Anything that makes it possible for your target audience to identify your company right away is referred to as branding. For example, even when seen apart from any other marketing materials, the Nike “Swoosh” emblem and the tagline “Just Do It” are instantly recognizable. Even if you might not be able to create a brand as powerful as Nike’s, concentrating on doing so should help your business succeed more.

A brand often consists of elements such as your company name, logo, color schemes, fonts, slogans, message, and advertising strategies. Branding is the way that customers view your business. Even if your company offers top-notch items and first-rate customer service, a negative reputation could still result from subpar branding.

If your brand is weak at the moment or practically nonexistent, there are plenty of things that you can do to start building and strengthening your brand, some of which are detailed further in this article.

1. Establish Your Goals

The first thing that you should do when attempting to build a stronger brand is to establish the overarching goals that your business has. Once you create these goals, it will be possible for you to create a strategy for your brand that accommodates these goals. While there are many different types of goals that you can set for your business, some of the more popular ones include increased conversion rates, better customer retention, and a premium brand.

For instance, Apple has created a premium brand over the years, which allows them to charge much more for their smartphones when compared to the competition despite the fact that the smartphone models have similar feature sets. With conversion rates, higher rates typically equate to more revenues. Establishing business goals can help you measure future success and is critical to building a strong brand.

2. Outline the Key Qualities & Benefits Your Brand Offers

The key to building a strong brand is to highlight the main qualities and benefits that your brand offers to customers. There are almost certainly going to be brands in your industry that are larger than yours, which is why your main focus should be to differentiate your business and brand from the competition.

If you can find things about your products or services that no other company in your industry offers, you should be able to start creating a memorable brand. Maybe your company provides a more affordable product than most or is known to offer stellar customer service. Try to avoid making a basic list of features that your services or products provide to customers. Instead, it’s important to figure out how your company provides value and how your brand is unique.

3. Create a Brand Logo & Tagline

If you want to be able to effectively grow your brand, you should create a brand logo and tagline that can represent your business in all of your marketing materials. In order to create a strong logo and tagline, it’s recommended that you seek assistance from a design firm or someone in your business who you know to be highly creative. The logo that you create will be the primary calling card for your business, which is why you should invest money into creating a strong and memorable logo.

Branding agencies can help you craft the right logo, which will typically include your brand name, a color palette that matches your business, iconography, web elements, and various fonts. Some of the best and most memorable logos include the Target, Apple, and Nike logos. Modern logos tend to be minimalist in nature with sleek elements and simple color schemes.

4. Revisit Who Your Customers Are

If you want your brand to be successful, it’s important that your target audience finds your brand appealing. To make sure that you create the right brand, it’s recommended that you revisit who your customers are by performing extensive customer research. Once this research has been completed, you should be able to better understand your customers and what they want from your business.

If your primary audience involves younger adults who have just left college and are new to the job market, these individuals will likely want a brand that is modern, bold and takes a stand, which can involve anything from being at the forefront of sustainability to fighting against income inequality. You can find your target audience by creating buyer personas. These personas can help you understand more about your customers and their perspectives. With the data that you’ve gathered, buyer personas should identify customer goals, challenges, and likes.

5. Research Competitor Brands Within Your Industry

It’s very difficult to create a successful brand without first having researched competitor brands within your industry. While you shouldn’t copy what these brands are doing, you can use the brands for inspiration while also making sure that your brand is effectively able to differentiate itself. An effective brand is one that stands out among the competition, which is why it’s important to know what the competition is doing.

6. Improve Your Site’s Visibility in Search Results

After you’ve created a strong and memorable logo along with other branding elements, it’s important that prospective and current customers see your branding and become familiar with it. To do this, it’s recommended that you improve your site’s visibility in search results. Around 75 percent of internet users will never click past the first page of results for their search engine queries. If you want to bring in visitors to your website, it’s important that you improve your ranking in relevant search results.

Read Also: How Branding Increases Sales

If you can get your website to be among the first three results for relevant queries, you should see a notable uptick in the amount of visitors who reach your website. You can improve your site’s visibility by performing search engine optimization throughout your website. By increasing the speed of your site and implementing keywords into blog articles, you can boost site traffic and bring in more organic traffic.

7. Be True to Your Brand

Consistency is a key component of a successful brand. Even if your brand elements are memorable, your target audience will soon forget them if your company doesn’t stay true to the brand that you’ve cultivated. For instance, the brand voice that you create should be used for every marketing material that you put out.

