“Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” – Steve Forbes
Building your own brand is one of the most effective ways of raising awareness around your product or service. The initial creation and subsequent maintenance of a strong brand is one of the most important elements of a successful business. Your brand is the first thing that your customer base will associate your business with. For this reason it is essential that you spend sufficient time developing the brand that will bring your product or service to market. The majority of large businesses put a lot of financing into creating the ‘perfect brand’ in order for them to be easily recognised within large markets.However, a big budget is not always essential for building a successful brand. As long as you have created a strong strategy and have sufficient content building a successful brand is an achievable goal.
The first question you must ask yourself when building your brand is, “What makes my business stand out from my competitors?”. The unique selling point of your product or service should be a centre point in your strategy to build your brand identity. By using your businesses strengths to position it within the marketplace, the brand that you build will become easily recognisable among those who operate within that specific market. As well as utilising your USP to fuel the creation of your brand there are other questions you must ask yourself when building your brand, ‘How do you want your customers to feel when they associate your brand with your business?’, ‘How can you create a brand that is both practical and meaningful?’ etc. There are many different questions that you should ask yourself in the early stages of creating your brand as what you decide on will always be associated with your business. For this reason it is important to get it right from the outset.
Branding does have some focus on the colours, fonts and imagery that you want to represent your business. However a brand is more than just the aesthetic elements. Your brand will tell the the story of your business which will stay with it as it grows. As a collective society we love stories and storytelling, ensure that your brand identity communicates yours. To ensure the story you create reflects positively on your business and is in line with your target market look to conducting research on your potential customers. Doing this will allow you to see exactly what your potential customers look for from a brand. Using the findings from your research you can move forward utilising your findings to create your brand strategy.
Consistency is key when it comes to branding. The design and route you would like your branding to take should remain constant through initial design and throughout promotional materials for your business. By keeping consistent you will ensure that there is instant recognition from your customers when they identify your brand within the market. By having a direct focus on how your brand will represent your business it allows you to map out a clear vision of how your business is going to evolve in the future. If you commit to the branding of your business from the start it will establish what your business is and what you stand for. Together these elements are essential in ensuring your startups success.
Finally, remember that sometimes, less is more. Your brand should effectively communicate your business without your customers having to research your business further. The ability to recognise a business based on its branding can be seen with some of the largest companies in the world such as Coca- Cola, Apple etc. Keeping things simple is what they do best while still allowing for their respective brands to speak volumes within their own markets. An example of how branding can speak for a business itself was seen in the Google ad that aired during this year’s Super Bowl. By saying very little they communicated the importance that their products have in their consumers lives, by allowing them to have experiences that can rarely be recreated. As a startup by creating a successful brand you can have an impact like this on your own customers as your business grows.
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