Stock theft has been common since time immemorial. The problem is all cows look similar, and it is difficult to discriminate between them. Farmers brand their herds with different colored paint so they stand out. We brand ourselves in business so we stand out uniquely too.
You designed a special logo, created a rock solid tagline, featured colors all over your website, and more, telling people what your business actually is and what you provide to your audiences. Beyond those, the point of branding is to make your business recognizable, trustable, admirable, preferred, and conveying a meaning for your customers.
In the end, a product will never be a product anymore. When a brand has been successfully established, its audiences know exactly the experience that they will have when making a purchase, and most of time, they are not only purchasing for the functions, they are doing it for an ownership that shows their taste and status. There are many examples for it, like Apple, Ray-Ban, Coca-Cola, Tiffany & Co, etc..
Building a brand is not an easy path. Besides what has been mentioned above, the following things if you can do properly will help you effectively and efficiently develop your brand identity that links to the success of your business.
11 Things You Must Do When Branding Your Company
1. Decide Who Your Brand Speaks To
Your brand should represent your unique discriminator as seen through the lens of your target. If we want to launch, let us say a new range of hearing aids for seniors, our brand is going to breathe reliability, caring, and compassion.
Conversely, if we decide to open a new nightclub aimed at teenagers, we might present our initiative as cutting edge and challenging discipline. Our market must associate with our brand before it engages.
2. Create a Unique Voice to Convey Your Brand Message
Every individual people is different from others in many ways, like appearance, vocabulary, attitude, the way of dressing, and even the way of standing and sitting. It is same for a business.
Your company stands out from a crowded market through unique characteristics. Developing a brand voice with a unique tone is the key to build brand awareness and make your business recognizable and memorable.
You can tell your brand story through advertisements, email campaigns, social media networks, strategic videos, blogs, or any strategies that carry your voice to communicate with your audiences. There are various tones of brand voice, like entertaining, passionate, funny, friendly, authentic, etc.. For example: Coca Cola’s voice is vibrant and joyful; MailChimp established a voice that is causal, friendly, and cheerful. You will have to find your tone that must be unique, consistent, conveying a personality, and aligning with the value and goals of your business.
3. Turn Your Fans Into Your Missionaries
Our delivery behind our brand must stand out in ways that reinforce it in our targets’ minds. Advertising no longer closes sales, because social media created a generation of skeptics.
When our targets turn to social media to find out what other people think, we want them to have a positive experience. What better recommendation is there for our brand than a customer who praises us? What worse is there than the person who marks us down.
4. Create Valuable First Impressions Using Images
First impressions are the cornerstones of how people view our brands. When I think of McDonalds, I see the golden arches first as shadows of fond memories in my mind. The picture of KFC’s founder Colonel Sanders spurs our memories of past likes and joys. Strong brand design creates a statement with colors, styles, logos, images, and graphics. Plaster the social media with it, so you are instantly recognizable when users visit your website. Become a familiar friend.
5. Reinforce First Impressions with a Content Marketing Program
It’s a human thing to reject information that does not match current perceptions, but to believe the information which does. We need layer upon layer of positive impressions to make our brands virtually shockproof no matter what comes.
Volkswagen came through the emissions scandal by floating on a raft built from its decades slogans. If you want to weather the odd storm - and they will blow - you need regular focused content marketing that attracts, persuades, hammers your message, and sells.
6. Extract Extra Leverage from the Social Media
When the new generation of consumers walks across Times Square in Manhattan, New York, it no longer looks up in awe at the neon advertising and streaming news. Instead, it is heads-bowed-down to smartphones exploring the new reality.
We must be discoverable on social media in our missionaries’ posts, and through key wording and advertisements too. If the new reality does not find us on Facebook and Twitter, it is as good as if our brand did not exist. We must reach out to that market. It will not come to us.
The marketing survey below telling us how the customers perceived brand transparency and its topics on social media when it comes to brand trust.
7. Shout It Loud and Shout It Long
A successful propagandist said, ‘If you repeat a lie often enough, the people will believe it’. This principle is even more powerful when we speak good news. Conversely, if we say a thing only once, the people soon forget.
There are so many neon signs on Times Square we hardly notice any branding, let alone read the messages. It is tough getting a new restaurant brand to emerge from the crowd. Five Guys and Cheesecake Factory did it in 2017 by being visible and accessible to their markets.
8. Align Every Aspect of Your Business to Your Brand
Sincerity and delivery are the secrets of enduring brands. Once we break the chain of trust, it is hard to recover. Our brand must represent who we are, although it is quite okay to say like Avis we are trying harder.
It follows that a branding project must start inside a business, if you like with internal branding If we align a new brand with a successful business we are proud of, our market will say, ‘that’s okay, that’s what I know and I love.’
9. Reinforce Your Message with Strategic Advertising
Did you ever think that there are actually two brands, what we want to believe, and public opinion? Coca-Cola really messed things by pushing New Coke when most hated it. The public are not that gullible.
Our brand awareness can gain traction faster with a little prophetic advertising about where we are going with our service or our product. If you push the frontiers of reality too far you may burst the bubble and become not trustable to the public.
10. Reinforce Your Quality with Influencer Marketing
Our friends’ friends are our friends, that is how social cohesion, and the social media work. In the UK, Lea & Perrins Worcester Sauce makes good money from its ‘Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’.
Influencers to consider are those with social reach, and those most likely to promote our products at the point of sale because they love them. We do not necessarily need a Bieber or a Madonna, although it would be nice if we could afford them. Remember the power of Colonel Sanders, which still lingers on.
11. Solicit Customer Reviews and Feedback
Sure, we appreciate that half the reviews on the internet are phony, or at least exaggerated. But the fact is they work, provided they are genuine. Our objective brand is, after all, the sum totality of what people think of us. This is where we need to be out on social media and punching hard.
The statistics below show how online reviews influence customers purchase decision.
Not much has really changed down the years despite what people say. The people still buy from brands they like and trust, especially when what their friends say, confirms this. The internet merely provides a wider spread of opinions as it reaches more people.
You Can Reinforce, Not Enforce Your Brands
Thus, you need to maintain brand consistency and positive reputation with your audiences through various marketing strategies. However, you cannot tell people what to buy, or brand your company contra to what it actually is.
There is no mantra to guarantee success for any brand. Sticking on the 11 strategies we discussed above and deploying them with your own tailor-made details are the key to win the battle.
