Why should your target audience buy from you or interact with any of your content when there are numerous options in your niche?
Why would anybody bother to refer their friends, families and colleagues to your product or service?
The ultimate solution to these questions is business branding.
Business branding is the clear distinction that sets you apart from the competitors in your industry. Branding is a blueprint that determines how your customer sees your business. It also helps you zero down on your customers and prospective clients.
You know the saying in the marketing world…"If you're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one."
In case you're not clear on the aspect of your business that needs branding, just know you need branding for everything. It influences your business strategy, logo, design, typography, style guide, customer & company relationship, and marketing values.
So If you're unsure about your business brand strategy, if you'd like to review your brand identity or if you're new to business branding in general.
Seat tight and read on because this all-encompassing blog post will show you:
Are you ready? Let's get into it.
We gave a vague explanation of business branding in the introduction, here's a more specific definition.
Business branding is the process of creating a consistent and remarkable perception of your business to consumers who interact with your business. Business branding reflects in every touchpoint.
The touchpoints of business include:
The generic misconception about branding is that it is mainly for corporate organisations, but this is not true, especially in this digital age where anybody can start a business from the comfort of their home.
Branding cuts across every kind of business. We'll be focusing on the major types of brands here:
Personal Branding: This is also known as individual branding. Personal branding involves service providers like freelancers, digital marketers, career coaches, motivational speakers, politicians and many more. There has to be constant communication with their audience in a way peculiar to their style.
Corporate Branding: This is a type of branding for large organisations or businesses where they ensure a unique and consistent messaging for consumers to easily recognize them anywhere.
Service Branding: This type of branding is a "customer-centric" type of branding. Service branding focuses on solving customer problems and providing an exceptional customer experience.
The key feature of a service brand is to make life easier for consumers.
Product Branding: Ever wonder why toothpaste is synonymous with "Closeup," noodles synonymous with the "Indomie," or beef roll popularly called "gala."
Product branding establishes a business providing goods for consumers as an authority in that industry, it is also known as merchandise branding.
Why should you bother about branding your small business, or even maintaining a brand identity throughout your touchpoints with customers?
Well, the simple answer to this question is because it works. Branding has been working for both large businesses, small businesses and even single business owners.
Discover the amazing benefits of branding your business:
Let's face it, as a business owner, digital marketer or sales manager, you must encounter different kinds of consumers In your business.
The customers looking for a cheap product and service but always demand beyond their budget, the calm high-paying clients that know what they want, the sassy customers and more.
Branding attracts the kind of customers you want. Getting the best designs, customer service, business culture and other branding features will attract high-paying clients.
Customer loyalty is better than several one-time purchase customers to your business, getting organic referrals and advertising from a loyal customer is one of the best things that can happen to a business.
73% of customers love a brand with exceptional customer service. Of course, you'll agree with me that customer service is one important feature of branding.
Branding increases customer loyalty more than any advertising campaign.
Most people block out pop ads or any form of advertising these days, customers raise their guard whenever they read an advertising piece, but branding makes customers familiar with your business.
The easy access to the internet has allowed everyone to start an online business from anywhere. This is good news, but it also brings fierce competition between small business owners.
Effective branding makes the consumers in your industry choose you over a sea of competitors.
Your website design, logo, colour and typography creates a good or bad impression of your business, yes people care about such details.
According to research, using a signature colour can cause an 80% increase in brand recognition by customers.
Branding influences the perception of your audience about your business.
A bad branding strategy will turn people away from your competitors, but good branding makes people trust your capacity.
One survey from Edelman, 2019 shows that 81% of consumers need to be able to trust the brand before buying from them.
Selling your product or service to a one-time customer is good, but getting returning customers is out of the world.
The branding factor that provides returning customers isn't logo designs, typography or any of those fancy stuff. You get returning customers by providing an amazing customer experience and delivering quality services.
73% of consumers mark customer experience as an ultimate factor in their purchasing experience (PWC, 2018). Your relationship with customers is a big deal, and it's also an important branding strategy.
Imagine if Coca Cola kept changing its tagline, colour or logo every year. Their customers will have a hard time recognizing their brand.
Creating a brand strategy means taking every feature of your business into account, including the tiniest details associated with your business.
Brand strategy is the first stage of branding.
See the basic branding strategy that can never go wrong for your business:
People buy your vision or purpose before considering your product or service.
You need to be clear on the purpose of why you stayed a business in the first place. Is it to solve the ache of your target audience, or to provide luxury and make people's lives better.
Your "why" should resonate with your audience's interests and not yours alone, but don't exaggerate, otherwise, you'll end up raising prospective customers' guard.
Now you're clear on the reason why your business is living and breathing in the industrial ecosystem, the next thing is to research your audience.
If you're speaking to everybody, you're speaking to no one. Your audience can't be everybody, get clear on the people in need of your business.
One easy way to research your audience is by studying your competitors, those already established businesses that have been in the game before you, who are their messages referring to? Who are the people following their social pages, commenting and sharing their posts?
Other ways to research our audience involves joining forums related to your industry, joining Facebook groups, Reddit and other community platforms.
A consumer persona is an artificial avatar modelled to fit the description of your ideal customer.
Personas consider the demographics and psychographics of your consumer. Data like consumer age, gender, occupation, interest, pain points, and social status
You'll get all this information from conducting In-depth research on your audience.
Brand positioning is the process of placing your business in a manner that sticks to the mind of your customers.
What do you want your audience to think when they hear about your business? Where should these people speak about your audience? What are your customers saying about you?
Developing a brand positioning is similar to the first stage of creating a brand strategy—find you why.
Consistency matters when it comes to branding, but how can you be consistent with your messaging if you don't have a style guide that organizes the content you share?
A brand style guide is a prescript that considers the core values of a business, target audience and objectives to determine the design, font, colour, content style and other brand features of a business.
Even though these features are created by different professionals in your business, a style guide maintains the voice and tone of your business on all touchpoints.
Using a style guide makes you consistent throughout your channels.
Building a brand strategy is an important business strategy, it determines the way your customers see your business, and it also instills trust in the minds of your customers.
Creating a brand strategy is a time-consuming task, you just might get overwhelmed with the whole process. This is why outsourcing your branding strategy to a professional agency is profitable for your business.
As a team of creatives, we help small business owners and entrepreneurs create an amazing brand strategy that makes you stand out and attract the ideal clients you've always wished for, contact us for more information.
Branding is one of the most important marketing that influences customer behaviours. Numbers don't lie.
Consumers love to identify with brands that resonate the most with them.
Have you ever bought a book just because of the attractive cover page? Wouldn't you hire a digital agency with amazing work samples, then an agency with poor designs and no samples?
Another remarkable example is the shoes you buy. When do you see a Nike shoe worth $700 or some random brand shoe worth $600, which would you prefer? You'll pick the Nike shoe even if it costs $100 more.
Branding always influences our buying decisions.
Branding is a way of creating a distinctive perception of your business in the mind of your consumers.
Our 5 basic strategies above will show you how to effectively create a branding strategy.
They involve:
A solid brand lasts for as long as possible, but you need to constantly make changes to suit the needs of your consumers and follow the trends in your industry.
What brand comes to your mind when you see the phrase "Just Do It," you remember Nike. That's an example of a good brand.
A good brand has a signature style, colour or tagline that makes It easy for its customers to identify their business.