Building a brand doesn’t happen overnight, so your business needs to stay consistent with the ongoing efforts of building your brand, reputation, and relationship with your target audience.
Our expert digital team at Bold x Collective understands the efforts put into building a solid brand that resonates with your target audience and works well to promote your products or services.
Remember that your brand’s building process doesn’t necessarily have to be chronological to the list of tips provided in this article. You may have to make accommodations and add new findings to previous steps to create the most optimal plan for your brand.
Building a brand on your own can seem intimidating, and it may take time to figure out where to start. Keep reading our in-depth guide on how you can start building your brand!
Before we explain each strategy, let’s discuss what makes up a brand and why creating a strategic plan on how you will build your brand is essential for every business.
What Is a Brand
As marketers, a few questions we get asked often are what defines a brand and why investing time and effort into branding is beneficial to building a brand. Your brand alone is an essential component for consumers to distinguish the difference between your brand from other similar brands in the industry.
A brand will house all the creative and central elements, like a creative logo, a unique mission statement, values, slogans, color palettes, and more.
Together, all these visual and non-visual elements will shape your brand’s identity and voice to provide consumers with a one-of-a-kind experience when they come across your brand and hopefully result in new customer relationships.
What’s The Importance of Branding
Now let’s get into what goes into building and establishing a successful brand. It’s important to understand that branding is necessary for a new business to communicate its purpose to the right target audience in an effective way. Branding is an effective marketing tool for companies to help differentiate themselves from their competitors in the same industry. It would help to create a brand that leaves a lasting impression on your target audience.
Building your brand involves researching and designing specific features that identify and make up your brand. Branding aims to set your brand apart from your competition and give consumers a reason to choose your brand over others.
Now that we have provided you with a better understanding of what a brand is and the significance of branding, we can dive into explaining the six essential steps we recommend you use when building your brand.
Here is our list of practical steps you can use when creating a strategic plan on how to build your brand:
Research your target audience & competitors
Define your purpose & mission statement (Slogan)
Implementing a brand personality (Persona) and storytelling (Focus)
Set out objectives & goals
Build your identity – (Name, logo)
Brand integration (Implement the brand across your business)
Research Target Audience & Competitors
Before formulating a strategic plan for building your brand, start researching and establishing your brand’s persona and target audience. Compile extensive research that gives you a concrete understanding of the significant consumer segments your brand wants to connect with while looking for potential consumers and the advantages your brand can bring to each segment.
Additionally, make sure to research your brand industry to gather further information and a couple of competitors.
During the research process, keep in mind the following questions to ask yourself when creating your persona:
Who is your most accessible target audience?
Who is your most demanding target audience?
How does your target audience express themselves?
What interests your target audience?
Who are your competitors?
By looking at your competitors, you cannot only determine a better idea of how to reach your potential target audiences within your industry, but you can also analyze current and past branding trends that have yet to succeed in the industry. Feel free to gather inspiration from your competitors and keep up to date with popular or new trends that thrive within your industry.
Define Your Brand’s Purpose & Mission Statement
Next is to explore and finalize what you want your brand to stand for, defining your brand’s purpose. Think about how your brand came to be, how it operates currently, and where you see it heading in the upcoming years.
Defining your brand’s purpose will help you connect with the right audience who want to derive the same sense of your brand. A great way to communicate this is by establishing a mission statement that directly outlines your place in the industry and answers the following commonly asked questions by consumers; why, how & what.
How does your brand differ from others?
What service do you provide?
Why does your brand exist?
Why should people engage with your brand?
Developing A Brand Personality
This next step involves storytelling and creative brainstorming to bring your brand to life! Here, you want to brainstorm the characteristics of your brand and what you want to communicate to your audience. It can be helpful to think about your brand’s positioning in the market and to establish certain aspects that make up your brand to help your target audience see your brand’s personality.
For example, your brand can be positioned as a high-end luxury fashion brand that wants to highlight its products’ high quality, one-of-a-kind, and exclusivity. Therefore, you would like to implement these points throughout your brand through a unique voice, tone, language, and color palettes to represent your brand’s personality.