No matter what kind of business you are planning to start, a strong and recognizable brand is going to be one of your biggest assets. Around sixty percent of consumers prefer to buy products or services from brands that they are familiar with, which is why strong branding, along with marketing and relationship-building with your customers is key to building that familiarity and getting your business off the ground. Your brand is the overall perception and view that your customers have of your business, including aspects such as visual branding, brand voice, and customer experience. So, what can you do as you get your new business started to build a solid brand?
Understand Your Target Market:
The first step towards building a strong brand is understanding your target market. Once you have gotten to know exactly who your ideal customers are and what they like, you will find it much easier to put together a strong brand that they can relate to and will want to get to know better. Spend time learning about your target audience from a range of channels like social media, customer surveys, and focus groups – and don’t be afraid to get their opinion directly on branding ideas to find out exactly what they’re going for.
Be Relevant:
When it comes to choosing your visual brand, a relevant logo and brand colors will make it easier for your customers to associate your logo and branding with what you do. Spend some time thinking of creative logo ideas and try to incorporate your business name or what you offer into the visual side of things. Not only will this help with brand recognition in the future, but it will help you out as a new company by instantly providing potential customers with some information on what they might expect.
Be Consistent:
Once you have put a visual brand together, it’s important to be highly consistent with it whether that’s inserting the logo onto your website or having commercial graphics installations for your van or car. Wherever your brand is shown or seen, it should be the same – think of any instantly recognizable brand that you know, and one of the first things that will come to mind is just how consistent they are online, in-person, in print media, on TV and everywhere else.
Create a Brand Voice:
Many business owners stop at the visual brand – but the truth is that branding goes much further than just a nice logo and colors. Think of your brand as a person – if it was a human, what would they be like? What kind of language would they use? What do they get excited about? Adding this human touch when creating a brand voice that you’re consistent with over time will help make your business more relatable, improving the customer relationships that you build.
In any industry, strong branding is one of the first factors to master if you want to build and run a successful future business.
