11 min read
Last Updated on January 10, 2022 by Ibe Princewill
From Business Names and Marketing to Logos and Designs, Here is a Starter’s Guide to Building and Growing a Successful Business Brand that Conveys the Right Messages to Your Audience.
Branding, in general, is very important for any genuine business because an organization’s image is the thing that differentiates it from its competitors.
In this current technological era, every organization needs to have an online presence and business brand to stay relevant and competitive.
An effective web branding conveys attention to your unique business, your offer and drives client requests which will eventually result to profit.
So what move or procedures should you take to achieve this ultimately important task of growing your business brand and effectively branding your business/services?
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Henry Ford
Know Your Audience
It makes no sense to invest time or money in building your brand without first ascertaining what will resonate or go in line with your audience, and to understand your customer’s behaviour, wants, and needs it is paramount to engage with your audience.
Knowing your audience thoroughly is the first and most important task in building a successful brand but online and offline.
New business owners need to know their target audience inside and out; their likes, dislikes, needs, and motivators, as well as their overall profile. See your brand as a person (By the way a registered business entity is recognized as a person in the eyes of the law), and create a persona for your ideal customer.
Doing this will make your prospect, audience, client, or customers see your brand as a person that they can relate with and not only an organization that has numerous processes to follow before one can pass a message or get his or her problem solved.
View your brand as an individual; would the brand be the easygoing friend you can trust? The know it all relative who’s always there to help you? Or the body of laws that will require you to go through many complicated processes before you can get your need attended to or solved?
If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.
Zig Ziglar
Apply Practical Knowledge in Communication
What you do with knowledge gotten is the real secret to building a successful brand. You must have an in-depth knowledge of your market to fully understand how to evoke or create the right emotions through your brand design.
Always remember that your brand is your voice and your product or service is your souvenir.
You can go ahead ticking all the obvious brand-building boxes, doing all your market research, developing a brand identity, brand and logo design, and full integration of your brand story across all communication channels (online & offline) – but if you fail to convey the right messages to the right audience effectively, those efforts will be a waste.
The right message and consistent communication is the cornerstone of every effective brand-building, but says it’s amazing how many small business owners overlook this: “It might seem obvious, but ask yourself who are you providing a service for? What key message(s) do you want to convey? (This is where you need copywriting skills)
Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.
Elon Musk
Learn From Failure
Failure is a critical part of a brand-building process; you can learn valuable lessons from a brand that failed. Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re going to fail at everything.
Embracing failure might not be the first thing that comes to mind when building a brand. It’s almost impossible to find a marketplace that isn’t crowded anymore, so you have to try to stand out from the competition to be remembered by your audience, prospect, client, or customers.
When building a brand, you should do your best to create a face for your business to help people remember your business. Will you fail? Yes, you might fail and there are valuable lessons you should learn from your failure.
Go back, rethink and ask yourself why did you fail and how can you do better than before so as not to fail again. Don’t forget to add some personality and humour to your brand to create a customer-friendly atmosphere for people who engage with it but have it in mind that excellent service, fast delivery, and the best possible prices will ultimately win the heart of your audience.
A brand should be able to stand the test of time despite the demise of the inventor of such a company or brand. With the proper effort put in place, a strong brand will continue to evolve and revolve around its core values, these core values are represented in everything your company does and can be seen and felt in the way you deal with your customers.
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.
Jeff Bezos
Don’t Think Like a Small Business
One of the problems small businesses face a lot is their inability to invest in quality support staff, a company should always hire someone that will transform the whole business positively.
Imagine how much time we lose handling visitors, phones, office management, and supplies. We all juggled travel plans, office management, and company events, always in haste!
Secondly, If possible avoid hiring friends & family members, the biggest issue with hiring friends and family is that you will have a problem managing them or face the issue of lack of talent in your business and it will negatively affect your brand.
To be a great business you need to have many talented people on your team. Having a dedicated, friendly professional to answer the phone and greet visitors creates a polished and professional first impression that garnered better-quality customers and creates an outstanding brand impression, think about it.
I see many small businesses also miss out on one important task which is the inability to set clear path goals or the lack of ability to have a vision for the business and brand. Many have a survival mentality instead of a forward-thinking mentality when building their brand and business.
