Your company’s brand is made up of aesthetic and creative choices that represent the most important values and benefits you have to offer. Simply put, your brand is the personality of your business. Branding is the first thing customers encounter when they interact with your company, and it helps set the tone for the engagement you have with customers and what they expect from your products or services. Here are five easy steps to build your brand:
1. Find your meaningful purpose
In beginning to establish your brand, you need to ask yourself questions with the goal of learning your purpose. Purpose is the cornerstone of branding. The kinds of questions you ask should be self-exploratory and include things like:
- What am I passionate about?
- Why do I get up every day?
- What problems does my company solve?
- What products and services do we provide?
- Why are they important?
Once you’ve asked yourself questions that lead to discovery of you as a person, a professional and a company, you can use those insights to create your brand.
2. Understand your core customer base
Before you can consider how your brand presence conveys to customers, you have to know who your customers are. This means you must continue to be thoughtful about your product, what it does, who benefits from it and why. When you understand these important factors in branding, you can start to piece together a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a marketing document that answers the question, “Who purchases your product?”
Buyer personas include demographic information like customer gender, age, location, household income and more. They should also include psychographic information, which is information that explains the social, emotional and psychological reasons that your buyers spend money on your products.
For instance, a diamond jeweler might use information like societal pressure to buy the right diamond engagement ring in their buyer persona. Many companies have more than one type of shopper, and create multiple personas.
3. Do competitive market research
When you research your competition you can learn what they do well, and what their weak points are. You can answer questions like, “What gaps in competitor products and services does my company fill?” You should not strive to imitate your competitors with market research, instead you should learn from them and use what you learn to strategically craft a brand marketing plan.
4. Create a mission statement that aligns with your values
With purpose, buyer persona and market research complete, you are in a strong position to create your mission statement. The mission statement is a concise but powerful sentence or two that defines your company’s goals and values.
For example, an investment firm might say something like, “Our mission is to provide ethical financial services to elite customers who benefit from best-in-class technology and customer service.”
5. Establish yourself online
Finally, you have to build your online presence. Digital marketing and social media offer many opportunities to build your brand online, ranging from creating a sleek, brand-conscious and well-designed website with logo and professional photography to using platforms like Facebook to connect with customers. The possibilities for building your brand online are endless.
Once you have implemented these tasks, you will have a better understanding of how to build a cohesive brand. If you’re just missing photos, now would be a perfect time to book your branding session.