There is one major thing that your company owns that makes you lovable – your brand. As a new company on the market, you need to be able to carve out a brand image and reputation that people are going to want to buy from. Whether you offer a product on the shelf or a service you can provide, people prefer to buy products from brands that are familiar.
How do you get familiar? You build a brand.
A brand is not just a logo or a set of snazzy colours. You’re already in an uphill race by being a small business in a big ocean of large businesses. You’re going to be in competition with everyone from day one because these larger companies already have their names set, their customers loyalty and a marketing budget that’s bigger than yours. You need to be different; standing out from the crowd is your new job. Building your brand isn’t going to be an overnight process, not when building it up can take months – depending on how tenacious your marketing team is, of course! Your customer’s perception of your business is going to define your brand, so the real question that you need to ask yourself is this:
How on earth do I get started?
Well, you’re in luck. Below, you’re going to find some steps to building the best brand you’ve ever imagined. Good luck!
The Who
Not just a band, you need to know who you are aiming your product towards. You cannot build a wall without a location of where to get started, right? Your brand needs a starting point, and your starting point is who your target audience is. You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can know who you can be everything to. Always keep your brand message tailored to exactly who you are trying to reach. Create a brand that they can relate to, and you’ll be successful!
The Why
You need a mission statement; a written exclamation about what you are passionate about and make that your reason for pushing your brand. You can’t build your brand without letting people know what you are about, and your mission statement defines this about you. Your entire visual brand should also reflect what your mission statement is.
The What
So, you know you’re starting as a small fish in a big pond, and you’re going to have a lot of competition out there. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but that doesn’t mean that you should ever imitate exactly what the big brands in your industry are doing. The whole idea of building a trusted brand is to differentiate from the competition and convince the customer base you are targeting to choose you over them. This means research!
Look into what the competition are doing and instead of copying the ideas,beat them out. You have the chance to really create an effective brand name, and you can then work out how you look better to your customers over them.
The How
Next, you need to figure out how you’re going to look better than the rest. You’ve done the research, you know your audience and you have your mission. You now need to outline all your qualities and benefits that you offer over the other competition out there. The way to show them what they are missing out on is to show them how you plan to win their business and then retain it afterwards, too. This doesn’t mean just listing all your features on your products, it means showing customers how you plan to provide an improvement. Customers buy products based on solutions to their problem; if you can show them that your solution is better than the other brands, you’ll win the business.
The Where
Your brand needs a website, a logo and a tagline. These three things together are what is going to set you apart from the rest, and visuals of your brand are vital for success. Your logo will appear on everything, and if you want people to know who you are, you need it to be easy to interpret. Invest your money here, because once you pay a good brand development company for their service, you’re going to see the difference.
Building your brand doesn’t have to be as hard as you think. All you need to do is follow the steps and you will be able to enjoy customer loyalty and company growth that you didn’t anticipate.
