Branding is a huge part of the market strategy for any business. Increasingly, people shop with brands that speak to their core values. With so much choice, they can afford to. As such, your brand needs to be strong and clear to stand out amongst the others in your market. This is often a mammoth task, and one with no clear right and wrong solutions.
We’ve formulated some tips to help you understand what to look out for when creating your brand. Although this is not an extensive list, it should give you some ideas of how to better brand your business.
Tips for Branding your Business
6 – Think about how you are perceived
The key to branding is perception. You may look at your branding and see it one way, but your customer base may see it another. These differences in perception may be down to differences in you and your target market. This again goes back to research and understanding your customers wants and needs.
This is a constant process throughout the life of the brand, and does not stop with how the brand looks. People’s perception of a brand will be made up of how and where it’s presence is advertised, and what values it aligns itself with. They will also look at how it interacts with the public and the community that speaks for it. Remember, the community can speak in a positive or negative light, so engagement is important.
7 – Create a clear brand message
A lack of clarity creates chaos and confusion – a certain route to failure. If your message is unclear, people will feel frustrated or confused and stay away. This is a killer for many small businesses, especially those who attempt to be jack of all trades.
To ensure your message is clear, run your brand past people and see what emotions and feelings they get. Understanding what confuses people about your message early on will prevent people from feeling misled further down the line.
8 – Simplicity trumps complexity
We’ve all seen brands with too much going on. Even someone with no design experience can see when something has been poorly designed. Too often this is down to over complicating the brand, which leads to confusion in the brand message. Keeping things simple helps to solidify your message and keeps it clear.
Anything that requires more than a few sentences to explain will lose it’s message. Creating a complex set of shapes and patterns may be visually enticing, but will likely have an unclear message behind it. Save the complex stuff for striking, dynamic advertising later down the line.
9 – Consistency is key
To ensure that you are not sending a confusing brand message, keep things consistent. By doing so, you will come across to your customer base as knowledgeable and professional in your marketing. These are traits that are often thought about when choosing a product or service.
It is not only your physical branding that needs to be consistent. Remember that the way you and your employees interact with people is also part of your brand message. If your brand design says ‘trustworthy’ but your employees are not, you will lose customers.
10 – Review, review, review
Branding is not a ‘one and done’ exercise. It needs to be constantly reviewed to ensure it is still fit for purpose. By reviewing your brand frequently, you will notice which parts are performing and which are dead weight.
Opinions and trends are changing with increasing frequency, so it is important to understand where your brand fits. If you fail to review the brand and prune away parts that under perform, you are setting it up to become confusing or unclear.
Interested in learning more about branding? Contact us here.
