Building A Brand
What does it mean to build a brand? In today’s online landscape building a brand is more than throwing your name anywhere and everywhere online hoping people will remember your name when they are in need of a product or service you provide. A brand will make you or break you in the competitive landscape in any industry so it’s crucial not only do you brand your business correctly but more importantly-your message is in alignment with your brand.
In the last 16 years, I have seen disaster stories of business owners that spend upwards to six figures on marketing their business without identifying their brands or knowing the message they were trying to convey to their market. Does that mean they didn’t get business? Not at all! The end result was many months of frustration, brand confusion, mixed messages and a shotgun approach at marketing their services.
Identify Your Brand
The key in branding is to have a clear picture and vision of what your brand is. I know-no duh. It’s true though. Most business owners don’t have a clear picture of what their brand is, what they want it to be and what it should be. Define your brand by identifying the value you bring to the marketplace.
Ask yourself these three questions for start:
1.What is your specialty?
2.What differentiates you from your competitors?
3.Who is your ideal client and what do they look for and want in a company?
Once you are crystal clear with these three questions, you begin to know what direction you need to head down. How do you know you’re ready to go to market with that brand? Think about these brands and what they do-Geico…Insurance, Coke…Soda, Ray-Bans…Glasses, Kleenex…tissue. You get the point. Well, when you are able to distinguish your brand with your message then you’re almost there.
Commit To Your Brand
Now it’s time to make the commitment to your brand and message. The worse thing you can do is be indecisive or wishy washy and change your brand mid stream. This begins to create confusion into the marketplace. Part of committing to your brand has to do with everyone in your organization embracing and support it. It has to become a part of your culture, your language, your selling proposition and every fabric of your business including business cards, marketing collateral, lyrics, apparel and signage. Most of the times, going all in versus keeping one foot out the door is the best thing you can do to take your business to new heights. You as the business owner needs to believe in the all in mentality before you can ask anyone else to do the same.
Introduce Your Brand
Now that the first two steps have been completed-you can now move on to introducing your brand to the market place both online and offline. In this step timing is everything. The first step in bringing your brand into the market is by creating curiosity within your geographic area whether broad or scaled. Think about that movie trailer that comes out a few months before it premiers and shows only about 20 seconds of the movie that’s been strategically pieced together to capture your interest and make you want to see the movie. So, how should you introduce your brand into the market? Here’s a few ideas:
- Create a 15-30 second video that will spark interest-this creates the emotion and feeling as if you were opening a Christmas present. It makes people curious about who you are and what you do. You can put together a Facebook & Instagram video view campaign in your targeted market.
- Send out emails to your current customers-announce the new brand to your current clients. Use of autoresponders likeMailChimp and AWeber are great tools for you to use to communicate with your clients. Set up a few templated emails that lead up to the unveiling of your new brand.
- Impression based-campaigns- running Facebook and online display impression based campaigns is a great way to get eyes on your brand. It’s all about repetitive exposure on major websites and social media sites across the internet making you top of mind for your specific industry. Imagine having every billboard on every major highway, main street and side street? Impression based campaigns do the same online-gets you in front of online consumers.
Before you start blindly marketing your brand, there are three things you must do. The first is to identify your brand, then commit to your brand and finally introduce your brand to your market. I’ve worked on branding strategies for small to medium-sized businesses for over 16 years and within that time, Iv’e seen it done right but most times its done wrong.
