How does your brand stand up?
A client’s brand isn’t a careless thought – a cute, quick-stamped tagline that was brainstormed on a whim. We know better than that.
Your brand carries the weight of your product or service, leaving behind a legacy of impressions on your audience or potential customers. That’s heavy.
And that’s why we’re here to pick you up and guide you through the do’s and don’ts of branding – something we (if we may put on our bragging pants) are known to do for our clients. It’s not easy, which is why it shouldn’t be a DIY. Here’s what we suggest to strengthen your brand identity:
Read Your Audience
And that’s read as in know your audience. It’s not a guessing game – not one you can afford, anyway. To accurately target your key demographic, you need to create your ideal client down to the itty bitty detail, i.e., geography, age, parents vs. single, favorite TV shows and movies, online status, goals, education level, fears, dreams, likes/dislikes and more. This will narrow your focus to hit a bullseye with your direct messaging. Once you know how to talk your potential customers’ language and understand their key desires and the struggles they have within the market, you can positively appeal to their emotions – most buying decisions are emotionally based, after all. Your customers need to trust what you’re saying/selling, based on how you’re making them feel. That feel-good trust is the most foundational asset of your brand.
Be Consistent
Your brand isn’t just stuck on your logo. It lives, moves and extends beyond the visual into a collective, consistent platform aligned with public relations/marketing/ad/web copy, sales and a strong tag line. With that said, it’s imperative to have your copywriters, designers and PR staff use that consistent language throughout your brand’s messaging. It solidifies that trust from your audience, who is seeing/reading/feeling your brand in multiple formats every day. They want to know that you’re all in as one brand, not scattered into multiple identities.
Stand Out
There will always be competition in the market, but there are ways to separate your brand, your company, from the rest – to be the best. Analyze how you can differ from the core commonalities of your competitors, because the average person sees hundreds of ads each day. To be exact, according to Brandwatch, 91 percent of retail brands nab the attention of the nearly 3 billion Internet users that are also active on social media. That’s a tsunami of web surfers to navigate through before your brand drowns under your competitors’ thousands of pages of content. The difference is in the creative details, which will make you stand out not only in social media, but also in digital/web, print ads, packaging, sales/marketing and PR messaging – from your logo to colors, fonts and style you choose to the voice, tone and value of your content.
Wait for It …
After you’ve researched your audience and made the careful, consistent, creative voice strategies that will drown out the competition and make you stand out, push pause. Meaning, brand building takes time. So, be patient. Wait to see the engagement and reaction from your social media channels, your new website, your PR marketing and ad materials. While you may have to monitor and tweak, there’s no need to do a major overhaul if you’ve made the right decisions along the way.
Give us a call so we can get started on building (or rebuilding) your brand the right way at 843.222.0605.
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