Brand Your Way To Success

As a business owner for over 5 years now, I have found that branding is very important for any business that is looking to expand and move forward in today's economy. A company's brand is like the glue that differentiates it from all of it's competitors. In today's world of economic turbulence and uncertainty, it's vital for many to most businesses, no matter what your field, to have a remembered presence in order to remain competitive. Effective branding can create a visual imprint in the minds of your clients. Simply put, whether online or off line, branding helps you get and stay remembered.

Brand Your Way To Success

Simple Branding Techniques That Work

While branding can offer vast opportunities for your business, whether you are the CEO of a top 500 company or a blogger using affiliate marketing to add additional revenue to your account, in order for it to be great and serve you well, we need to first draw in and engage our clients. This isn't as easy as it sounds, but if done correctly, it can bring you in a bounty of new and interested clients as well as keeping the old ones engaged and eager to continue coming back. Unfortunately, branding isn't as simple as putting your company logo and motto on a business card or (now days) creating a social media page. The branding strategy that you use must make your brand not only noticeable, but relevant in your market place so that a client sees you as a trusted authority and thinks of you first. If I say, "Just Do It" we all know what company that I am talking about. The same holds true if you see a webding style image of an apple with a bite taken out of the top.

Branding Basics

New Perspective

Branding, especially when you are working with online branding, has many tools at our disposal that we can utilize to produce a visual presence for our business that makes our companies pop when it comes to making a visual impression, and many of them are inexpensive to free. Web graphics and animation, great web copy, and your overall website design, a killer logo and tagline are just a few of the significant factors that will bring your brand alive. This magnetic appeal that helps your viewers easily and quickly think of you first when they need what you provide is the number one most fundamental key to turning viewers into paying customers. The branding that you use should include great design and factor in a visual uniqueness that visually captivates interest when producing your total impression.

The Branding Reflection: Your Visual Presence
A strong, easy to recognize image can make the difference between someone who buys from you or goes on to your competition. For example, a client online, can easily go from your site to your competitor's by simply double clicking their mouse. First impressions are everything and a lot hinges on the impression they get from your web site, your newspaper ads, or any other advertising media that you use. Branding, or so I have found, conveys a unique message about who you and your business is to your target market.
There many requirements for a successful branding campaign. If you are totally out of your element here, you could try to hire a branding agent to help give you some ideas, but before you do, continue reading. My goal is to give you some pointers and hopefully encourage you in creating your brand without spending hundreds, if not thousands on branding.

Baby Steps

Taking it slow so you don't fall short

I discussed the importance of having a great, easy to recognize logo, but branding is much more than simply having your logo or slogan and it's more than simply using a unique color scheme on all of your documents. Here are some initial baby steps to take that need to happen in order to begin your successful brand creation.

First steps

Where To Start

Analyze Your Competition

Probably the number one key, as I have come to use many times over in my own business as well as helping others, is to produce a successful brand by differentiating yourself from your competition. You will have to know how buyers see your competitors and then, equally as important, know how they see you in comparison to your competition.

You must recognize how your competitors set themselves apart from their competition. In addition, you should also make yourself aware of all of the areas in which they excel as well as fall short in. Your business may benefit more from knowing where your competitors drop the ball than from where they are killing it, and learn how to use their shortcoming to distinguish your company from the rest of the pack.

Show...Know your muscles: Identify your strengths

Now, after you recognize where the competitors are dropping the ball when it comes to how the client sees them, you are able to start cross-comparing their weaknesses with your strengths, because their weak areas need to be part of your company's strengths in order to catch the eye of the clients they are turning away because of the weaknesses. You can perform a target market analysis (formal or impromptu), learn from it, and utilize it in every way that you can to your advantage. This is a valuable tool when first creating your name in the market place.

Once you've recognized AND LISTED your strengths, and made note of which ones are most significant to your clients, you should be able to think about ways to successfully market these assets and incorporate them in your branding campaign. For example, when I started my engraving company, it was really difficult to find engravers that would personalize individual gifts purchased elsewhere. Part of my slogan and our mission statement was "We make your memories more personal." I also incorporated quite a few pictures of original, one of a kind engravings on the website to catch attention. Through this we, not only gained more clients, but actually had some of our "competitors" sending jobs our way.

