Shaping Your Brand
What makes one brand successful and another fall flat? How do you build a brand around a new product? How do you develop a brand around an intangible product? These are difficult questions to grapple with for many young marketers and entrepreneurs. Building a brand is a process, one that requires consistency, dedication, and adaptability. Branding is something that is built through each and every interaction your business has with the marketplace establishes or tarnishes your brand. The best way to build your brand is to foster healthy relationships between your business and your customers. This post will help establish key steps towards shaping a brand or building a healthier brand out of an existing line.
Strategize
Think through not just what you want your brand to look and feel like, but the exact message you want to portray. Consider the mission and vision statements you’ve drafted for your business. What is it that your business accomplishes for your customers rather than the individual meeting of a specific need? What are you equipping them or enabling them to do? Consider the impact that your products and services have beyond the sale. What are the feelings you want your brand to invoke? What connections do you want to draw not just in the message, but in the design and style of your digital content, packaging, and products. Strategizing is the first and most critical step towards building and shaping an effective brand identity.
Research
Once you have your idea in mind, it is important to test it against market standards and customer expectations. While the mainstream styles of the day are not always a beacon of what can and cannot work, they can be good indicators of what the market is responding to. Antiquated logo styles and crude designs can be off putting if they seem too out of place on a store shelf or in a picture on social media. However, out of place stylization can work if your product or brand presents itself as a non-traditional solution to a consumer problem.
Create
Once you’ve identified the feelings you want to invoke, the styles you hope to incorporate, and the overall idea you wish to convey, it is time to create content on behalf of your brand. Depending on the stage of your business, this may materialize in a variety of ways. You could be taking the very first step towards logo design or packaging. However, brand goes much deeper than just the images people see with your business’ name. It is also about the type of content you put out and the general templates that you follow both visually and thematically. Your brand is conveyed not just by your profile picture, but by every post that you make to social media. Create your brand by creating content that can be seen, shared, and engaged with. Shape your brand by sending out the overall message through the content that you post to your pages and profiles.
Recreate
Shaping your brand is much akin to sculpture. It’s not about making one master stroke and walking away with a fully formed statue. It is about slowly chipping away until you have refined, smoothed, and clearly defined what you’ve been working on all along. Take the time to not just create templates and types of content, but to redress it and refine your process. The clearer and more effective you can make your content, the healthier your brand becomes. Successful branding is easy to identify, whether it is a picture, a statue, or a thousand words. The best way to find that ease of identification is to continue to refine the ways in which you put your message across.
Socialize
Social Media is the fastest and most effective way to place your brand message in front of a large and engaged audience. Whether you utilize Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok, social media is the most effective way of reaching a targeted audience quickly without having to heavily invest in advertising or production resources. Make sure that your brand does not pass by unnoticed by rolling your content out over social media as soon as it is ready.
Consistency
Consistency is key when it comes to both social media and branding. Refining your brand is one thing, constantly changing designs and theming is another. Consistency means not just posting frequently but asserting yourself over key points and messages in repetition. Use consistent font styles, speaking patters, and designs in order to help create uniquely identifiable points between all of your content, products, or social media offerings.
Create Touch Points
The best way to build your brand in a way that lasts is to create opportunities for engagement. How is the content you post, the products you sell, or the messages you speak about going to make an impact on someone? What can they do to engage with that impact and your business? Utilize calls to action, challenges, contests, and even something as simple as questions and polls in order to create opportunities for consumers, customers, and users to actively engage with your content. Reading a blog post is one thing, but taking the time to comment and discuss creates a much deeper connection to a brand and its work.
Follow Up
Shaping a brand will never be a one and done process, nor will the fostering of relationships between customers and your business. Returning customers are far cheaper to retain than bringing in new ones. The same goes for social media followers. Drumming up conversation and increasing engagement for those already connected to your brand will create more pathways to success than always fixating on new customers and new brand interactions.
Re- Recreate
Shaping your brand is a process that takes time, and hubris. The brand image you create today may be out of style in five years. The message and mission you have today may not be practical to your business ten years down the line. It is important that you keep your brand up to speed both stylistically and thematically. Make sure that it is representative not just of your business, but of the times you are in and the platforms it exists upon.
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