6 Things You Need To Do In Order To Build A Strong Brand
Your brand is more than a creative logo, it is your entity. It's who you are, what you believe in, and what customers can expect when they engage with your brand. Your logo is the face of your brand, and your, slogan your outfit. they play a role in what makes your entity special, as do the images, messages, and everything you do.
Building a strong brand takes effort, and these 6 steps can help.
1. Brand Identity
If you need some help determining your brand’s mission, vision, overall business goals, naming your company, or coming up with the tagline consider getting help from your internal team or a branding agency.
Brand Identity typically includes:
•Ideation for your company name
•Tag line
•Brand positioning
•Brand story
•Messaging
These services are very strategic, relatively permanent, and takes a lot of rounds of edits to find the perfect fit for your goals and brand personality. You can speak to the branding agency and work off a budget, that way they agency can focus on what’s more important.
2. Market Research
Market research is vital for ensuring that your products can meet the needs of your market or that they can enter into relevant conversations consumers are having. At the same time, market research can extend beyond the general persona of “marketing” and affect your brand position as a whole. Most of the world’s most successful brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and relative newcomers like Tom’s use market research to help define brand strategy through insights that data provide.
Consider the following benefits that research data can provide:
•Predict Effectiveness of Branding Strategies
•Discover Entire New Markets
•Identify Brand Weaknesses
•Evaluate Current Practices for Efficiency
3. Logo Design
As the heart of your branding efforts, your logo should represent the essence of your company’s personality. It should be instantly recognizable, legible, true to your brand’s personality, and unique.
Branding agencies will design 3-5 versions with about 4 rounds of edits. Crafting a logo is extremely subjective and time-consuming, so you need time built into the budget to customize the logo to your liking. To speed up the process and save money, make a mood board of logos, fonts, colors, sand styles you like. That will give the designers a place to start to deliver the first round of logos that’s closer to what you want.
logo is extremely subjective and time-consuming,
you need time built into the budget to customize the logo to your liking.
4. Brand Style Guide
Your brand is what your customers and audience think of when they hear your company’s name or see your logo. It’s what you represent and who you are as a company. It’s both the voice and the tone within the content you create, and it can be experienced through all the work that you produce.
A brand book, is the creative compass that guides your business’s image, visuals, voice, and tone. It incorporates your visual and editorial style guides. It’s an essential internal marketing material and media kit to pass off to all employees and agencies you work with.
5. Visual Style Guide
Visual style guides are used to define the way the brand will look and to keep graphics consistent and uniform across all mediums. A visual style guide will help the creation and upkeep of your website, app, social media accounts, advertising, marketing and packaging and it incorporates logo with typography and brand colors. It can also integrate supporting design elements and photography guidelines.
6. Editorial or Content Style Guide
A style guide is a document that tells your marketing team, content creators, and employees how to write in a way that reflects your brand’s character. It also specifies how you want them to refer to your brand and products, translate industry jargon, and use grammar and punctuation. An editorial style guide may determine your attitude/personality on social media versus email marketing and your company website.
The goal is to create consistency across your communication channels and solidify your brand’s style in the reader’s mind.
Once the foundation of your brand is established, you want to make sure your actions contribute to its ongoing fortification and growth. Regularly survey your vendors, employees and customers by conducting regular brand audits using your brand style guide to make sure their impressions of your brand line up with who you are.