Stop the habit of thinking about only making it through the week and start thinking monthly, quarterly, yearly, and a decade down the road. Where will your brand be in ten years from now? What will you do to make that happen?
Furthermore, most small businesses embarking on a branding exercise are to think big from the start and you should, but not to think as though you are already operating across continents thus, spending heavily on brand awareness campaigns and advertisement outside your locality or area of operation from the start.
The goal here is to start small and grow big. Start from your area of operation and expand within your means.
Your personal brand serves as your best protection against business factors you can’t control.
Dan Schawbel
Color & Design: The Silent Ambassador of Your Brand
Your visual identity is all of the imagery and graphical information that expresses who a brand is and differentiates it from all the others which include your color, logo, and a consumer’s first encounter with your brand, so it must create the right impression.
Your brand identity should guide the visuals, not the other way around. Your visuals are meant to express who you are, so it would make sense to first figure out what you’re all about before choosing the right color, design, or logo.
Unless you’re a graphic designer, you should avoid the Do It Yourself approach when creating your Logo, Graphics, or picking your Brand Color, it is always wise to invest in a professional designer to create and develop your logo, (our team of experts can help you out with that) You should Make use of professional creative designers to suit your desired style and budget.
Do your best to keep your brand identity consistent across all media channels, it is advisable to create a set of brand guidelines containing detailed information on the color palette, fonts, and tone of voice to be used in your branding, along with other elements such as how your brand should appear on any platform, file, equipment, staff uniforms, marketing literature and advertising materials.
If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.
Howard Schultz
Go Beyond Your Logo
Many small businesses make the mistake of confusing their brand with their logo, but it’s vital to differentiate between the two.
A brand is about much more than a logo, it is the public personification of your company, conveying everything you believe and hold dear about what you do. Your brand should stare a cause because people buy a product but they join a cause.
If your brand is about accommodation, then you cause should be about putting roofs over people’s head by giving them the opportunity to afford a comfortable house at an affordable cost.
You should also have in mind that even if you’re in a competitive market, it isn’t necessary to conjure up a personality for your brand immediately.
It might be important if the brand is aspirational and needs to fit into a particular market but if your business provides something customers need, rather than want, then prices and service may well be more important in such market before brand personality.
While graphic design is paramount for communicating ideas visually, those ideas must come together to narrate a motivating and captivating story about your brand.
Visual which is a part of your brand have the ability to grab your audience’s attention, but stories have the power to involve your audience and make them stay with your brand.
If You Don’t Give the Market the Story to Talk About, They Will Define Your Brand Story for You.
David Brier
On the other hand, a logo is a symbol made up of text and signs, color and images that identifies a business entity. An ideal logo displays the company’s nature of business and its brand worth.
A Logo is a big part of your brand identity and it is what people will see about your business. A good logo is easy to remember, it identifies you from other business, and promote brand loyalty. (We have a team of experts that can help you design an attractive logo for your business)
How to Choose Your Brand Name Meticulously
As much as we want a business name, we should avoid ruining our branding by giving our brand an ugly or bad name, due to the unavailability of our desired brand name taken by another business.
Think meticulously, consciously, and carefully before picking a brand name because, a bad brand name can have a damaging effect on your overall brand awareness, so choose it carefully. You might ask a question like: How do brand names affect a business?
The truth is that: Brand names create an identity that people can associate with, they create perceptions and they let customers know what to expect from the brand.
A good brand name lends credibility, assures quality, and sets the right customer expectations. Bad brand names create a lack of relevance and recognition, produce poor promotion of brand values, and ultimately lead to expensive or ineffective branding.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
A brand name must reinforce the key elements or objectives of your business because, ultimately, the more it communicates to your audience about your business and what it provides, the less effort you’ll go through trying to explain your business to others. (Let us recommend the right brand name for your business today, get in touch with us)
So Cheap Agency offers you the chance to do what you do best – running your business and making profit, while benefiting from our years of collective experience to build solutions that will drive growth and new customers to your business day and night.
Begin the process of building a website with good and credible designs that will inspire your potential customers. Get Started Today.