When you’re growing a small business, much of your attention is likely to be focused on maximizing sales, developing partnerships, and day-to-day logistics. With all of these important duties, it can be easy to forget about consumer perspectives, but if you want to appeal to high-yield customers and maximize your potential, you’ll need to sharpen your business branding to a fine point.
What Is Branding?
Branding is an abstract term and, as such, can be difficult to quantify or put into simplistic language, but, broadly speaking, we think of branding as the identifiable attributes of a company (whether names, terms, designs, symbols), distinct from other sellers. How do people feel when they see your logo? Why do they buy from your company and not others? In a nutshell, your brand is your identity as it appears to external parties.
Shaping a Brand
For many businesses, branding is simply a manifestation of the values shared by those within the company. For smart businesses, branding is a mirror to the customers they hope to endear themselves. Here are a few points to think about before you get started.
● Target market: Before you can even think about how to style your values, visuals, and voice, you need to identify your most high-potential demographic. What are your potential customers’ characteristics, how can you reach them, and why should they buy from you? By answering these questions, you can begin to form a cohesive customer profile and streamline your efforts.
● Company goals: Your branding should closely align with your wider business objectives or OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). If you are able to succinctly outline your long-term goals as a company, this will help you to position your brand externally.
● Company expertise: Appealing to a demographic of people who you know nothing about and share nothing in common with is a recipe for failure. It’s important, therefore, to evaluate what your strengths and expertise are – if you find you’re lacking in specific areas of knowledge, you may even consider looking at the options for further education. Degree subjects like business communications, marketing, or management can all help your business to thrive.
Getting Started
Company branding affects and is informed by all ventricles of a company, from management to HR, and so it’s important to embody your branding and ensure that everyone in your team
understands it too.
Values:
Start by asking, what does your company believe in? Outlining your core values will transform the approach of your team and, in turn, affect the way your customers perceive your brand.
Visuals:
Your values should also affect the way your company looks – for example, if your brand is centered around diversity, it may end up looking colorful. Now’s a good time to establish good design practices, such as sending and receiving images in PDF format – a PDF editor tool can help with this, allowing you to add text, sticky notes, highlights, and suggest changes.
Voice:
Your brand values should also be conveyed through your messaging (or voice). This includes your outward-facing communications via email, web copy, social media, and more. Think about how you want your company to talk and try to establish a lexicon that you feel represents it best.
This short introduction is designed to help you get started on what is likely to be a long and challenging journey toward shaping your brand. Whether you’re building customer profiles, educating yourself on marketing, identifying company values, or just designing a new logo, try to think about how your decision can affect external perceptions.
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