I touched on building your brand in the previous blog and to summarise, for me, a brand is – ‘what people say about you when you are not in the room’. I should add, I have been saying this long before Amazon mentioned it, but if Jeff Bezos’ is saying it too, then I am in good company.
To recap, building your brand is based on three important foundations;
1 How you look, your visual identity and how you present yourself.
2 How you sound, your verbal identity and your tone of voice.
3 How you act, your values and what you say and believe in.
The foundations of building your brand
When you tell your brand story, there are a few things you should think about in terms of what you are trying to say;
- Who are you, what is your purpose?
- What do you want your audience to hear? Tell a good enough story for people to want to use you.
- Your vision, values and mission.
- What marketing methods are you going to use to get your message across?
Building your brand– what is your business all about, how do you wish this to be communicated and portrayed. Many call this your story and it should include your vision, mission and values. Your brand should retain a consistent look and feel, so that no matter where you promote yourself, your look and story will flow through all platforms and be easily recognised.
Ask yourself these questions;
- Why do I do what I do?
- Why am I different, why should someone choose me?
- What problem am I solving? What solution am I offering?
- The so what – why should someone care? What is in it for them?
Building your brand from scratch
There are a few things you need to do to work out how you wish to present your brand before steaming ahead with the aesthetics. Some of the things you should consider doing first are;
- Research your competitors what do you like/think is working for them? Look at other non-competitive brands that do you like, what are they doing well?
- Research your target audience, who do you want to reach/speak to?
- Choose a personality and tone for yourself e.g. friendly, warm, professional.
- Choose your business name.
- Write a catchy tag line or slogan which goes with your message. This could also be your mission as long as it is short and snappy.
- Think about the colours and fonts you want to use in your logo and branding. Different colours evoke different emotions as do fonts. These should all tie in with your personality and tone.
- Design your branding, logo and messages.
- Apply this across your whole business regularly and consistently.
Branding your business
When I say apply this across your whole business, by this I mean think about the full picture of how you wish to look and where you will be seen, e.g.
- Your office signage or shop front signage.
- Your packaging and stationery.
- All of your printed collateral.
- Your website.
- Your social media.
- Your email marketing.
- Any advertising you do.
- Your content and features in publications.
- Any corporate merchandise, uniforms, clothing, PPE equipment.
- Any branding in your customer service offering.
Building your brand is a logical process but takes time, patience and repeated consistency. Don’t chop and change because you get bored. You will send mixed messages to your audience, confuse them and yourself and your consistency in brand will be lost.
Knowing your target audience
You need to try and understand as best you can who your audience (s) is (are). You will use different messages to talk to different audiences and you need to be clear on who you are talking to, this will allow you to deliver the right message (s) in a targeted way.
When thinking about your audience, try and work out the answers to the following;
- Their age.
- Their gender.
- Where they are located, the Geographic’s of their whereabouts.
- Their income band and disposable income.
- Their interests and buying behaviours.
- What their pain points, motivations and reasons for buying are.
- What they read, where they seek out information.
Setting a vision, mission and values
The easiest way to explain the difference in these is that a vision should be far reaching, a goal for the future and one which is pretty challenging. Your dream for your business in the future. Your mission is how you are going to get there – what your business goal is. Your values are the behaviours that you are going to adopt to get you there.
Everything from your brand, tag line, tone of voice and story should reflect your vision, mission and values.
When people ask you what you do, you should be using your mission to answer this.
Creating your branding and logo
Your logo will appear on everything, so it is important to get it right and produce it to a high quality, so that it stands out and you are proud to promote it.
When you create a logo and brand, it’s a good discipline to also create a brand guidelines document. This is your bible detailing how all the elements of your brand should be used. A good brand guidelines document will include;
- Your timeline/business journey.
- Your vision, mission and values.
- Your logo details and how it should be placed and used.
- Your colour scheme/palette.
- The fonts you are using both in your logo and your copy text.
- The style of images, icons and videos you wish to use.
I hope this provides a good insight into the steps needed when you are thinking about building your brand. If you have any questions on this article, please use the contact me form to get in touch.
You can also visit my LinkedIn page here
Thank you to Patrik Michalicka and Unsplash for the image used in this article
