Building Your Brand: Three Little Things That Make a Big Difference

Building Your Brand: Three Little Things That Make a Big Difference

Branding is essential for any business, large or small. A lot has to go into the branding process, and the frustrating fact is that many businesses get it wrong. They either don’t think about it carefully enough, or they don’t spend enough time on it. Branding is difficult, which is why so many businesses hire a professional agency to help them out.

But while branding as a whole involves a large number of factors, there are a few things that will make a big difference. Three things, to be precise.

Here’s a closer look at how the following three factors are the foundation of successful branding for your business.

1. Understand Your Customer

First of all, before you do anything, you need to have a deep understanding of your customer.

You may think you know who your target customer is already. For example, you may have a good idea about their gender and their age. But you need to go deeper and create a detailed target persona.

• What is your customer like as a person?
• What do they like and dislike?
• What are their hopes and fears?
• What keeps them up at night?
• What do they want more than anything else?

These are the sorts of questions you need to be asking to define your target persona. It takes time to come up with an accurate persona, but once you have one you can use it to define your branding so that it speaks to the right people directly.

Keep in mind that your customers need to see themselves in your brand, and they need to feel that you are creating these products for them. A detailed persona will help with this.

2. Stand Out from the Rest

The next thing that goes into a successful brand is the need to make your brand stand out from your competitors, and you therefore need to differentiate your brand.

What makes you unique? Why should customers choose you over your competitors? These are the difficult questions you need to answer, and you really need to get down to the details.

Are you the cheapest, the fastest, the friendliest? What do you do better than the rest? The answer should define every single element of what you do and how you do it.

The ideal scenario is for customers to think of you when they want something specific, and this happens when you have got your branding right.

If you have not yet done so, come up with a unique feature of your business that makes you special. It could be anything, but you need something that makes you stand out. Then play it up and use it everywhere you can.

Once you have decided what makes you different, you can build it into every element of your branding including your logo, your image, your content, and more.

If you hire a professional advertising agency to create your ads, this differentiator will play a key role. It will lead the direction of the ads as well as all of your marketing materials, so its importance cannot be overemphasized.

3. Know Your Purpose

You need to know your specific purpose in order to get your branding right. You can promise many things, but it is your brand’s purpose that’s really essential.

You want your potential customers to instantly know how your brand will make their lives better. So decide on your brand’s purpose, its reason for being.

You may promise a fast service. But how does this improve the lives of your customers? Does it give them more time to spend on other things? Then that’s your purpose.

Rather than just being the cheapest, think about the purpose of being cheap. For example, this would allow customers to save money to enjoy spending on other things.

Find out the overall benefit, and use it to direct your branding.

Build an Effective Brand

Getting your branding right is essential for the success of your business. While good branding won’t guarantee success, it will certainly go a long way towards helping your business to grow, and it will give you direction for everything from your marketing activities to the people you hire.

Make sure you focus on these three factors when defining your brand because they will become the foundation for every element of your branding. There are many other factors involved, but these three factors will determine many of your other decisions surrounding your branding, and will ultimately help you to enjoy more success.

Stephan Reed is a digital marketing partner for Fechtor Advertising, an advertising and branding agency in Columbus, Ohio.