Building your company’s brand is an important aspect of standing out among your competition and getting ahead. If you’re not sure where to start with your brand building efforts, click here for 6 simple how to build a brand tips!
Starting a new company? Congrats!
Now it’s time to watch it grow. Building a brand is a key part of a companies success in today’s marketplace. With social media and various platforms available, it’s important to know how to get the most out of these tools and allow them to help build your business.
If you’re wondering how to build a brand, check out these 6 tips below!
Know Your Market
Before you can start building a brand, you have to know who you’re marketing to. Given the service your company offers or the items they sell, determine who your current customer is and who your future customer will likely be.
It’s also important to note who your competitors are. There are a number of ways to go about this. You can start by googling the type of service your own business provides and examining the other companies that pop up.
Reddit is a terrific place for some online people-watching. You can check out subreddits that are discussing products you sell or the service you provide and see who people are recommending to one another. This is a good way to get honest, unfiltered feedback about what customers do and don’t like and the companies they’re gravitating toward instead of your own.
Another way to gauge potential customers is to hold a focus group. This is an easy way to get real-time answers about what customers are looking for. If you can’t afford a focus group or don’t have the resources to put one together, head to social media.
Check out the accounts of your competitors and see who their followers are. You can also try the reverse of this and find some of your target customers on social media and see which brands they follow and engage with. This will allow you to understand what is pulling those customers in and keeping them attracted to a certain company.
As you move through these steps of research, take notes. Determine the easy to reach customers and how you can attract more of them to your page or site. Pay attention to how your target customers communicate online. What seems to peak their interest?
You should also be following and paying close attention to your major competitors. These are the companies that have infiltrated the marketplace in a major way and are well known amongst their customers and beyond.
Know Yourself
A company and brand can’t please everyone and nor should it. The key to building a strong brand is to get focused on what your company is about. What are you trying to do? What is the message you want to convey to consumers and more importantly, what specific need are you fulfilling for them?
You’ve probably seen what the film industry terms a “logline.” This is a one to two sentence synopsis of a film that gets the point across in a concise and clear way. Try doing this with your company, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Create a logline for your business. You should be able to clearly state in a few sentences or less, what your company offers and what makes it different from others like it. This statement can just be for you and your internal staff to get on the same page about branding.
Consider it a mission statement that you and your staff can refer to if you begin to get sidetracked and as you make decisions. It’s a touchstone you can always come back to in an effort to make sure your branding aligns with your mission statement.
The Name Matters
Don’t let this stress you out. Your company name does matter and it’s an important first step in moving forward with your branding and business altogether. However, it isn’t everything. Without the other components that make a business sore, the name alone can’t help you and won’t mean much if everything else is lacking.
That being said, you want to choose a name that reflects the mission and message of what your company will do. Avoid names that be confused with other brands already out there.
Keep in mind not only what your business does now, but what you might want to do in the future should you grow or expand into other avenues. You want to select a name that can be malleable and will still work should you begin to sell other products or do something slightly different than you do at the moment.
The Look
This is a big category in which you’ll have several things to consider. The look and feel of your branding will go a long way with how customers respond and how much traffic you’re able to draw it. These are excellent tools so don’t overlook them as easy ways to get more out of your business.
It will help you to increase creative approach.Think about the colors you want to be associated with your company. How about a logo, or an overall social media aesthetic? Look at the social media pages of your competitors. We bet they have a cohesive look and some consistency when it comes to how they display their content.
Do your research and then determine how you’d like to visually present the company to your potential customers and to anyone who may be checking out your website or social media page.
Keep it consistent across all platforms and work to build a signature look. This will help customers identify your brand without even seeing words. When they’re mindlessly scrolling through social media, they’ll know when your brand has posted something, and hopefully, it will catch their eye because it will look and feel different than the other pages they follow.
Slogan
Customers want information quickly. This means, if they visit your page, they’ll want to know within a few words what your company does and what kinds of products they sell.
A slogan or phrase can help you explain this fast. You can use the logline we talked about earlier for guidance. Build out a sentence or a few words that exemplify what your company stands for and the service they offer.
Be sure to put this in the bio or “about” section of your website or social media page. It will help customers understand who you are and determine if this is a service they need.
Find Your Voice
Now that you’ve figured out how to visual intrigue an audience and catch their attention, it’s time to use your words and follow up on the message you’re trying to convey.
This is where it becomes important to have great social media management and a strong website. The captions and content you provide will be the difference between gaining and losing a potential customer. Be strategic about what you post and the words you use in conjunction with that information.
Try to find the voice of your company. This means examining how you communicate with your audience and keeping it consistent so they know it’s you and associate that tone with your company in particular.
This allows people to build a connection with your brand and remember it in the future. You can hire professional brand agencies to build and improve your branding visibility.
Now You Know How to Build Your Brand!
These simple steps will help you build the brand you always wanted. Remember to stay true to yourself and your company and remain focused on the products you deliver or the service you offer.
We’d love to help your business thrive. Contact us today to discuss website building and branding.
