As a business owner, you’re unlikely to have missed the buzz around branding. It’s always helpful to consider your brand as the identity or the personality of your business. You have to work hard at creating your branding and building it up so that it’s solid and strong. Most importantly, you should make sure that it communicates exactly who you are to your employees, stakeholders and target audience. When it comes to planning your branding, there’s no way to wing it. In such a competitive climate, you have to be as strategic as you can.
Brand Storytelling
The world of modern business is highly digital and fast-paced. Technology has advanced swiftly to leave us spoilt with so much convenience and the ability to connect with the exact products and services that we desire most immediately. Due to this, if you want to forge a connection with your audience, you need to give your business a great narrative so that you are able to evoke an emotional reaction in your target audience. If you know your target audience’s values, and your brand story complements those values, you are allowing yourself a real edge over your competitors and increasing the chance of your success. To build your brand story, you need to ask yourself questions about the foundations of your business, the problems you can solve, or the ambitions and shared values that you and your employees wish to be remembered for. If your brand has a strong personality and great story behind it, you are automatically allowing yourself to be perceived as more human as opposed to another faceless corporation in the crowd.
The Material Part
Your storytelling is about encouraging emotions and connections, yet you won’t want to forget about the material part of your branding. Your brand is very much defined by, for example: your tone of voice, be it casual slang or sleek formal; and your logo along with the design work on all of the graphics that represent your company and merchandise (This also includes your carefully chosen colour schemes). The aesthetic side to branding is crucial to conveying your personality and giving the right impression to customers. If you fail to present yourself in an artistically pleasing way that is appealing to your audience, you could lose customers before you’ve even started!
It’s an excellent plan to have a talented graphic designer to help you with your graphics and logo after you’ve spent a good while planning what your needs are. While you are at it, never underestimate just how instrumental branding is to your success. Spend enough time brainstorming strong brand names with your team. You will want to go for something that is memorable, concise and that your audience will have no trouble spelling or pronouncing (because if this is the case – it may easily be forgotten).
Marketing
There’s no use having a beautiful brand story and aesthetic if your marketing is not getting your message and products out there! Also, it’s not enough that you’ve done your target market research and that you know who your consumers are. You will need to put in the work to market your services to them properly, using the right platforms. If you feel that you may need a little extra helping hand in this department, why not consider outsourced digital marketing so that you can gain some extra momentum and professional insight.
Your Target Audience
It’s no secret that your brand affects how your target audience views you. With this in mind, when you are building your brand, it’s vital that you always keep referring back to them and base your brand persona around values that your audience are most likely to identify with. You can easily do this by asking yourself a few questions as a company along the way. These might be questions like – Which parts of our story would they find most valuable? What identity traits would they share? What kind of content would they enjoy? What type of content might they find creative? If you keep referring back to the consumers that will drive your success, you can’t go far wrong.
The Power of Content
When it comes to branding content is everything. If you have a blog on your company website where you are writing really high quality and valuable articles that appeal to your audience, you are allowing your brand identity to be shown off in terms of your creativity and your innovativeness. Great content will not only help you rank higher within search engines online, but it will entice your audience to share the content on their preferred social media platforms and thus, grow the popularity and strength of your brand even further.
Videos
Once you know that storytelling is of the utmost importance in branding, it becomes clear why so many companies are opting for marketing videos to present their brand. By using videos, you can help your audience to connect on a more human level to your company by seeing you at work, putting faces to the name of the brand and listening more interactively to your brand story. You could even go as far as holding live video events on your preferred social media platform to allow your audience to interact with the members of your company in real time.
With so much competition out there these days, you won’t want to ignore the importance of branding to the success of your company. If you are still in the start-up phase, you can sit down with your team and figure out which persona you are looking to achieve. If you are already in the developing stages, you can look at improving your branding and options to help communicate it to a much wider audience.