If you want your brand to be professional and stylish, you should never put out marketing materials that are zany and bizarre. It’s important that you provide your customers with what your brand has promised and to always be honest and truthful with these customers. To make sure that all employees are consistent with branding, document and distribute your brand guidelines.

8. Build Your Brand Digitally with Multi-Channel Marketing

A great way to build your brand is to do so digitally with multi-channel marketing, which involves reaching potential customers through a variety of online channels. The main online marketing platforms available to you include social media, email marketing, and display ads.

When marketing on social media, it’s important to understand that some social media platforms differ significantly from one another. Certain channels may be better at reaching customers at the beginning of the buyer’s journey compared to other channels. While Instagram and Facebook reach very similar markets, being in a variety of places will invariably allow you to reach a larger number of customers.

To get started with multi-channel marketing, it’s recommended that you create company profiles on the major social media platforms, which include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. After these accounts have been created, you should conduct extensive research on each platform to determine what users typically look for. It’s important that you know how to communicate with customers on social media platforms before you begin to do so. If you can effectively build your brand digitally, you should start to see notable returns from your investment.

9. Create Branded Content

As mentioned previously, all content and marketing materials that you put out should be branded with your logo, tagline, and other brand elements. The right branded content can help you generate and nurture leads, increase brand awareness, build trust, and convert initial leads into paying customers. The various types of branded content that you can create include:

• Ads
• Videos
• Landing pages
• Social media headlines
• Blogs

The blogs you create can highlight your brand while also providing customers with useful and relevant information.

10. Develop a Brand Style Guide

You should think about creating a written style guide for your brand that can be addressed in the future and distributed to your employees. This document can help you align future digital branding strategies. In order for branding to be consistent, a style guide is likely necessary.

This guide should include your color palette, font sizes, font styles, logo, slogans, outreach channels, patterns and backgrounds, a standard call to action, animation and video styles, and a language style. This style guide can be used to keep your branding in check across all digital materials and future marketing campaigns. If you are unable to refer back to a guide like this, you may find yourself straying from consistent branding too often.

11. Integrate Your Brand

After you’ve fully established your brand, it’s important that you start to integrate it into every aspect of business. Whenever customers read, hear, or see something about your business, your brand should be at the forefront. For instance, any video that you place on Facebook or YouTube should clearly display your logo and other identifiable brand elements.

The same is true of any profiles you create on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Business cards, packaging, and physical products should also include your logo and company name.

Benefits of Strong Branding

Robust, consistent branding guarantees that your clients will always choose you over the competition and provides you an identity.

This is what additional benefits a strong brand can offer your small business.

Increase Brand Recognition

Your company’s logo, colors, or tagline can make your brand recognizable and get customers to say, “Yes, I know them!” The more often customers are able to identify your brand, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Build Customer Loyalty

A consistent brand can build trust and credibility with your audience and make your brand 3.5 times more visible to your audience, according to Marq’s 2021 State of Brand Consistency Report. Customer loyalty is a crucial deciding factor in your customers’ purchase decisions.

Improve Marketing Efforts and Return on Investment

Unified branding elevates your marketing efforts and generates higher returns. It also reduces the time you spend figuring out “new” ways to reach out to customers, allowing you to focus on delivering them the ideal experience.

Increase Chances of Funding

Branding is a great way to get your business in the eyes of investors, providing you with an influx of capital. Investors are constantly looking for companies with solid brand recognition and loyalty. For them, these brands present the greatest potential.

Make It Easier to Launch New Products

Once you have a consistent and recognizable brand, it’s easier for you to grow your business and test out new products. Customers are more receptive to trying new products or services when they’re familiar with your brand and trust your company.

Provide a Larger Talent Pool

People are eager to work for reliable, established brands. When you’re ready to grow, your well-known brand can give you more options when it comes to finding talented, hardworking employees.

Conclusion

The brand that you create should mean everything to your business. Once you’ve put your brand out there and have started to integrate it into everything that your business does, you will be able to affect how people view your business. A strong brand is one that’s remembered even when customers aren’t viewing your marketing materials. There are many effective ways to build and improve a brand, which include everything from creating branded content to creating a brand logo.

While it can take time to follow each of the aforementioned steps for building a strong brand, doing so can pay dividends and should help you increase customer conversion rates as well as overall profits. If you’ve recently started to grow your brand through financing and product development, building a brand will also be integral to any future success that you have.