Branding is one of those things that you really need to know how to do if you are going to run your business effectively. If you are able to approach branding in the right way, you should find that it leads to a significant improvement in the way that your business runs and the kind of likelihood your business has of being successful, so it’s something that you should definitely think about as much as you can in that sense. The truth is that branding your business can actually be easier to get right than you might think.
In this post, we are going to take you through the full guide to branding your business, so you can make sure that you have got it right and that it is going to be as effective as possible. As long as you bear the following in mind, that’s going to be much more the case.
Figure Out Your Niche
Before you start going to brand your business, you need to first figure out what your niche is going to be. There are a lot of approaches that you might be able to take towards this, and it’s the kind of thing that can be really important for almost every aspect of your business’ operation, so it’s definitely worth learning how to do it right. So how can you make sure that you have found the appropriate niche for your business?
The first thing is to make sure it’s something that you are passionate about and you really care about. If it is not, then it might be that it actually negatively affects your experience of it, and that this kind of feeling is going to impede on the branding itself. Essentially, it will come through in the branding if the passion for the niche is not really in place.
But that’s not all that matters. You also need to make sure that you are aware of how the niche is normally marketed and branded by other businesses – and this is what we are going to look at next.
Research
The research phase is all important, because you have to know as much as possible going in if you are going to get as much as possible out of it. With enough research, you should be able to come up with an appropriate branding strategy that really works, and which people are actually going to love, so that is clearly a really important thing for you to be aware of here.
As we have just seen, one of the main kinds of research that you should do is to look at what other businesses are doing in a similar niche and ask yourself what you might be able to learn from how they are marketing and branding themselves. You can learn from both their successes and their failures, and it’s important that you are going to be aware of both of these at once.
But that’s not the only kind of research you should be doing. You should also look further afield at other kinds of businesses and see whether there is anything you could learn from them too. The more you look around, in fact, the better, so that’s something that you are going to want to do. Good research is the kind of thing that can make all the difference to your steps going forward, so consider it a vital part of the branding process.
Ideation
Next up comes the ideation stage, which is where you actually start to come up with all of your ideas for your brand and how it is going to be expressed. Here your goal is to keep your wits about you and keep your options open, and allow all ideas to come to the fore and be expressed, with the goal being that there is no such thing as a bad idea. If you can approach it in this way, you should find that it helps you to come up with ideas a lot more smoothly and easily, and especially if you are putting a lot of good heads together on it.
At first, as we have intimated, you should simply allow all ideas to come to you and your team. But eventually, you are going to want to hone in and narrow it down a little, so that you can then start to figure out which ideas are going to be better for your branding. This is a creative process, meaning that you should allow it to unfold as it does without placing too many restrictions on it, but gently guiding the ideas towards a certain point. If you can do that, you are going to find that it really helps with regard to getting those ideas in place much sooner.
Once you are happy with the essential idea, it’s time to start thinking about what a brand is made of and how you are actually going to put it all into place, which means you need to know about the brand elements.
Brand Elements
So what are those brand elements that you need to be aware of? There are a few, and some of the most basic are probably also the most obvious: for instance, the logo, the brand name if you have not decided on that already, and the colors that you are going to use. These three form the absolute essentials of your brand, and they should all conform with one another in a kind of personality that you can then be happy to present to the world. That is a hugely important procedure that you need to be aware of, and the main thing is that you have to make sure you are happy with the brand elements in particular.
So get those things right and then see where you are at. You might be surprised at how complete the brand is starting to feel at this point, which is a really good sign. If not, it’s okay, it just might need a little more work. Either way, you should get it as ready as possible before you start trying to actually make use of it and put it into place.
Style Guide
Once you have those in place, you need to make sure that you are putting them down on paper in some official way, so that everyone in your business knows what they are supposed to do when it comes to branding. You have to draw up a style guide that can be followed to the letter, in all communications, marketing and everything else. This will include everything that we have just discussed: logo, colors, name, personality, as well as the voice that can be used for the brand.
Once you have this, and you have spread it and shared it to all corners of your organization, you can expect it to start being put into place properly, and that is going to mean that you’re much more likely to see your branding start to work quickly. It’s really amazing how useful a style guide can be for achieving consistency, which is one of the most important aspects to branding that you need to be aware of in all of this.
Marketing
Now you can begin the actual marketing process, where you will take your brand and start putting it out into the world. There are a lot of sides to this that you will need to be aware of, but one of the most important is to think about where you are going to proudly display your brand. In truth, the more places you plaster your branding, the better, because the goal is to get it to be visible in as many places as possible and therefore really stick in people’s minds. That is going to be a hugely important thing in general.
You might consider merchandising to help this along, and it’s amazing what you can achieve with a uv laser marking machine and some leather goods that you want to have emblazoned with your brand. You should also make sure that your branding is on all communication that your business puts out into the world, for the same reason, so that it is as visible as possible.
But marketing goes beyond that, and you’ll also have to think about how the brand’s voice is going to be used and displayed on places like social media and in traditional forms of advertising. Be sure to think about all of this and ideally to set up a schedule for it all, so that you can see how it is going to play out over time. Once you have that in place, you’re going to be in a much more confident position with regard to your branding.
As you can see, there are a few things to think about here, so just make sure that you are branding your business in these ways if you want to have full success in your business from the very start.