When the word branding is mentioned, the first thing that comes to a person’s mind are logos, brand colours, branded T-shirts, banners, flyers teardrops, business cards, and any other physical evidence about your business. All the examples that have been mentioned are not wrong, they are just part of branding but they don’t define what the actual term of branding means.
Branding is the process of creating a strong, positive perception of a company through its products and services. The products and services that are offered complement a company’s branding through the logos, mission & vision statement, the company name, design, and a consistent theme throughout the marketing communications. All the attributes mentioned are supposed to invoke a positive response in the customers’ minds. When branding is mastered and done correctly, it can differentiate your company from its competitors which in turn increases trust and loyalty from your customers. The big question is, how best can you employ branding in your business and achieve results from it? There are 5 great tips that can best help you with that.
Have a Unique Selling Point
A Unique Selling Point (USP) is a characteristic of your product or service that differentiates you from your competitors. To get a clear understanding of this point, you need to ask yourself how best you can stand out in your industry using your product or service so that your customers can choose you and not your competitor. A USP is considered by developing those outstanding product or service features that will make your customers remember you forever. In simple terms, try to be different.
Identify your potential customers
Having a great product or service doesn’t serve you right if you’re delivering it to the wrong audience. That’s branding gone wrong. Take the time to know your audience by making research about them. To simplify your work, you can create buyer personas that can help you describe who your ideal customer is. All you have to do is study your product or service and figure out the ideal customer that would be interested in what you’re offering. Once you identify your potential customer, you’re able to know the kind of messages you can send to them so that you can get a positive response from them.
Have a clear understanding of your mission statement and core values
A mission statement is a precise statement that briefly explains why your company exists or what purpose it serves. The mission statement is the driving force that excites employees to work hard and feel part of the organisation. The statement has to be clear enough to help you know what kind of products or services you need to develop for what customers and the rationale behind your whole processes as a company. Your core values, on the other hand, describe the culture, ethics, and morals that you exhibit in your business which is later reflected to your customers. Make sure your core values are always positive so that your customers don’t have to always complain about how you behave towards them.
Create a brand personality
You should create a brand personality that customers would love to associate with. Look at brand personality as the personality of an individual. Most individuals love creating personalities so that they can be likable and acceptable. The same principle should apply to your brand. Unlike individual personalities that can change over time, your brand personality should remain consistent. Choose qualities that your customers can resonate with. Do you want to be seen as charismatic, informative, casual, creative or a visionary? Any brand personality that you choose will connect you to customers with a similar personality or who have an interest in that personality and such customers will always have you in their minds.
Create branded content that’s consistent everywhere
All the content that you decide to create should be branded with your logo, tagline, brand colours, and other brand elements. If this branded content is created for online purposes, it should be posted consistently increasing brand awareness that can later generate and nurture leads since people are always seeing your content almost every day whenever they scroll through their feeds. The other branded materials that you create for physical evidence such as T-shirts, business cards, etc. should leave the confines of your office and be out there so that people can know that you exist and have a clear picture of what you offer.
On a concluding note, whatever you do to make sure your business is perceived positively by your customers for a long period, is branding.
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