In today’s competitive market, you’ll find numerous businesses offering a similar product or service. So how do you make yourself stand out from similar businesses in your niche? The answer is simple, build a strong brand for your business.
Branding is the identity of a business and is influenced by both tangible and intangible aspects. It is the promise your business delivers on and promotes customer awareness about your organization. The best rewards of building a brand are that it boosts value and increases sales in the long run so you can build a sustainable business.
Here are the main benefits of building a brand for your business.
It encourages loyalty.
A successful brand is memorable and something people want to be part of. It’s trustworthy and has a good reputation. This is the reason why people continually come back to buy from a business.
If you want potential buyers to remember your business, you need to create awareness of what you do and how you do it. With the best brand-building strategies, you’re being efficient with your time and resources while making a huge difference in a highly competitive market. This includes a well-defined brand identity, public relations, thought leadership, events, audio and video, content creation, and blog posts.
It makes you stand out.
Ninety percent of Google searchers start their search before making up their mind about a business. It’s also a great opportunity for any new business to win customers over if they have a strong brand that makes them stand out from the crowd.
Successful branding strategies will change how potential customers perceive your business and create a strong impression.
It will help you build credibility.
Brand recognition and brand awareness will play a big role in establishing credibility with consumers. If consumers don’t know your business, your sales team will waste valuable time explaining who you are and what you do.
A brand is often a long-term investment and it’s challenging for a business to balance brand-building against short-term business needs. However, building a strong brand will increase awareness and trust by customers. If done right, your brand-building can also support marketing efforts and create a buzz around your company or website.
What Is Brand Building?
Brand building refers to the process of generating awareness about a company, its products, or services through sponsorship or direct advertising efforts. Branding is an integral part of a business since it is its visual voice. You can’t achieve your marketing goals without turning your business into a brand. By working closely with the offline and online marketing teams of your business, you’re more likely to meet your long-term business goals.
How To Build A Brand People Love
Here are the five steps to building a strong brand that will resonate with your audience.
Understand Your Audience
You need to build your brand in the eyes of your customers, and not in your own eyes. The brand-building, marketing, and conversion optimization process should, therefore, start with understanding the customers.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What are their goals, needs, and desires?
- How do they view themselves?
- What are their struggles?
- What are their fears/motivations when they want to buy a product or service?
- How can your business product or services help them?
You can answer these questions through market research, which includes analyzing existing customer data and speaking to individuals in your target audience.
Conduct a Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis refers to the process of identifying and learning more about your competitors to gain a competitive advantage and is important for any marketing campaign. You need to identify your competitors, the products or services they are offering, their pricing, and the promotions they are using. This will allow you to determine your brand positioning in the market and help you plan for your future marketing campaigns.
Develop an Informed Mission Statement
Many successful brands have a mission statement. This guiding principle gives your company a strong purpose which resonates with your employees and customers, hence improving the long-term performance of your business.
A mission statement is a short description of your company’s fundamental purpose and why your business exists. It’s an integral part of your brand-building efforts since it specifies your core business goals and your brand message.
Your mission statement may also describe the image or personality you want people to have in mind when they talk and hear about your business. Be sure to develop an original mission statement that makes your brand stand out.
Create a Unique Brand Identity
Whether you’re a start-up or a large business that has been around for generations, creating a unique brand identity is critical to business success. Without distinctive brand identity, your company cannot remain top of mind. For example, a memorable name, logo, or tagline strengthens your positioning, and customers are more likely to remember you when they need something.
Here are some suggestions for how businesses of all sizes can create a unique brand identity.
- Outline your brand message clearly.
- Choose a unique brand name that reflects your message.
- Select associations that help with positioning your brand. Such associations may include tagline, slogan, logo, website, fonts, colors, packaging, and online profiles.
- Develop long-term and short-term brand building strategies
- Earn customers’ trust as consumers need to recognize and trust your business before they start doing business with you.
- Always communicate your brand’s mission statement and be visible. Personalize your brand so people can relate to it more easily. Great customer service and over-delivering also contribute towards brand-building.
J.O. is great at building brands and can help you. Call us at 817-335-0100 or click here to learn more.
What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is a broad term that describes how familiar people are with your business and its products and services.
It is important that consumers remain familiar with your brand so they think about your products or services when they need to make a purchase, which increases the chance of them making a purchase from you.
The best example of brand awareness is when people say Kleenex when they mean tissue paper, or AirPods when they refer to earphones. Customers think of these brands immediately when they think of a certain product so the brand has a significant amount of value.
How to Build Brand Awareness
Most consumers can identify popular brands by simply taking a look at their logo. The most important thing is to be consistent in order to improve your image in the consumer’s mind. Using attention-grabbing visuals and developing a unique voice are great ways of building brand awareness.
10 Steps to Building Your Brand
Brand-building involves building a brand personality and shaping the consumer’s perception. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to build your brand:
1. Analyze your competition: Researching what your competitors are doing can help you discover your unique style and also learn from their failures and mistakes.
2. Find a unique and recognizable style: Select a recognizable element, font, color, character or unique language that your consumers will remember.
3. Be humorous: Humor is a great way to spice up your marketing messages. However, you need to be careful and make sure it is always appropriate for your target audience.
4. Be unique: Although you need to be unique, you don’t want to be desperately original. Don’t be afraid to use proven marketing ideas. Seek inspiration from global trends, and always aim to add value and not just copy-paste ideas.
5. Understand your audience: The best marketers are the ones who understand their customers. Make sure to do some thorough customer research.
