Building a brand that stands out from the crowd is no easy task. Whether you have years of business acumen and a large team behind you, or are just starting out from the comfort of your own home, a brand is more than just a name and logo. Your brand reflects your entire business.
A successful brand encompasses all areas of your business, from the font or colors that you use across your company website, to how your store is laid out and presented to your consumers. However, you won’t be able to build your brand without being consistent. First and foremost, you will need to establish what feelings or sentiments you want your brand to evoke. Just like large companies such as Coca-Cola, M&Ms or Apple, you need to make sure that you know exactly which elements drive your branding. Then you can start building.
Establish your place in the market
In order to grow your brand, you need to start thinking of your business as one. While this might seem quite unusual at first, living and breathing your brand will help you better identify any faults or weaknesses in your branding strategy. To establish your brand as the number one authority in your area, you need to make sure that your branding is watertight. Now is the time to review if you have enough funding to give your logo a makeover or perhaps your tone of voice is letting you down too. In order to establish your place in the market, you need to make sure that your brand is meeting your company objectives. A weak brand causes more harm than good to company reputation.
Review your branding
Now you can begin to review your company’s branding. Make sure that you perform an online audit to check that all of your social media channels and company website use consistent branding and colors. Your website is a crucial part of businesses, especially in the technological age. They are integral to securing the growth of your company. This is why businesses are looking to marketing companies like WHITEHAT to help them to do this. Next, if you have a store or point of sale, make sure that your branding and logo are consistently used throughout your store. If you consider Apple’s stores, for example, they are consistent with regards to their décor and layout; to them, they use simplicity. Your company, therefore, needs to adopt the same attitude. Ensure all your stores are similar with their décor; you want your customers to recognize your brand and be drawn in. For ways to showcase your stock, websites such as aaadisplays.com provide a range of fixtures and displays to give your retail store a much needed makeover.
Once you have ensured that your branding is consistent both online, and at any points of sale or customer interaction, you can begin to grow your brand. Now’s the time to make sure that your workforce are supporting your branding efforts through uniformity.
Online help
The internet is an amazing place to build brand awareness as anyone from around the world can get access to your business, meaning your reach can be endless. You can help grow awareness to people needing your services by using resources like Google Adwords. This is a very efficient way to tell people about your business as you can Automate your Google Search campaigns to optimise your reach and make sure you are reaching the people looking for your services as it has been shown that using Google AdWords can improve awareness by an average 6.6%. It is also important to realise the threats posed to your brand online. Make sure you have up to date cyber security such as FWI which helps protect your brand’s online identity.
Watch your brand grow
Building and developing your brand doesn’t stop with creating a logo or giving your firm an online audit. You need to ensure that your employees continue to protect and preserve your brand in the long term. From customer service representatives, to packaging and email responses, your branding needs to remain at the forefront of your colleagues’ minds. However, it’s important to remember that you will never gain 100 percent control over how your brand is received. This all depends on your employees and the efforts that you make to promote brand awareness and engagement internally.
You may not think it, but your employees are an important part of expanding your business so that it has the chance to become more successful. If they are not happy in their job, then it will be hard for your business to achieve its goals and to make the improvements that it needs to grow. You may want to think about how to measure employee engagement so that you have a better idea about how the staff are feeling in their roles so that you can make the necessary changes to help make your business as successful as it can be.
The hard work is now up to you, so make sure that you use the above tools and tricks to ensure that your brand remains successful and recognized for many years to come.