Back in the 1980s, brand recognition became essential to all major corporations as their distribution of goods became global, and competition became extensive. Major corporations would then incorporate political parties, nonprofit organizations, and celebrities to brandish their brands using their popularity. Nowadays, businesses are using social media platforms to advertise their brands, effectively using digital means to advance their brand towards people.
So, why should you spend money on branding? To have an advantage, of course! Businesses often have a hard time making a name for themselves, especially if they don’t have a unique branding that people will remember.
With the right branding strategies, you can be one step ahead of your competitors and be the first to reap the profits (assuming your competitors don’t have a brand yet). Now that you have decided to do branding for your company, how do you create a compelling brand that will help you gain attention and popularity? How do you make it effective?
It’s simple if you have creativity and wit. That said, here are five branding strategies that can help you make an effective brand.
Brand as an Identity
The brand of your business represents its values, sincerity, and identity. Without a brand, people will not know about your business, let alone do business with it. A brand isn’t only a fancy logo that you slap in your business’ name. It represents the business as a whole.
When defining the identity of your business, you can ask several questions to enforce that idea. Questions like what services do you offer? Or how do you make your clients and customers satisfied?
You can also list down three words that best describe your business. Or you can ask yourself what core values your business has. The more clear you are with your business’s goals, values, and, ultimately, identity, the more meaningful your business’ brand will be to them.
Establish Your Brand’s Standards
Imagine Coca-cola and McDonald’s logo right now. If you can remember it well, that means they have succeeded in making their brands memorable. Naturally, you want to do this with your brand as well, but how?
You can do so by establishing your standards.
In making a brand, you should always be consistent in the fonts, the framing, and the graphics. If you change your brand from time to time, people will forget it easily.
That said, there are five aspects of your logo that you have to be consistent with, namely: logo, font, colors, graphics, and photographic style. Being consistent with these aspects can help you create a more meaningful brand that people will remember quickly and efficiently associate with the product or services you provide.
By being consistent with your branding, people will remember your brand name and logo easily. This also helps if you offer multiple products. With a consistent brand design, people will still know that it’s your product that they’re buying.
Choose a Memorable Name
Creating a name for your brand can be quite complicated as you want it to be simple but not too simple that it’s bland, or too long that people will have a hard time remembering it.
Having a bland name will not only prove to be detrimental. It will be a major disadvantage to your business as well, especially if your competitors have a more compelling brand.
Think of it as an opportunity to make an impression under ten seconds. You want it to be brief but memorable. That said, give your business a name that is easy to remember and pronounce, relevant with the times, and perfectly conveys your business message.
You can also choose a name that evokes an emotional response to your audience. Take note that people’s emotions tend to trigger specific memories. With this information, you should pick a name that will trigger a particular emotion from people, making them easily remember your brand.
Also, triggering emotions can make people be emotionally invested in your business. One good example of this is “Nike.” The name “Nike” is certainly memorable, but the tagline accompanying their brand name, which is “Just do it,” invokes a feeling of inspiration or motivation.
With that tagline, they can convey the purpose of their products, which are sports apparel. You can also choose one that can trigger a feeling of nostalgia, hunger, or anything that will positively associate with your business.
Speaking of taglines, you can also associate your brand with a one-liner that people will easily remember. Not only that, but you can also use it to convey a message as to what your business aims to achieve or what it is about.
Create Value Propositions
If you want to focus more on online marketing, it can be quite challenging as you can’t advertise your products and services face-to-face. Without this kind of interaction, it is quite hard to showcase what your business does best, especially if you aim to advertise your business and the products and services it provides.
Having a brand that conveys your business’ aim, along with the right online marketing, you can make value propositions instantly, without the need to say it face-to-face with your customers.
Your value propositions are your business’ main selling points. That said, creating an excellent brand and efficient online marketing, you’ll be able to differentiate your business from competitors. This would also showcase the things as to why people should choose your business over others.
Build Social Media Presence
Nowadays, many companies are eager to build a social media presence or use technology to build a brand or be more relevant. It’s been a necessity simply because of the sheer power and influence a social media presence and software development can have on your brand. But how do you make your business known in social media?
The first thing you should do is choose the most secure platform and make a profile for your business. Humans are visual creatures. That said, you can create a visual identity by creating a profile that best represents your business. You can use images that describe your business very well, or if you want to keep it simple, you can use your logo.
You can also use social media to answer some questions your customers might have for your business. Not only that, but you can also ask them for a review or feedback to gain some insight into the things you should improve on in regards to your products and services. Also, you can take suggestions from people on how to improve your business by making it more customer-oriented.
Takeaway
With the brand strategies mentioned above, you can start making a name for yourself and make a memorable and sincere brand among your customers. Always remember that with branding, you’ll make your mark in the market, giving your business identity and, ultimately, more customers.
Your brand is your business’ identity, so make sure that it’s presentable and conveys your business message to give your business a boost in profits.
