In the past, some may have thought that a company’s brand was just its logo, tagline, and color scheme. While those elements are undoubtedly important for establishing a brand, an effective and successful branding strategy should encapsulate much more. Creating and maintaining a brand that people recognize and love takes skill, creativity, and consistency, but doing so will give your business a surefire edge over your competition.
What is Branding?
Simply put, your brand is how people perceive your business and the products and services you offer. Similarly, your branding consists of the steps you take to cultivate that brand. Your branding includes the crafting of recognizable visual elements such as your company name, logo, color scheme, and design. It also extends into components that evoke emotional responses from potential clients, customers, and even employees, i.e., your brand personality, messaging, and more.
Developing a Branding Strategy
Successful branding does not happen overnight. Rather, you should develop and adopt a long-term and fluid branding strategy that aligns your brand personality with your imagery, messaging, and customer service.
Your brand personality is defined as the human characteristics associated with your brand. In other words, it’s how clients and customers would describe your brand if it were a person. According to HubSpot, brand personalities typically have five overarching pillars: excitement, sincerity, sophistication, competence, and ruggedness.
To develop your unique brand personality, reflect upon your core values. Similar to an individual, your company’s core values are the driving force for your business’s actions, decisions, and communication style. Once you have a solid understanding of your company and its values, consider your target audience by researching the preferences, behaviors, and expectations of your ideal customers. Though your brand personality should be an authentic reflection of your business, you need to be able to reach your target audience in ways that resonate.
From there, the design of your visual imagery, style of both internal and external communication, and even the quality of your products and services should reflect your distinct brand personality. In order to gain the trust of potential customers and clients and the loyalty of existing ones, it’s important to remain consistent. Developing set brand guidelines for your company can ensure you represent and communicate your brand consistently via your advertising, social media, and customer service.
If you need some assistance branding (or rebranding!) your company, contact the experts at RobMark today! Using our years of branding experience, we can walk you through all of the steps required for building a strong, consistent, and successful brand that reflects your company’s vision, goals, and values.