It isn’t easy to get your product or service in front of potential customers these days. With how much competition there is, it’s easy for a brand to be overlooked and not seen by the people who might need them. Building a brand is hard work – but it can also be really rewarding!
The thing is, you want to make sure that you build your brand so that it lasts. That’s true whether you wish to develop an on-or-offline business. One of the surest ways of making that happen is to build a brand that your customers recognize and respect.
This article will explore how to build a brand from the ground up and keep it going long-term.
What is a brand?
Before we dive into how to make your brand, it might be helpful to grasp what one even is. When you hear about brands doing this or that in the news, it’s easy to conflate “brand” with “company.” The two aren’t entirely synonymous, although they’re intimately related.
A brand is how people think of you and how they see your company. It’s the values that you stand for, which are communicated to your customers through everything from messaging to customer service to design. A strong brand will resonate with a wide range of consumers and provide an emotional connection between them and it.
The goal is not just attracting clients but also retaining them to grow profitably over time. Building a successful business starts with building a great product or providing excellent services – this builds trust among current and prospective customers by establishing standards that create value at every point of contact.
What does brand building involve?
Aside from the how-to’s of building a brand, which we’ll get into in a moment, there are some things to ponder concerning it all. Building a brand involves a lot of different factors, like researching your target audience and competitors. It involves your brand’s voice, personality, and focus. It’s about marketing, promotions, and advertising … and consistency across all media.
It also includes constant efforts to develop trust-filled relationships with your clients, customers, third-party vendors, and the public at large.
Start by creating a strategy
A brand strategy is how you plan to get the public to view your company the way you want them to view it. It’s how you plan to shape perceptions. It affects how you sell and communicate, as well as how the public perceives your product or service. All of that will impact how you market your products and services, too.
To create a successful company that stands out among competitors, start by creating a comprehensive marketing strategy for what customers should know about your business and why they should care enough to engage with it. Here’s a hint … storytelling goes a long way on this front.
Construct your brand identity
As suggested above, a complete brand identity encompasses how you present yourself to the public, how your products come across, and how people perceive what it is that you do. It includes the visual treatments of your company logo, websites, or other physical design elements, how you interact with customers on social media, how employees are dressed for work, and more.
Storytelling is how we share and connect with one another. It’s how, as humans, we create meaning in the world around us. And it’s how brands build their identities. When you think of companies like Apple or Nike that have built an iconic brand identity over decades through storytelling, your mind probably goes straight to how compelling the story is rather than any other branding element, such as logo design or color palette choices.
The same applies when looking at more recent examples, too: Airbnb might be known less for its website illustrations than for letting travelers know that they “belong anywhere.”
Market your brand
The most powerful marketing campaigns are the ones that make you feel something. Apple was able to tap into how people felt when using a Mac—a feeling of superiority against other brands and an intuitive experience with how the software works on their laptops, TVs, and iPhones.
Nike has tapped into how athletes want to achieve greatness through its famous slogan “Just do it.” And Airbnb connects us all by making travelers know that they belong anywhere around the world while simultaneously building trust in whom we’re allowing into our homes.
Maintain your brand
As with any business, there are many actions that you need to take in order to build a brand from scratch. You’ll have to learn how good marketing strategies work and how they can be tailored for your own needs, as well as how social media campaigns will help promote your voice and image.
Keep in mind that it’s also essential to focus on how the product or service will look and how it feels when people use it. If possible, make sure all of these aspects come together seamlessly so that customers don’t even know that you created one before another: strategy, design, functionality–they should feel like an extension of each other rather than separate entities vying for attention.
