vision for your business.
In the meantime, we’re always here to answer questions and help you build a stronger brand.
If you’re interested in learning more about how brands and business owners use branding to succeed, visit our site or contact us.
Wrapping Up
The best way to build a brand is to build a community of people who trust and look up to you.
If you’re just starting, I recommend finding a niche and growing your knowledge and expertise in that area. You can use that knowledge to build a tribe that will support you as you grow your business.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level, consider becoming a consultant.
This means you can start offering your services for hire without investing much money in marketing or advertising.
Once you have built a strong brand and community, you’ll have a platform to build a business.
