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How To Make Your Brand About Your Business

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by Startacus Admin

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Effective branding should reflect your business and what you're about - this advice and these tips will help you ensure that it does just that

Branding is an important part of any business and it’s critical that you get it right, especially when you’re just starting out. The branding you create should be a reflection of your business and depending on what you present will depend on how effectively it’s received or perceived by the general public. 

pexels-photo-3182759More importantly, though, it should be grabbing the attention of your customers and those who you have the potential to reach. With that being said, here is some helpful advice on how to make your brand about your business.

Make Sure It Represents Your Business Identity

Business identity is important because it’s something that is likely going to run throughout everything that you do as a company. It’s what your business stands for and what type of personality your business has. 

To begin creating a successful brand, it’s important to answer these questions about your business identity first. Pull away the core essentials and then think about how you can incorporate them into the brand itself.

Your business identity covers a lot of ground, from the logo of your business to how you deal with clients and present yourself to the world. Your brand and branding, in general, should focus on reflecting that. Otherwise, you risk confusing those who come across your business and are therefore disappointed to receive something completely different.

Vision for the company itself is essential to have because if you don’t have that, then your branding is going to just be a discombobulated mess. At the end of the day, you’re trying to entice people to buy into your brand right? So make sure it matches the brand’s identity by being believable. 

Don’t try and claim something that you’re not, otherwise, you’re setting it up to fail.

Research Your Target Audience 

pexels-photo-3184292.Who are your customers? If you can’t define your customers in detail, then there’s a lot of research to do on your target audience. Before you can create a brand or any type of branding, you need to know who your business has been made for.

Your customers are probably the most important element to your company after all because they’re making you money. You could be putting in all this effort towards your brand and the result could be that you don’t get any result from it because your target audience isn’t actually seeing it.

There is so much to learn about your target audience from their likes and dislikes, the demographic of where they’re from, how old they are, etc. It’s worth understanding the customer preference definition and how that relates to your own business. Once you know who they are and have a detailed awareness of what they want, then you’re going to have more success of your brand hitting the nail right on its head.

There are lots of platforms where you can pull data about your audience, whether it be your social media channels or your website. Take advantage of it where you are able to - it’s mostly free.

Try Not To Copy Your Competitors

As much as it can be tempting to copy your competitors, it’s something you should avoid. After all, you may be similar in what you sell and provide but you’re likely going to be different in so many other areas.

photo-1573497019414-e44d0759d00eThe problem of copying an advertising style or a type of brand design or logo is that it’s not going to be as successful in its delivery to your customers. By using a competitor’s brand strategy, the first thing it creates is confusion.

Confusion isn’t good when you’re trying to assert yourself as a unique brand. Copying is going to create confusion but it’s also going to get you mixed up with that other competitor, which could lose you sales.

There’s also the issue of brand dilution and that you’re essentially tarnishing the name of your business and effectively losing its identity at the same time. The most damaging is the decreased market share. Not only will you miss out on customers, but your competition will too.

So as much as it’s tempting to copy, try to stay unique and do your own thing when it comes to creating your brand.

Think About Your Business’s Core Values

When you’re validating startup idea and building those foundations for your business, it’s all about the core values you have as a company. Everything that you end up doing beyond it, who you work with, and what you deliver should all carry those same core values throughout.

What these values are, will be something that’s different for all businesses but it’s critical that you don’t lose them when you’re trying to make the brand. Those values need to carry over into your brand with every piece of advertising material you make. It should continue through to how you treat customers and clients.

startup-photos (8When implementing this into the brand, think about how you want to come across. It could be the tone of your business, the look, and feel of your website, etc. As you build your brand, you might find that you get feedback that you can utilize to better define your brand’s message and vision.

It’s all about the detail and making sure that everything you do as a business has these core values in mind. Remember that a brand can grow and change just like the business itself, but those core values will tend to stay the same.

The business you create, you build on those values so try to avoid doing anything to change that. Otherwise, if you do, you may end up creating a brand that doesn’t represent who your business is or was. These values might be a handful or just one or two, it’s up to you to define them.

The Feelings You Want To Portray

Feelings are a very influential element in how successful your brand can be. What feelings do you want to invoke in the customer? The reason for your business could be to sell a line of shapewear, for example. With that in mind, you probably want to help create a desire for confidence in the customer or sexiness, perhaps? 

Take a look at your product or service and focus on the emotions and feelings. We tend to lead a lot with our emotions when it comes to buying. This also brings it back to understanding your target audience and who they are. 

Once you’re aware of the feelings you’re trying to invoke, you can then adapt this to any branding you create for the business. Again, taking the shapewear idea as an example, the tagline ‘Feel confident and sexy in this shapewear’ is better than just advertising it with a description of the clothing. 

photo-1556565681-306458ef93cd.jYou may go even further with it and if your target audience is older females as opposed to younger ones, you may word it as ‘Regain your confidence and sex appeal with this shapewear’. The more information and data you have, the more you can use feelings to your advantage.

Again, it all comes back to your business though, and what you want your customers to feel when they see your product or service that’s offered. Make it believable because customers will see through the fake very quickly and easily.

Refer Back To What Your Business Aims To Achieve

To make your brand about your business, it’s important to refer back to what your business aims to achieve. What is that you set out to do in the first place? It’s not just about the message of your business but the objectives and goals you have.

When you created a business plan, the business goals were likely included. Every piece of branding or marketing material you create should be striving towards a business goal. It doesn’t have to complete that goal but it should work towards it.

Before you hit go on anything related to your brand, think back on your business. Does it align with what you’ve set out to achieve or will it do nothing? Could it instead backfire and do the opposite? 

Questioning decisions as a business is essential because there have been many examples where companies, through branding, have done damage to themselves. 

You are building a business just like you are building a brand and so you should be adding to it, not taking it away. At the same time, you don’t want to be plateauing. There’s a balance that’s needed and a constant awareness of every decision being an influential one to the brand and business’s success as a whole. 

It’s important to see the bigger picture, not just what’s right in front of you.

Bringing Brand & Business Together

What’s very much clear is that your brand and business should form as one entity. Your business strategy needs branding and your brand relies on a business strategy. One will struggle to gain as much success without the other. Be sure to remember this when it comes to building your own brand as a business.

 

 

 


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Published on: 25th November 2020

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