Partner Article

7 Points You Must Tick When Launching a Brand

Regardless of size and stature, branding is one of the most critical parts of your business; and one that is perhaps the most undervalued, and isn’t implemented to its full extent. However, a comprehensive and unified brand strategy will underpin direction, giving you a competitive edge.

To be blunt, no one really cares what your offerings are, it’s highly unlikely that they are truly unique, you are among a long list of companies that will come back on an internet search - It’s your identity, your values and your promise that will communicate why you matter.

Ideally, creating customers isn’t the end goal. You should envisage creating brand ambassadors who are loyal fans because they trust and believe what you are about, who perceive you in the way in which you intended.

Define Your Brand

Not only should this be one of the first steps that you take, it will be one of the most complex tasks that you will face when starting out, you need to admit yourself that you can’t be all things to all people (and neither should you want to be.) During this phase you should bring clarity to your purpose and mission; identifying your USP, your skills, your client’s desires and needs and what success looks like at defined milestone markers. Thinking around the areas of where you can deliver your product or service, how would you categorize it, what style of service are you offering?

Keep in mind that while clarity is necessary, being too restrictive in your niche will close doors to future opportunities – balance is key. Unless being exclusive is your USP, in that case, crack on.

Develop a Mission Statement

Now you have defined your brand, cement your findings by creating a clear written mission statement. A mission statement serves to direct and realignment your daily activities to ensure a unified purpose is the driving force. It helps in the decision making process, sends a strong brand message to both employees and clients.

FYI – Keep it short and to the point, it shouldn’t be a press release and neither should it be generic. The mission statement should be lived and breathed by everyone within a business, and if it isn’t? That should set alarm bells ringing; something, somewhere is unravelling.

Understand the Value of a Logo

A true visual representation, your logo should be the very foundation of your brand, the subconscious interpretation of a logo is often overlooked and undervalued. Some of the iconic brands that we know and love today have been incredibly strategic in choosing the colour, shape and font used in their logo; if you looked closely you would begin the see the similarities of logos in particular sectors.

Designer and Digital Illustrator, Lee Mason explains further - “There are obvious correlations between sectors and brand decisions. A company specialising in ethically sourced products won’t be using bright reds and yellows on their packaging, perhaps more likely to use recycled paper and earthly tones, whereas a company selling budget products to people with lower incomes who perhaps aren’t as interested in where the ingredients are sourced might specifically go for red (it evokes sale, budget, tabloid) when developing their brand. If you were selling colouring books, you’d use bright colours in your logo (making sure it still works in mono ideally), but if you’re branding a high end restaurant, the last thing you’d want to use is primary colours, probably opting for a classic black icon and a traditional font.”

Colour and shape can evoke a range of emotions and have an enormous impact on the way in which we perceive a brand, it’s worth delving into the psychology behind this process before making any final decisions.

Brand Everything

Everything within your business should interconnect through branding, building brand equity. Forget the current debate raging on of digital vs traditional, it is in your best interest to be wherever your customers need you to be.

Beyond being a visual entity, everything you touch should reflect your brand; the language you use, how you answer calls, uniforms, any physical space and virtual space you occupy, social media channels along with any traditional printed items you possess.

Everything you are associated with needs to have a unified approach to the message it is conveying.

Know Your Audience

If the idea for your offering was born out of a gap in the market or a desire to improve an existing service or product then chances are you have an idea of who your audience will be. But knowing who they are is not the same as knowing about them.

The nature of your business should dictate the way in which you can carry out your market research; retailers with a physical location would be able to keep a record of the demographics and work from past purchase data, allowing you to tailor your offering. In the digital realm, undertaking audience insight studies on competitors or creating profiles of WHO you think your audience are then use that to find out more about them. For example, Mail Chimp defined who they think uses their product using audience personas, and from these they can learn more about people in these positions using social media audience insights.

Paul Matthews at Auburn Hill gives us his experience, “We focus on our target audience which is those with a considered approach and appreciation of intrinsic detail and quality in their build. It’s important that we target the right people with our marketing efforts to ensure we don’t waste money. To do this we study the intent around certain searched keywords, and track the actions of users who click through from these search terms - do they go on to download a brochure and become a customer? If so, those keywords are the ones we focus on to target our search marketing efforts.”

Implement Audience Insight Tools

Web analytics are good (although shockingly 11% of businesses don’t even use them!) but they don’t give you the whole picture. This is where audience insights from social media comes in – whether you care to admit or not, Facebook knows almost everything about you.

Using these insight tools allows you to drill down and gather authentic data on your audience and their behaviours. Demographics such as gender, marital status and income are just the tip of the tiny iceberg at your fingertips; purchasing activity along with the pages that they are liking and the level of brand affinity they demonstrate allows you to tap into their mind-set and the brands that they engage with the most.

Across the pond, Facebook kindly went one step further and bought data from banks, store cards and credit cards, mapping it against user’s profiles. This meant that businesses could then extract this data and use it to create new campaigns, or even new offerings entirely.

Display Integrity to Your Brand

I can’t tell you how many businesses I have come across that adopt a ‘say yes now and we will figure how to do it later’ approach. This is beyond ridiculous; I’m sure many old school sales types would disagree with that statement, but in my eyes it is nothing short of firefighting. Over promising leads to under delivering, so even in the early days when acquisition is a major priority - I would advise that you stay true to your brand, know what you are capable of delivering and deliver it well.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rebecca Moore .