6. Keep your social media accounts active: Don’t just set up accounts on social channels. Find out where your potential customers are and reach out to them on that platform. Your content, ads, and the way you interact with customers and prospects contributes to brand-building.
7. Be consistent: Your brand messaging should be aligned across all your advertising channels, your website, and any touchpoints where you interact with the customer. Demonstrate the value your business brings to build your brand.
8. Make customer care a priority: The experience your customer has when interacting with your employees is important. High-quality customer care can significantly contribute to a brand. Engage with your followers and learn how to respond to your critics.
9. Be honest: If you make a mistake or customers are unhappy with your service delivery, acknowledge it. Your customers will appreciate your honesty.
10. Build an active community: Form strong relationships with your customers. Let them know you’re not a robot and they will act as your brand ambassadors.
Want to create or build a brand? J.O. can help! Call us at 817-335-0100 or click here to learn more.How to Strengthen Your Brand with Your Marketing Strategy
If brands live in the minds of customers, it’s important to learn how to strengthen your brand to create a positive perception of your business.
1. Start from the inside and work your way out: It’s difficult to build brands based on a poor-quality product. Get your product and customer service right, and make sure the customer experience is smooth. Then you can start to think about how to differentiate your brand and demonstrate its value to consumers.
2. Focus your message on a specific market: Your marketing message will be too diluted if you try to target everyone. Find your target audience and focus on the value that you can create for that group. This also makes it easier to find the right marketing channels and tailor your message to those channels.
3. Use a strong and consistent Tone of Voice: Your brand voice is extremely important. ToV should not be so much about your message, but how you convey it. You convey your brand’s voice in various ways, including your speaking and writing style and the words you use. It’s important to use a strong and consistent brand voice that will build trust.
4. Create and maintain quality visual displays: Design is part of visual communication, so make sure to create quality designs to bring your marketing campaigns to life. How you use elements like color, font, and shapes on a product package, website or email campaign can affect how your brands are perceived.
5. Your content should provide valuable information: Have you ever turned to Google for information on how to solve a particular problem? If so, you likely sought help from content written by a brand that sells services or products related to the problem. This is a great long-term marketing strategy that companies can use. Establishing your brand as a valuable resource can help your brand build trust, and increase the chances of consumers remembering your brand, product, or service when they need to make a purchase.
6. Build loyalty: Customized content can help you establish long-term relationships with your customers. Social media posts are also a great way to interact with customers and keep them engaged. Find out what social media channels potential customers are using and the kind of content that delights them.
Get going with strengthening your brand. Call J.O. at 817-335-0100 or click here to learn more.
How Do You Build A Brand Marketing Strategy?
All brands can create a brand marketing strategy in 5 steps.
1. Identify Your Brand Purpose
Building a purpose-driven brand sets you apart from the competition, helps to attract consumers, and gives your brand personality.
During this process, you can identify potential customers and find your unique position in the marketplace. This also makes it easier for you to give clarity on who you are, your strategy, and what you should do in the future. Connecting your brand purpose to everything you do can help in brand building.
2. Get to Know Your Target Audience
Know your potential customers by creating customer personas. A customer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal buyer. It can help you identify the key traits and motivations of your consumer to help inform your brand’s marketing strategy. Once you know who your consumer is, you can find the right ways to sell to them.
3. Create and Sell Your Brand Story
A brand isn’t just about a brand name, logo, and slogan. Defining your story will allow your target audience to understand the purpose of your business. A memorable brand story resonates with people and allows people to relate to the lifestyle and purpose the brand represents.
4. Understand Your Competitors
Just as with understanding your target audience, it is similarly important to learn more about our competition. Do a thorough competitor research, find out what makes you different from them, and then make those differences clear in your marketing messages.
5. Develop Brand Guidelines
Last but not least, consider how you connect with your audience. Unique brand guidelines include your logo, fonts, colors, and tone of voice, among others. It can help marketers and designers to tell your story and convey your core messages in a consistent manner.
Brand Recognition Vs Brand Awareness
Beginners might use brand recognition and brand awareness interchangeably, but experienced marketers understand the difference. Knowing the difference between brand recognition and brand awareness and how to apply both in your offline or online marketing efforts can significantly improve your branding strategy.
Brand recognition refers to the extent to which consumers can accurately recognize your business based on elements such as colors, fonts, and logos. On the other hand, brand awareness involves recognizing not only the visual elements, but also the overall feeling and tone of your brand, its products or services, and other practical details. With brand awareness, a company’s advertising efforts can elicit feelings in the audience.
Figuring out how to make your brand stand out, stay top of mind, and elicit emotions can be complex. It’s strongly recommended to work with an experienced agency to create a higher level of brand recognition and brand awareness.
An experienced agency employs multi-channel campaigns to reach a wider audience. They can also customize their services to suit your company depending on your goals, growth, and budget.
Through extensive research on proven strategies, as well as the best practices and latest trends, a professional brand-building agency such as J.O. can help any business in any industry with brand building and long-term growth. Call us at 817-335-0100 or contact J.O. here.
Bonus! Marketing Tools
With digital marketing, the latest tools are important if you want to get the job done right the first time.
Here are a few examples:
- Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
- Social media management tools such as Crowdfire, Zoho Social, Hootsuite, and Buffer.
- Design tools like Adobe Suite and Canva
- Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and Periscope.
- Content marketing tools such as Hubspot, CoSchedule, and Buffer
- Email marketing tools such as MyEmma and MailChimp
