Branding is so critical that even if you have an amazing offer, a target audience who desires it, and consistent, quality marketing, you get inconsistent and poor results for your business.
Branding is the basis of a successful business. Here’s why: everything from your promotional email copy to the offers you develop, is based on branding. It’s how you communicate value to your prospects and customers or clients. In fact, every action or change your company makes is based on branding, whether you’re doing it consciously or not.
Do you have clear branding? If not, let’s begin to address that now.
How To Develop Brilliant Branding
Branding is a complex process that involves a range of visual and conceptual aspects. However, simply starting the process of defining your brand will lead to new, positive results and help you market your business in less time. It could also affect how you feel about marketing, by aligning your efforts with your deeper business and personal goals. Here are the 3 most important steps to develop brilliant branding.
Step 1: Position Your Brand
Effectively positioning your brand allows you to showcase your authority and gives your customers or clients a reason to buy from you rather than your competitors. When done well, it gets you seen, thought about, accepted and remembered. To do this, you need to be clear on whom you serve and why you can help them best reach their goals.
To position your brand, first analyze the needs of your prospects and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Then contemplate what you desire to create for your prospects, and what your target audience desires from their experience with a company in your field.
Do they want to feel healthy again after a diagnosis? Have they searched high and low for an answer to their problem and failed to find relief? If you haven’t worked with your target audience for long enough to understand the reasons why they would benefit greatly from your offer, consider interviewing your ideal clients or customers. Be sure to make notes regarding exactly what they say, as that material will be useful later.
Step 2: Define Your Vision and Mission
Vision and mission statements are a core part of branding. They define the direction your company will go in, and where you’ll take your customers or clients.
Your vision is where you want the community or world to be as a result of your business endeavours. Your mission is what you’ll do to make that vision a reality.
Alzheimer’s Association’s vision statement is “a world without Alzheimer’s and all other dementia”. The mission statement of Sweetgreen, the salad and grain bowl company, is “to inspire healthier communities by connecting people to real food.”
Step 3: Understand & Communicate Value
For many small business owners, this is one of the most challenging aspects of branding. Yet listing out why you provide value to your audience will markedly facilitate the sales process.
To do this, ask yourself some questions, such as:
Though branding can seem complex or feel unnecessary, its ability to focus your mind and efforts is unparalleled. It can strongly connect you with your audience, motivate and inspire you to make a bigger impact on the world, and inform your marketing efforts, as well as make them a lot simpler and more effective. Once you’ve worked on these initial but important aspects of your branding, be sure to revise them before creating and loading new content into your marketing.
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