Establishing a strong brand identity for your business is key to long term success. It can take a long time, but when done right, can transform any business. Knowing how to create a strong brand identity and building brand awareness requires skill, time and money, yet investing these things early on is certainly a good idea.
Switching and changing your branding over and over will lead to disorientated and distrusting customers. Changing your branding can be great for your business, but when you do it too often, it can confuse your customer base, so doing it once really well is the best way forward. Before you get started, follow these 5 tips to ensure you create a strong brand identity for your business!
Establish Point of Difference
Your first step in creating a strong brand identity is to differentiate yourself from competitors and establish a point of difference. This will give your potential customers a reason to choose your product or service over another, so it should be intertwined heavily in your branding. When a customer sees your product, you need to have something that sets you apart to encourage them to make that decision.
Points of difference vary massively depending on the nature of your business, so it is important you do thorough market research in order to understand how you are different. Make sure that your point of difference is something that will encourage potential customers to come to you! Once you have found your point of difference and have analysed the extent to which it fills a gap in the market, you can start to embed it into your branding.
One of the most simple ways to establish your point of difference through branding is to explain how you are solving a problem for a consumer. Keep it simple and short to keep customers wanting more!
Have A Solid Brand Strategy
Once you know the point of difference that is going to underpin your branding, it’s time to create a solid branding strategy. Start by considering your overall business strategy, including your long term goals. As branding is not something you want to change often, considering your goals for the next 5 to 10 years is important.
Having a strong brand is about much more than making money, so you should consider what else you want to achieve through your branding. This should then be reiterated throughout your branding. Consistency is key when it comes to branding, so having a bulletproof brand strategy from the very beginning gives you the best chance of success.
Have Brand Guidelines
If you have a big company with lots of different employees, then having brand guidelines in place is certainly advisable. This will ensure that everyone in the company has a crystal clear idea of what your business stands for and how you want to portray it. Having consistency throughout the company when it comes to your brand is essential.
Brand guidelines should include a brief overview of the history of the company and the importance of that in terms of where the company is today. The vision for the future and key values are also a crucial part of branding. You would then also have more specific information to do with the visuals for certain departments, such as fonts, expectations for imagery, spacing and colour palettes.
Voice and tone is one of the most important elements of branding. They play a huge role in how you come across to potential customers, so making sure everyone has an understanding of your brand voice is key.
Reflect Brand Message Through Content
Reflecting your brand message through content is one of the best ways to establish yourself within an industry. From email marketing to your website and social media to adverts, every single piece of content that goes out to the world should clearly show your brand. This is where you should invest in support from a branding agency Manchester or London based for some of the best talent in the country.
Branding agencies have extensive amounts of experience in knowing how to make your brand shine through in every aspect of your business. Getting it right first time is key to success, so if you are going to invest anywhere, this is the right time! You might also want to work with a copywriter, as although you may live and breathe your business, it can be difficult to convey your core values simply through content. A copywriter will consider the perspective of the consumer to bring your vision to life through words. As mentioned previously, it is certainly worth investing while you can to get it right and not have to rebrand in a couple of years when you realise things just weren’t quite right.
Continually Monitor Progress
The final thing you can do to make sure your brand is a success is to continually monitor your progress. There are many different ways to measure brand awareness, namely through surveys, looking at website traffic and data and communicating with your audience.
When rebranding, it is important that you keep your current customers in the loop. You could run retargeting campaigns to inform customers that have come to your website in the last 3 months that changes will be made and introduce them to the new branding. This will help to minimise any disorientation and to make them feel considered in the decision of the brand. This should function to build trust in the brand.
Final Thoughts
Branding is a huge part of any business and can be a deciding factor in the overall success. Creating a strong brand can take time and financial investment, yet it is worth doing properly! This is the best possible opportunity to show how you are different to your competitors and to establish yourself within your industry. Branding is all about what your company values and how you want to present yourself to the consumer, with the potential to create a loyal customer base.