Branding gives your business a real identity – Start by asking these questions.
Branding in 2022 is so much more than just creating an eye-catching logo or spending thousands on a well-placed ad. Every flourishing business should have a powerful brand purpose and coherence in its communication across all channels and customer experiences.
It’s essential never to lose sight of your PURPOSE. At any moment through the life of your business, it will be a powerful driver for sustaining growth, innovation, keeping employees engaged, and leading to countless intrapreneurial opportunities.
Why focus on your brand?
- Branding gives your business a real identity.
- Branding makes your business memorable.
- Branding establishes your marketing strategies.
- Branding brings your employees pride.
To determine your purpose, first, examine the industry your business fits into and the problem you want your business to solve. Is there a clear gap your service or product can fill, and how is your business uniquely equipped to fight this issue? Once you clarify this, you will start to form the foundation for your brand’s purpose.
Start by asking these questions,
- What does my brand offer that our competitors can’t?
- What’s unique about your offering?
- How different are you to other businesses in your industry?
- What are the things that you are good at that others can’t replicate as well?
- What are some of the characteristics that define your business, and how can you model this into your brand?
- How can you communicate this in your brand identity, i.e. through quality, customer service, marketing strategy etc.?
What’s your story?
Your story is perhaps the most necessary component of branding and determining your purpose. Your story should combine an accurate story of how and why you founded your business and a story about how your customer fits into the fabric of your business.
It’s an invaluable tool in communicating with your audience on a human level and can help to create a lifelong authentic connection.
Remember: A well-thought-out story can produce a lifetime’s worth of content for you to use across marketing campaigns.
Who is your ideal customer?
Knowing who your ideal customer is can transform everything – your product and service, your marketing plan, value, price-point, the tone of voice, any potential partnerships, who your ideal employee is, your growth and much more.
This BIG question is your chance to think about your ideal customer values and how it determines where they spend. The little questions are:
- What are your customer’s prevailing challenges and frustrations?
- What are your customer’s goals and priorities right now?
- What are your customer’s preferred forms of communication?
- What platforms are they spending time on?
- What does a day in your archetypical customer’s life look like?
- What competing brands do your customers like?̋
- What makes your ideal customer happy?
How will you communicate your brand’s purpose?
After answering the above questions and infusing your purpose across every facet of your business, you need to figure out the most compelling ways to communicate your intention to likely customers. This is the moment you create a powerful marketing strategy.
What should you focus on:
Your use of language: Look at what words and terminology your customers use to describe your industry, products, and services.
Visual elements like your logo or the colours you use – Your logo will be one of the few unique features of your visual personality.
Your voice: The tone of voice you use to interact with customers via social media and content marketing extends your brand’s voice.
And of course, which channels will you use for marketing your business, e.g. Twitter, EDMs, Podcast ads etc.
