One of the most essential elements of your business’s success is your ability to brand it effectively. However, what this means often goes misunderstood. Some people think the role of branding is a good business name or a sound logo alone.
While that is important, it is far from the only aspect of the brand that matters. Here, I’ll examine what indeed constitutes a strong brand, how to develop it, and why it’s so crucial in the first place.
Table of Contents
Establishing Your Brand Identity
Having a good idea of your brand is vital for any marketing attempt. Without a clear idea of your business, who it is for, and the elements that represent it, how do you know what kind of message to send to your potential customers?
Take the time to work out the aspects of your business that you want to make crystal clear and the visual elements that help make that impression in the minds of your market. This is where you work out your logo, the color scheme associated with your brand, the typography, and the imagery that you use to represent it.
Writing Your Brand Story
As mentioned, the role of branding involves a lot more than just visuals. Every visual aspect of your brand should have its roots in the brand story you are trying to tell.
As the name implies, the brand story is the narrative tied to your brand. It gives meaning to the business and context to how you are supposed to fit into the lives of your customers and clients.
Your brand story can be based on the origin of the business, if it was motivated by the desire to bring certain products and services to the market, or it can be based on the customer’s needs and the solutions you provide them, for instance.
Defining Your Brand Values
The values you operate by should be at the root of your brand story. Core values shape your brand’s publicly stated purpose and should guide the decisions you make when running your business.
If your core brand value is professionalism, customers will expect courtesy, trust, and discretion. If you position sustainability as a brand value, customers are more likely to accept that you use green manufacturing and operational methods.
Establishing your values helps your customers see that you align with their priorities. Of course, you then have to ensure that your business follows those values.
Failing to do so will cause irreparable damage to any relationship you manage to build with your market.
The Role of Branding in Marketing: Keeping It Consistent
In keeping with the point of having to live up to your brand’s values, you must ensure consistency in how you represent it across the board. This means ensuring that no official or public communications, including those on social media, contradict your brand story.
It also means ensuring that any marketing teams you work with follow your house style. For instance, you can create a brand bible that contains all the information that marketing and design professionals need to adapt to your existing brand, including the colors and imagery to use and even which words to emphasize in written content.
Developing Your Unique Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition is often a part of the brand story and sets your business apart from your competitors. It is one of the core assets you use to get the attention of your customer base.
It is particularly what your brand offers, what product, advantage, or focus others in the market do not already provide.
It can be a brand-new product or service, an emphasis on working to the needs of a specific market, or even a certain degree of experience or expertise that others in your market do not offer. A clear, unique value proposition helps your customers remember you amongst a sea of competitors and makes them more likely to select you.
Enhancing Your Customer Experience
You need to think about how customers experience your brand. In particular, you should consider the various touchpoints they might have with you and how you can create the best experience in each of them. This might be through your website, social media, an app, in person, remain, or otherwise.
Consider how to keep the customer experience seamless and positive, no matter how they contact you. For instance, if they try to call your business on the phone, can you get them talking to a real person quickly, or do you have to keep them on hold for ten or more minutes?
The latter will lend to a worse customer experience, so it’s worth addressing as it’s part of the role of branding.
Leveraging Your Digital Presence In The Role of Branding Online
Nowadays, the vast majority of marketing is done online. While TV and radio ads, posters, and billboards can still be essential to your marketing strategy, few marketing tools offer as much control over your brand message as a well-designed website.
Work with a custom web design team to ensure that you’re able to create the best possible representation for your brand, not just from an aesthetic perspective but also in your layout, navigation, and content. Your social media profiles can also be essential to your digital brand, as they are how you directly communicate with your most loyal and engaged followers.
Finding Your Brand Ambassadors
A good brand should be able to make its impression and explain itself. However, where that isn’t easy, or in markets where consistent contact is more likely to lead to further conversions, having some brand ambassadors can be invaluable.
For instance, brand ambassadors can be some of your most experienced and effective sales and marketing team members. However, they can also be satisfied customers, who can be encouraged to spread positive word of mouth about the brand.
Many businesses also work with influencers who can help connect the business’s brand to an existing customer base, using an already established trust to help land your products and services with a more receptive crowd.
The Role of Branding In Strengthening Emotional Connections
A brand is not just a means of stating the objective advantages your business, products, and services offer. It works best when it can build off an established emotional connection.
This can mean ensuring that your marketing and messaging focus on how customers feel and how your offerings can improve their feelings, as well as the sentimental ties that your customers can develop towards your products. Speak to their needs, fears, and wants and how your brand can help them fulfill these.
To foster this emotional connection, build a community of like-minded customers through social media and include personalized touches, like “thank you” notes with deliveries.
Writing Good Content
Another part of your digital presence that deserves a closer eye is how your business uses content. A good content marketing strategy not only helps you deliver helpful and informative webpages that make your audience more likely to engage with your brand and spend more time on your website.
Content also works to establish your brand. In particular, it helps showcase your business’s expertise and insight. If people see that you know what you’re talking about through the informative content you write, they’re also more likely to believe that you can provide that same insight through the products and services you offer.
Writing content also helps you develop a voice for your brand that fosters that emotional connection with your audience.
Role of Branding: Maintaining Your Brand Reputation
Sometimes, elements outside of your control can affect how people see your brand. This could be due to mistakes you have made that damage that reputation or a disgruntled party (be it a customer, employee, or rival) taking action to damage your public image.
It works best to take a non-combative stance, such as apologizing for past mistakes or addressing customer complaints with a helpful and conciliatory approach.
However, when it comes to damaging reviews and false content that could cause significant reputational damage, doing what you can to have it removed or corrected could be substantial. Don’t let others write the story of your brand.
Your brand is your business. It is the perception of it in the eyes of the customers and the wider public. If you don’t work to shape the role of branding for your business, you can have a hard time using it to connect with the market you’re trying to win over.