Crafting your own brand is vital for creating a unique identity of your growing business, as it will differentiate you from the competition. Branding goes far beyond creating an unforgettable logo and a catchy tagline, it is the way you define your business to yourself, your employees and your target audience.

To put it briefly, branding affects the way people perceive your company. It’s a result of all your efforts to create a certain image of your company, and although it’s intangible, its impact is massive. Needless to say, branding contributes to the overall visibility of your company on the internet and instills credibility and loyalty in your audience. 

Target your audience

Before you even begin crafting your brand, you have to get to know your target customers and understand them so that your brand identity will reflect both the core values of your business and the values of your potential customers.

 The first step to take is defining your buyer personas. Stats say that 93% of companies which outpace their goals segment their prospect database by persona.

You can start with determining demographics, such as gender, location, age, education, and income.  Also, you should look into your target customers lifestyle choices, such as their hobbies and habits, and find out what their hopes and dreams are, as well as their challenges. 

If you’re focusing your brand on Australian city youth as your target customers, you can’t speak the language of a middle-aged woman from the outback, or follow her preferred aesthetics. 

Define your brand

After you’ve determined who your target customers are, you can create your brand persona as well, and attribute it a set of human characteristics to which they can relate. This will help you communicate your brand message effectively using the language your prospects can feel and understand, and make it resonate with them. 

Properly defining your brand can be challenging, as you need to find answers to some crucial questions, such as:

• What is the mission of my business?
• What are the benefits and features of products/services my company offers?
• How do prospects see my business?
• What qualities do I want them to associate with my business?

To put it very simply, your brand is a unique and superb experience you promise to deliver to your customers. 

It is derived from who you are and tells your prospects what to expect in every aspect of your relationship, starting with your logo design and your tagline, to the tone of your social media posts, your customer service, your very products, and your packaging. 

It can really sound superficial but visuals and aesthetics do play an important role in defining your brand, as the first impressions are 94% design related, so pay special attention to your logo and the overall design of your advertising campaigns.

As defining your brand and making it coherent and consistent can be detrimental for the success of your growing business if not carried out and implemented properly, more often than not you will need the help of well-versed professionals. Given that there are many options to choose from, it’s essential to do your research and find people who can help you, like reputable branding agency, to define or reshape your brand.

Use social media

Being a significant part of our everyday lives, social media platforms have become an important resource for various brand awareness and brand visibility campaigns. When social media is done correctly, it can help you form a meaningful bond with your prospects, and build a network of loyal fans who want to do business with you.

That’s when the valuable content you share on social media channels comes to spotlight. While being coherent with your brand’s identity, your content needs to be customer-centric, meaning relevant and useful, in order to boost your prospects’ engagement and thus the efficiency of your branding campaigns. For your branding campaign to be a social media success, you will also need to:

• Use social media your prospects have profiles on,
• Post regularly and consistently
• Post visuals, such as infographics, videos, and photos
• Use social listening tools to respond timely on everything related to your brand,
• Connect with influencers and win them over to help you promote your brand.

Useful tools that will help

There are various tools which can come in handy when monitoring and dealing with your brand’s online presence. These tools can help you with your SEO efforts and improve Google search results, as well as take care of your reputation. 

You can use social media listening tools to be notified whenever your brand, service or products is mentioned, so that you respond right away, no matter if it is a positive review or a complaint.

 Customer satisfaction is an important part of your brand’s strategy, and a negative review or complaint can cause serious damage to your brand in an hour, so being able to address the timing is crucial.

Consistency is the key

The key of all your brand efforts should be its consistency. 

You want your brand – the tone and aesthetics of your messages – to be easily recognized by your prospects, so you need to make them know you on a more personal level, and build their trust.

The only way for you to do that is by providing your prospects unified experience through each and every channel you use so that your behavioral pattern is kind of predictable. It is kind of like that feeling you get whenever you’ve entered a Nike store or a McDonald’s restaurant – you will get what you expect, whether you like it or not.

Final Thoughts

To grow your brand successfully, you have to know your customers and get them to know you so that you can build trust and loyalty. If you want your brand building strategy to be efficient, all your marketing efforts should be based on your brands’ identity and focused on engaging your prospects in a long-term relationship rather than settle for a huge but unresponsive following on your social media channels.