If you’re a business owner looking for ways to stand out from the crowd and gain an edge in the competitive market, you’re in the right place.
With 582 million entrepreneurs worldwide, building a strong branding is one of the best actions you can take to reach success.
However, to leverage the power of branding, you must go beyond choosing a color palette and font combination.
In this article, you will learn what the power of branding is and how to build it for your business. Read on to find out more.
What Is Branding in Business?
According to branding expert Marty Neumeier, branding in business is the process of promoting oneself to build a brand image.
Although the way people perceive you is out of your control, branding can help shape it through tangible and intangible elements. This includes your brand logo, color choices, typography, value, tone of voice, and all the way to your brand message.
If you want to build a strong brand, make sure to maintain a consistent look and feel across all channels to build familiarity.
Why Branding Is Important
Branding is key to standing out in a competitive market. It helps to make you more:
- Memorable
- Recognizable
- Credible
- Preferable
- Valuable
- Influential
With such advantages, branding can become a great marketing strategy that will help to reach success.
How to Build a Strong Branding for Your Business
Contrary to popular belief, building a strong branding is more than taking care of the visual elements of a brand. Instead, it’s about understanding your audience and building an emotional connection with them.
1. Understand Your Audience
When building a strong brand for your business, understanding your audience goes beyond identifying their demographics, like age, gender, education, income, and location.
Instead, pay attention to their psychographics as well. This includes information such as activities and interests, values, sources of entertainment and news, all the way to their preferred social platforms.
If you’re unsure about how to start collecting this information, consider market research services from sites like Survey Monkey or Qualtrics.
If you’re on a budget, Facebook groups and review sites are great sources to get this information. Consider looking at customers’ conversations, comments, and reviews.
Based on that, you can create a map of their emotional journey, which refers to how potential customers feel before and after finding your product or service.
The before state typically stems from emotions with negative connotations, like frustrations, insecurities, or fear.
From there, consider how your brand can offer positive emotions like joy, confidence, or relief to aid their problems.
When you understand the audience’s challenges and desires, you can develop a strong brand that’s designed to evoke that specific emotion.
Nike is a great example of selling a positive emotional outcome. It evokes a sense of prestige and confidence after buying its product.
The brand successfully does so through its power of branding – be it the tagline, ads, or ambassador selections.
2. Choose Your Brand Personality to Increase the Power of Branding
Brand personality refers to the human characteristics or traits that represent your brand.
For example, if Harley Davidson were a person, it would be a wealthy and muscular man. Victoria’s Secret, on the other hand, would be a high-class and attractive woman.
Those distinctive characteristics cater to specific groups of people, which are the brand’s target audience.
From what you know about your potential customers, identify their main desire and develop a brand with that emotion at the core.
Consider thinking about the characteristics that will help you achieve that personality, including your brand’s tone of voice, word choice, attitudes, and beliefs.
To help you find that, try answering the following questions:
- Where do you bring the most value to your audience?
- What is important to you in the way you do business?
- What do you love and why?
- What do you dislike and why?
This level of detail will help shape your brand personality to look, feel, and sound like a real person who resonates and connects with the audience.
3. Create Your Brand Identity
Brand identity is the visual representation of your brand personality. It refers to elements such as color choice, typography, and other design elements.
These elements play a big role in shaping how people view your brand. It also affects whether your brand communicates the right message to your audience.
Different colors embody specific meanings and emotions. Red would be the best color choice if you aim to convey excitement and energy. Meanwhile, blue is a universally appealing color that helps brands appear stable and trustworthy.
The same goes for your brand’s font choice. Each typeface carries particular characteristics and emotions based on its style.
Serif fonts like Alegreya and Playfair Display convey a sense of professionalism and elegance. Meanwhile, sans serif typefaces like Roboto and Lato carry a more sleek and modern feel to brands.
Your choice of shapes and forms used throughout the page also plays an important role in your brand identity.
Round shapes like circles and ellipses have a warm and fuzzy feeling. So the audience feels a sense of community, unity, and love. The rounded edges can also be viewed as feminine.
On the other hand, straight-edged shapes like rectangles, squares, and triangles often convey a sense of strength and efficiency – creating a feeling of stability and trustworthiness.
Once you’ve figured out the foundation of your visual identity, feel free to combine them and design your logo, website interface, product packaging, and materials to use in your marketing strategy.
4. Highlight Your Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is the strategy to create a brand that holds a particular place in customers’ minds.
In practice, it is when you occupy a customer’s mind with a particular keyword. For example, if you hear the word “luxury car,” the brand you think about holds that particular position in your mind – and that is what brand positioning is.
That said, brand positioning happens in your audience’s mind based on their demographics, psychographics, frame of reference, and field of experience.
Therefore, it’s critical to build a consistent brand personality and identity to influence how the audience perceives and remembers your brand.
To be top-of-mind for the position you’re aiming for, consider what makes you more valuable than competitors.
You can start by focusing on providing excellent customer service, as 96% of customers say it affects their loyalty to a brand.
To further guide you in highlighting your brand positioning, try answering the following questions:
- Who are you trying to help?
- What are their challenges?
- What do you help achieve or experience?
- Who are you competing against?
- What solutions do you offer?
5. Apply Your Branding
The last step to building a strong brand for your business is to apply all of the mentioned strategies.
With a clear blueprint for your brand strategy, content creation and communication with your audience become easy.
Be consistent and cohesive with how you portray your brand, be it across your social channels, marketing campaigns, all the way to how you handle customers.
A website is an excellent platform to convey your brand. Use emotional keywords to resonate with the audience and show your personality through the visual aspects of your site.
The copy on your About Us, Services, and Values pages are also great opportunities to showcase your personality.
Consider using images to play with your audiences’ desires on social media and add a touch of personality to each copy.
Email marketing is also great for brand building, which is a term for improving brand awareness, resulting in increased familiarity with your brand.
This marketing strategy lets you send messages to those already interested in your brand. They know who you are, and you know what they like. Thus, make sure to showcase your personality when writing messages – are you funny, inspirational, or intimate?
Other areas you can load with personality include blog posts, packaging design, forms, checkout pages, customer service calls, and loyalty programs.
Identify what your business needs and make sure to apply consistent branding throughout all channels to build familiarity and improve your brand positioning.
Conclusion
Building the power of branding is critical for your business. It separates you from competitors, connects you with your audience, and leads to long-term success.
However, crafting a blueprint for your branding can take some time. So make sure you’re prepared and willing to put in the time for research.
Here’s a recap on how to build a successful power of branding:
- Understand your audience’s emotional journey, challenges, and desires.
- Choose your brand personality to evoke certain emotions and communicate them through your tone of voice and word choice.
- Create a brand identity that represents your brand personality. Show it through visual elements such as colors, typography, shapes, and forms.
- Highlight your brand positioning and let the audience know what you want to be known for.
- Apply your branding by remaining cohesive and consistent across all channels.
Best of luck!