Hark! Who goes there? Know YOUR client

Learn everything you can about your target market. Know their buying habits. How often do they purchase? Do they have a habit of only purchasing during special promotions? How detailed are they when purchasing? what I mean by this is, do they stick to specific name brands, are their only certain sites they visit online?

These are questions you really need to ask to better market to those that you serve. In addition to that, know your buyer's lifestyles, needs, mentalities, and attitudes. Knowing and working with things such as personality traits and shopping habits are key to your marketing success with these potential clients.

Think da brand, know da brand, BE da brand

Make certain your company truly reflects what your brand identifies. As another example, if one of the traits your brand attaches to your company is professionalism, then show professionalism in every aspect of your business. If your website hasn't been updated in years and still references a sale or event that happened years ago, this isn't professional. If you have a brick and mortar place of business and it is disorganized with employees looking disheveled, this also does not reflect professionalism.

Be the Guru

Become the expert that your client needs

Demonstrating yourself as an authority in your field will help you acquire both recognition and respect from your peers, your competition and, most importantly, your clients. Like I mentioned earlier, I actually had competitors sending me clients.

When those around you see you as the expert, you become the expert, i.e. you become the first one they think of when they need the product or service that you provide.

This is where good visual and auditory branding come in to play.

Making the Grade

Some things to think about when creating

"you see what I mean?" Now you are probably saying "FINALLY!" I know, the preceding was kind of long winded, but it was important to lay some groundwork out before jumping into the actual physics of branding. You can have the best logo in the world, but if it doesn't represent what you do, then it is a lost cause and could actually end up repelling potential customers.

The Logo

A big mistake many businesses get into when they first come up with a logo is to try to make this ornate, elaborate design. Yes, its nice and, yes, it is definitely original, but how does it look at 1 1/2"? How does it transfer in black and white? Can it be embroidered as easily as it can be printed?

These are all questions that have to be asked in the design process. Always remember the K.I.S.S model (Keep It Simple Sweetheart). This is a golden rule. It doesn't matter if it is embroidered or printed; every color has a price tag attached to it. Cost of production is always a factor when producing quality promotional pieces. You also have to factor in that if the logo is small enough, will it effectively go through the four color printing process? If your logo has 9 colors and it is printed at 1 1/2" tall, you may get a blob of colors that are unrecognizable.

Tag It and Bag It

A tag line is a great way to be remembered. If, for example, your marketing includes a radio spot, the listeners can't see a logo, but a great tag line can be an instant auditory visual. It doesn't have to be a tag line either. A catchy jingle is nothing more than an elongated tag line. "Give me a break...give me a break...Break me off a piece..." Don't tell me that you didn't finish singing that.

Commit to It

Once you have a logo, commit to it. Incorporate the colors into your web page, your letterhead, even the color scheme of your showroom if you have a brick & mortar place of business. Once you have it all worked out, own it because if you don't, it will promote you as being wishy-washy and can go as far as to concern people of your reliability if your logo changes at the drop of a hat.

Now once you have your logo in place, you can modify it as long as the core concept is there. The Niki icon has changed since it was first created, but it is still the swoosh that people the world over have come to associate with the name.

Final thoughts

Being original is the key here. To copy someone else is to run the risk of trademark infringement as well as running the risk of someone associating another company to your brand as per the photo example to the left. Walgreens sues over the use of the 'W". It was in the news for quite some time and you can click on the photo if you want to read up on it. I hope the connected links to the helps serve you well when creating your next branding campaign.

 

The purpose of these blog posts is to help you strive to be more successful and to create a life worth living, so I never want to end a post without giving your some sort of “power question” to ponder over. Answering these questions will help you to take action.

 

Power Question for the day:

What are you tolerating or putting up with that would make your life easier if you didn’t have to?

Thanks for reading, take care.