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5 Branding Tips for Beginners
A successful brand is an invaluable asset for any business. If you nurture a brand the right way, it can ultimately end up taking on a life of its own - some brands come to define the businesses that create them. If you have no experience with branding, then it can be a difficult undertaking. Here are 5 branding tips to get any beginner started.
Define Your Brand’s Ethos and Purpose
Before you can begin to establish a proper identity for your brand, you need to first take the time to properly define the ethos and purpose of your brand. What are the fundamental principles that underpin the way that you do business? What do you hope for your brand to achieve and what do you envisage it offering to your audience?
By answering these questions, you will give yourself a solid foundation upon which to build your brand identity. If you can’t answer these questions and define exactly what makes your brand unique, then you are inevitably going to end up melting into the background and getting lost amongst your competition. The most successful brands have distinct identities that run through everything they do.
Choose Your Logo Carefully
Your business’s logo is its public face; it is how audiences will visually identify your business. When people see your logo, they should instantly recognize it as belonging to your business. But your logo is more than just a shorthand for your business name. A good logo should accomplish several other objectives; it should convey something of what your business is about and what your underlying ethos is.
Don’t underestimate how much of a difference a good logo can make to all your marketing. Digital marketing that is topped-off with an instantly recognizable high-quality logo is always going to be more appealing than marketing that lacks a logo or features a low-quality design.
It is always best to design your own logo. That way, you can be certain that the final design you go with conveys everything you want it to about your business and brand. If you aren’t the most artistic person in the world, don’t worry! You can easily find a free logo creator tool online that makes it easy to create your own logo. If you don’t know how to make a logo, then you can get started through this link.
Know Who You Are Targeting
For the entire lifespan of your brand, knowing who you are targeting and who your main customers are is extremely important. If you don’t know exactly who you are trying to target with your branding, you are going to be flying blind. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much you like your business logo. What matters is how your target audience responds to it.
The more detail you know about your target demographic, the easier it is to target them with your marketing. However, understanding your audience isn’t just important from a marketing perspective. You want all of your communications, whether marketing or not, to resonate with your audience.
Constructing a brand for an audience without any insight into who they are and what their likes and dislikes are is always going to be difficult. This is why businesses are willing to invest so heavily in market research to find out that information.
Consider Your Communication Options
Every business needs to communicate with their audience throughout their lifespan. Whether you are marketing to them or informing them about new products and services that you offer, clear communications are vital for a healthy business. Different communication methods will be effective for different audiences, and the methods that one audience responds to won’t necessarily work with the next.
Good branding is all about consistency. That means that you want to identify the best communication channels for reaching out to your audience and come up with a plan for utilizing them effectively. If your brand is going to be very active on social media, then you need to have a plan for ensuring that your social media channels are communicating to your audience in a way that is consistent with your overall brand ethos.
Develop a Tagline
Choosing a tagline for your brand is an excellent way of supplementing your choice of logo. A tagline is a short, simple, memorable phrase that summarizes your brand or what it does. The right tagline can turbocharge the power of a logo and gives you an obvious choice of message to use as a basis for future marketing campaign.
Branding is essential for any business. If it isn’t something that you have experience with, then don’t despair, everyone has to start somewhere. If you get your branding right, you will find it significantly easier to market yourself effectively. Sticking to the advice above will help you to build a solid brand even if you have no prior experience in brand building.
Meet The Author:
As a woman making her way to the top of the corporate ladder, Ella Woodward has the expertise and business knowledge to guide readers through the latest developments in the fast-paced business, financial and investment spaces. She has the contacts, instincts and insight to discover the latest deals, trades and organisations that are worth your time. Being in constant demand, she’s made this blog as a resource for you to see a small selection of the work she’s done over the years.
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