Home Business & Management Brand Building: Guide to long term success

Brand Building: Guide to long term success[Updated 2020]

Before going into the mechanics of how to brand building. Lets first understand what is branding. Very simply put, branding is anything and everything that you do to establish a connection between your desired entity(yourself or your company) and target audience.
When it comes to doing branding for their company, most people think choosing a name and designing a logo is enough to build a brand, but that’s not actually true. There is more to it than just a name and logo. And, in this article, we shall dive deep into how long remembered brands are actually created.

what is Brand

What’s here for me?

  1. Basics of building a lovable brand
  2. Build a Customer Persona
  3. Don’t overestimate your customer base
  4. Do competitor analysis
  5. Find your why?
  6. Make your brand visible
  7. Examples of some great brands
  8. FAQs

Basics of building a lovable brand

Try to look at it and see that not just companies but people like you and me also have brands. We have a name, style, a particular way of walking and communicating, impressions that we make on different people. All these factors create a certain image of us in other people’s minds.

Similarly, businesses use various factors to position themselves in the minds of people like name, logo, tag line, colors, fonts, voice, etc.

Based on these people perceive your brand so it is advisable to spend a lot of time in choosing these because you don’t want to keep redoing them time and again.

It confuses your audience and makes a wrong impact on them, which is the last thing you want. Going forward we will look at the various aspects we mentioned over here.

Build a Customer Persona

What I mean by this is, ones you have decided to sell a certain product or service you should clearly know who is your customer. Who are the people to reach out to for maximum conversion. You should know everything about them.

Describe your customer using these:

  • Age Group
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Education level
  • Income
  • Aspirations
  • Pain Points
  • Likes & Dislikes
  • Social media they prefer
  • Type of content they consume
  • And whatever else you can get hold of

This one task if you do with full dedication. Giving all the time and resource it would need to go into the depth of it will help you immensely in the long run.

Based on these points you will be able to position your brand so that it resonates with the right kind of audience.

It will also help you save a ton of time and resources while brand-building especially marketing. You would exactly know who should see your ads, who should be part of your email list, etc. resulting in more people buying from you.

Don’t overestimate your customer base

Just a caution note before moving on to the next part. Generally what I have seen is business owners tend to overestimate their size of audience and waste resources on targeting that large group.

It is still fine to do such a thing if you are a big brand or have a lot of resources but for someone who is just starting out and have limited resources, having a higher number of conversions is a very important factor for their business to thrive and thus you should be practical and actually look at the niche market where you can get the maximum conversions.

For example, if you sell shoes, everyone who has a pair of legs is not your customer. You have to ask these questions like:

  1. Which gender prefers the type of shoe you sell?
  2. What age group is likely to get attracted to those shoes?
  3. Which income group of society can actually afford it?
  4. Are those shoes specifically used for some sports or occasion?

And many such questions have to be answered for making a customer persona of your product.

Customer Loyalty

Do competitor analysis

Ones you know your product and your customers, its time to look into other brands that operate in the same niche as you. Look at all the brands that are at your level and one and two brands that are at the top in your niche. Preferably position your brand differently from them.

Analyse all the strategies that all those brands are applying, like quality, price, packaging, marketing, presence on different platforms.

After doing all this you will get to know, why are the top brands so successful. What things are done right and wrong by the brands at your level.

This will give you a fair idea of what things you should prioritise currently to get the best output out of your efforts.

Find your why?

Do some introspection and answer this simple question.

Why this niche to do business in?
What problem do you wish to solve?
What are you passionate about in this business?

Answer to these questions will be the basis of what personality your brand takes up.

Based on this you must think of a tagline for your brand. A tagline should be short, crisp, easy to remember, and should most importantly define your brand personality.

Another important aspect of your brand building would be a logo. A logo is among the first things people notice about your brand and it is placed on all the branding materials like website, social media, your packaging, business card and what not.
Thus it should obviously be done right.

You can do it yourself or hire a professional but a logo should essentially communicate your brand personality And it should be such that it looks good in any size, from a tiny little square box of social media display picture to big banners.

Other important things like packaging, color, fonts, the voice you use for your brand, messages that you put out through your brand, tone of language used i.e professional, candid, etc. on your social media interactions and posts which are meant for customer engagement.

All of them should be focused on your mission with this brand. 

While doing all this you should be consistent with the subtle things like the tonality of language, colors, fonts, etc. They have a subconscious effect on the consumer. It helps gain trust in your brand.

build a strong brand

Make your brand visible

All this and more we discussed above will collectively help you to build a brand but to stay relevant and constantly remembered by the customers you have to use a multi-channel approach.
If we specifically talk about digital marketing. You should be present on all the social media they spend most of their time on and also be at the top of search engine results in your niche.

For this, you have to learn digital marketing and be a bit creative for making the social media posts or at least hire a professional to do this for your brand. Some of the effective digital marketing activities are:

  • SEO and content marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Smooth user experience on website and app
  • PPC(Paid advertisment)

Examples of some great brands

Looking at the old brands and dissecting what they did right to become such big names are a great source of learning, and so lets talk about few such brands:

apple logo

When I think about the top branding examples, the first name that comes to my mind is Apple. Apple essentially a tech company. They have effectively differentiated themselves from other tech companies on the basis of top-notch design, best in class user experience, and innovation.

And they market their products in such a way that a user of their products feels the same quality in themselves. If you are an Apple user, you much be creative, innovative, and imaginative.

Coca-Cola - a famous brand

Another veteran in branding would be Coca-cola. At one time they were the second most recognizable product in the world. Such strong was their branding game! And it still continues to be.

Though its just carbonated-sugar water but it had always portrayed itself as a promise of happiness and sharing. Every ad of coca-cola goes viral because of the creativity in them or the personalities they employ in their ads.

After learning how to build a successful brand you may want to look at how to make business strategy? And with this, I will take a leave and wish you a happy brand building journey!

brand building guide infographic

FAQs

How events help in brand building?

An event or even a meeting adds a personal touch between your brand and audience. Which indirectly helps in increasing brand value, net profit and customer retention.

What is Brand Positioning?

Simply put, brand positing is the kind of image that your audience have regarding your brand. What impression does your audience have of you.

How to measure brand awareness?

You can measure your brand awareness via these following ways:
1. Social Listening: How much talks are happening around your brand and are they in your favor or against. There are tools available to do this.
2. Website & Social traffic: Check your website and social page’s traffic.
3. Check search volume data of keywords related to your brand.
4. Make public surveys.

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