As we had mentioned on our #MarketingMonday, your brand is a promise to your audience, whether you’re working on your personal, professional, or business brand. Also, when you proactively work on defining your brand, you direct the conversation around your brand (versus letting others interpret your brand as they see fit).
Get started on defining (or refining) your brand with these four tips:
Define your brand’s goals
What do you want your brand to be known for? What is the mission you are working on? If you have not come up with a mission statement (through your business plan), now’s a good time to write out what you want your company to embody.
Research your audience
Go past the basic demographics of the types of people your brand wants to attract and dive deep into psychographics. If your ideal audience cares deeply about sustainability, do you want them to associate that value with your brand as well?
Talk with existing audience members about what they think about your current branding. This could unveil valuable insights that you may not have known about before picking their brains. For instance, your audience may perceive your brand as “cold and unforgiving”, despite your own perception being that your branding was “warm and inviting”. Don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions to get to the root of your current brand perception from your audience.
Seek outside expertise
There is an abundance of branding resources out there: just do a quick Google search right now for “branding tips” and you’ll receive over 7 million search results! However, sometimes reading article after article on branding can be overwhelming and leave you spinning your wheels. That’s when you seek in-person expertise to help you organize your thoughts about your branding.
Here in Denver, we have an excellent no-cost resource in the Denver Metro Small Business Development Center (SBDC). There, you can meet with consultants about not only branding, but other topics such as financial planning, employee growth, and more.
Hashtagitude also provides preliminary branding support to our clients, so if you’re interested in this and other solutions, get in touch with us soon.
Integrate Your Branding Throughout Your Business
Once you have defined your branding, integrate these new insights into all aspects of your business:
- Visuals (logo, marketing materials, graphics)
- Customer service
- Employees
- Written content
Create a style guide that outlines how your staff can use the proper brand integrations in their day-to-day tasks: this style guide can include which forms of your logo are ok to use/not ok to use (especially if you go through a rebranding), ways to write content, and more.
Ready for the next step?
Working with an online marketing agency can be a highly rewarding experience for a small business owner who is ready for growth and wants to focus internal resources on other aspects of their business. Schedule a 15-minute consultation with us today to learn more about how we can help you with your online marketing.
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