Essentially, a brand is how your audience and customers think of your business and what it represents to them. It’s a feeling more than a logo or name.
Knowing this means you need to really think about how you leave your audience feeling when they think of your brand.
1. Define Your Brand
To define your brand, figure out what your mission is, what benefits you offer your audience, what features are important to your audience, what type of customers you want to attract, and what qualities you want your audience to associate with you when they think of you. Take the time to write a mission statement which includes what you do, who you do it for, why you do it, and how you do it.
2. Choose Colors, Fonts, and Images
What types of colors, fonts, and images are you going to use? It will depend on the industry your company represents, what the audience likes, and the feelings these things evoke.
3. Create a Logo
It’s usually best to hire a professional to create a logo. A logo is a legal representation of your business and you cannot use stock photos, known taglines, or sometimes even certain fonts in a logo. By hiring a professional that is trusted, they can take your mission statement, audience information, and other information to help you create just the right logo that invokes the feelings you want your audience to have.
4. Develop a Tagline
A tagline is a very short, memorable and catchy statement that explains your brand to anyone who first comes across you. Remember that you must create something original for your business that encapsulates your business.
5. Integrate Branding across Channels
Whether online or offline, your branding should stay the same. Whether it’s a tagline, the way you answer the phone, how you sign off on your email messages, or how your users use your website, social media, and more, make sure it all goes together and promotes the same message – regardless of where your audience finds you and engages with you.
6. Don’t Forget Your Brand Voice
It’s important to ensure that whether you publish a blog post, book, video, podcast, webinar or something else, the voice matches throughout. Is your brand conventional, traditional, modern, irreverent, or something else?
7. Create Templates
So that you can teach your entire staff or contractors about your branding, you can develop materials and templates to help anyone you hire. A writing guide, branding guide, art templates, presentation templates, and more will help you ensure that your branding is matched across all channels.
8. Deliver on Your Promises
It’s imperative that you live up to the branding you have created for yourself. If you promise 100%, no question asked returns, do it. If you say it, you must do it, or you will not be trusted to live up to your branding – and word gets around fast these days.
9. Be Consistent
One of the keys to all aspects of business – including branding your small business – is consistency. Be consistent about your branding efforts across all online and offline channels. Whether you run a paid ad or produce free content, the branding is essential to ensure that you become a memorable business within your industry.
