Many people believe that the brand is the same as a logo but although significant, the logo is just one of the elements that make up a brand. A brand is perhaps best described as the overall impression your customers have about your business – if you make your brand recognized and loved, your business will have the perfect foundations for growth. Since this is such an important aspect of your future business prospects, you need to put some extra effort at the beginning, to ensure you have a winning combination for later on. With that in mind, here are some pieces of advice to consider when starting your brand.
Understand who you are targeting
A large customer base is not achieved by thinking that every single individual in the world is your potential customer. Although it would be wonderful to have such an extensive customer list, these goals can be chased after in the later stages of your business development since for a smaller business, it is always better to stick to a particular niche.
Knowing more about your audience will help you learn how to shape your brand identity, so you need to learn about gender, age, occupation, device preference, as well as the geographic location of your prospective customers. Here’s a simplified example through choosing brand colors: if your products are intended for the elderly, for instance, your visual identity would be something serene, as opposed to a colorful approach that you might take if your clients are children.
Tend to your visual identity
No matter your physical location, with the right mixture to your brand, you can extend your reach globally. Who is to say that your business from Sydney cannot develop a customer base in Italy? The main benefit of the Internet in business terms is that it has given companies an opportunity to look for partners, suppliers, and customers on a global scale.
The visual elements of your brand such as your logo, typeface, and color palette are crucial for your future brand awareness strategy and therefore must be created with great care. If you are struggling with the optimal solutions, you should consider hiring an experienced branding agency in Melbourne or another city you reside in so they can tailor a branding strategy based on your needs. If these foundations you set are right, you will have no problem building a global sustainable business on them.
Get to know your competition
Another important step is learning about your niche through your competition which will help you find a starting point and develop a winning strategy. Your intention is not to copy the big names from that industry – you have yet to grow until you can be in the big league. But what you will be looking for is information that you can leverage on to ensure your brand will pop up among so many others.
For instance, you might want to explore the comments of their customers on social media because they often contain frank opinions which could be a clue about something that your competition doesn’t have but you might be able to offer. Naturally, you would also want to do research into their product quality to see what you are up against.
Be consistent with the integration
When you have all the pieces aligned as you want them to, it is time to implement your branding strategy across different channels. Make sure you cover all areas of online presence, such as a website and social media, and you can also consider adding a blog to the mix. When it comes to social media, you needn’t have a profile everywhere but instead, you should concentrate on a specific network. The answer to which lies in the data you accumulated on your audience.
Regarding integration, what’s crucial is to be consistent – if you are a bubbly social brand with products for teenagers, you would want for your website to send the same message as your Instagram profile because any inconsistencies, such as a strict, dark website would turn away your target audience. This means that it is best to place the same team on managing your brand presence across all channels, to avoid partial consistency.
Wrapping up
During this research you would be conducting, you might discover that you aren’t sure about who you need to target or that competition in your niche of choice is considerable but you should see this as a challenge, an opportunity to show yourself and others that you can make it. With a carefully planned strategy on your side, your brand will get an opportunity to outshine others because you would be making informed decisions about each subsequent step.
Raul is a B.Sc. in Innovative entrepreneurship and has a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. While he’s not enjoying travel, football and great food, you can find him on Technivorz.com