How to Brand Your Business: Expertise from a Branding Agency

Whether you hire a branding agency or rely on your own efforts, understanding each component of building a strong brand is key. You need to ask yourself several questions when branding your business, including:

• Will my brand resonate with my target audience?
• What should my brand look like?
• What should my brand make people feel? 

All these are worth considering because building a brand takes time. BrandCraft is here to help guide you through the elements needed to build a cohesive brand.

7 Elements a Branding Agency Focuses on When Building a Brand

You need to know the feeling your brand should evoke from the onset if you want to create the kind of branding that resonates with your audience. Here are a few steps highlighting how a branding agency helps you brand your enterprise.

#1: Research your target audience and competitors 

Making decisions about your brand is a challenge if you have no insight into your current market. Some of the ways a branding agency can help you research your target audience and competitors include;

• Going shopping online or offline to get a feel of how clients will search and purchase your products.
• Conducting an online search of your product or service category and analyzing both direct and indirect competitors.
• Identifying the relevant social media accounts or pages that your target audience follows and embraces.
• Checking subreddits relating to your customers and considering their product recommendations and conversations.
• Engaging those who are part of your target market and asking them the brands they buy from within your space.

The research will help you understand;

• The interests of your customers and the language they use to express the same.
• Clients you can sell to without difficulties.
• Established brands in the market.

Insight into the details above will dictate your brand’s focus and how it can set itself apart from your competition.

#2: Define your focus and personality

You need to understand that your brand cannot satisfy everyone’s specifications. For that reason, finding your focus and allowing that to inform all other parts of your brand is a wise idea. A positioning statement is the first thing you need to consider in this case because it helps you answer questions about your brand and allows you to create your brand’s tagline.

You also need to think about the words you associate with your brand and a branding agency allows you to view your brand as a person. That way, you will find your voice on social platforms and identify the tone you should use throughout your posts. Additionally, metaphors allow you to establish the individual qualities your brand should have by personifying it.

#3: Choose a business name 

The name you choose for your business depends on whether it matters much or little to you. Since a brand is more than a name, your brand’s reputation, personality, and actions give your business name meaning in the market. A company name is probably a significant commitment to make for small business owners because it impacts trademark registration, logo, marketing, and web domain (URL).

An ideal business name should be hard to imitate and harder to confuse with current market players. Keeping your company name broad if you intend to expand your product lines is advisable. By doing so, pivoting when you are ready to grow will not be a problem. The right branding agency can help you identify the ideal name for your enterprise.

Also, running your business name by a focus group is another option you can consider to avoid adopting a name that is similar to something else you are missing or one that portrays unintended meaning.

#4: Developing a slogan

Your custom business cards, social media bios, website header, and anywhere else where you have a few words to generate significant impact need a tagline, and that is where a catchy slogan becomes a nice-to-have asset. Also as you discover new angles for marketing, changing your slogan becomes a necessity, and the right one should make a strong impression, and it needs to be short and catchy at the same time.

Here at BrandCraft, we can help develop a slogan for your business. This may include brainstorming exercises that play off your positioning statement to generate potential slogans that describe your business. 

#5: Choosing the look of your brand

Your brand’s visual representation is something you cannot afford to ignore, and that incorporates typography and colors. Over and above defining your brand’s look, colors convey the feeling you wish to communicate and promote consistency in everything you do. Also, you need to choose colors that differentiate you from competitors to avoid causing clients unnecessary confusion.

Some of the things worth considering, in this case, include the legibility of colored text over white and black backgrounds and white and black text over your color palette. You also need to identify the fonts you should use on your website. A single font for headings and another for the text will be good enough to avoid confusing those visiting your site, and a branding agency can help with this as well.

#6: Designing your logo

When thinking about building your brand, the logo design is the first thing that comes to mind because it acts as your entity’s face. So, opt for a scalable logo that works at all sizes, and one that is unique and identifiable, which means you need to factor in all places where you need your brand’s logo to exist.

For example, if your Instagram avatar is a text logo, it will be almost impossible to read. The solution here is opting for a square version of your logo with an icon element that remains recognizable even when sizes are smaller.

#7: A branding agency helps you apply your branding across your enterprise

A cohesive brand story results from applying your branding across your entity because it represents the nature of your operations and what your business stands for. Your brand story also sets the stage for customers’ interactions with your brand both online and in-store. 

For instance, when buyers are shopping on an online store for the first time, they focus on an enterprise’s mission and purpose to determine if they share any values with such an entity. After that, such individuals will visit the About Us page to learn more about a particular company’s business model and who they are buying from.

A branding agency will encourage you to share your brand story to reassure clients that you are running a legit business. When developing your brand story, ask yourself the following questions;

• What should customers know about the story behind my business?
• What is the motivation behind starting my organization?
• In what ways does my firm contribute to the world?
• What is the purpose behind the company’s existence?

Since a mission is not the only thing driving every other business, consider sharing your brand story and tell clients the idea behind starting your enterprise to connect with them.

Conclusion

Building a brand does not cease when you launch your brand or create a logo or slogan. So, ensure your brand remains consistent wherever your customers interact with you, right from the marketing materials you produce, the theme you choose for your site to how you package your products for shipping.

Successful branding requires consistency at all touchpoints of your brand. This consistency leads to trust and buy-in from potential customers. Knowing your brand’s identity; how it looks, sounds, and feels, ensures the quality of that consistency. We can work alongside you to create a detailed brand identity that will guide consistency, to increase awareness of your brand. Contact us to get a free consultation.