A lot of business owners when hear the word “branding”, think of a logo, like Nike swoosh, or the bite out of the Apple apple. But branding is so much more than a logo. It’s all encompassing when it comes to defining who you are as a business. It’s not just what you do, but what you stand for. It’s not the color of your products, but what those products mean to the people who buy and use them.
What is a Brand?
If you look at the dictionary definition (dictionary.com) of a brand, it seems boring and maybe even unimportant:
- “a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name.”
- “a brand name.”
- “a particular identity or image regarded as an asset.”
It goes on and on in this vein. But the truth is, in marketing, a brand is so much more than just your mark or logo or what you call your business. It starts with that, but it’s got a lot more to do with the feelings your marks, words, logos, and ideas evoke to your ideal audience.
Because of this, when it comes to branding and developing a brand, you’re going to want to “brand” more than your logo and mark – like your voice, your personality, your niche, and more. Everything you do signals the way you want people to think of your business, and if your brand is personal, you.
In many ways, your brand is the voice or personality of your business. Representing the way that you want the world, and especially your audience, to see you and think of you is how you brand yourself. This occurs through the colors, fonts, images, words, and temperament you share with your audience through your content.
Branding Involves Giving Your Business a Personality
If you think of your business as a person, sometimes you may get confused between yourself and your business. Sometimes your company and you are one and the same, this happens a lot with life coaches, consultants, and those who use their name as their primary business name, and they consider their business one and the same. That’s perfectly fine to do it that way.
For some business owners, this can be confusing because you don’t want your business only to be associated with your name, you, and your personality. You want to build something that can be successful without you being involved someday. Therefore, you should assign a personality to your business that is separate from yourself, starting with choosing the right name for your business. The personality you choose should be attractive to your ideal customer.
Choose a name that fits the personality you want to convey. Choose a design for your website and business that fits that personality, too. Think of how you want the business to communicate. Do you want to be serious or perhaps you like the idea of your business persona being a funny, irreverent wisecracker? It totally depends, of course, on your audience, what you do for them, and how you want them to feel about your business.
But Do I have to?
You may be wondering, what does it mean? Become your brand? It simply means that to promote your brand, you need to truly live it and be it. Okay, you don’t really have to become your brand, but your business must represent the branding you’ve created for it, and if the business is known due to your influence, it’ll work out better if your personalities match. This is especially true for online businesses.
If your brand is more personal, as mentioned before regarding coaches, consultants, and other experts who truly are their business, then you will become the brand because the business is you. But either way, the business itself must become the brand for it to be felt by the ideal audience and the community at large.
This is so important because:
- Branding Creates Trust – This is one of the most essential factors in the know-like-trust principle. If you are known as the owner of a business that represents one thing and personally, you are found to represent something else that opposes that branding, you will lose trust. That’s one reason it would be hard for a non-vegan, for example, to become a very popular vegan blogger. The mismatch would create distrust.
- Branding Improves Awareness – When you are consistent with your branding all the way around including the words you say, the ideas you promote, and the way in which you do it in terms of personality and tone, people will start to know your work the minute they see it. This improves awareness exponentially by increasing recognition.
- Branding Makes Marketing Simpler – When you focus on branding, you will speak in the same voice, to the same audience, in the same way through the channels they like to view your work in. These efforts will be more consistent when you have branding worked out. You’ll know the type of content you want to promote, how it should look, how it should sound, and most importantly, how it should make your ideal audience feel.
- Branding Boosts Revenue Generation – Because branding can encourage your customers to have trust in your offers, you will end up making more money. Even though branding can seem like an added expense, it’s really an investment in your business because branding is woven throughout your entire business – from product creation to customer service.
- Branding Increases Business Value – If you ever want to sell your business, the best thing you can do for yourself is to focus on the branding of your business. When the branding is right, in that it appeals to your ideal customer invoking the know-like-trust principle, it will increase the value of your business so that when you want to sell it, you’ll get a good price.
When doing business online, most of the time you will network online as yourself using your own name as a representative for your business. Sometimes the business name and your name are the same. Sometimes the personalities are the same. That’s great, and it is easier to brand yourself in this way but consider branding your business as a separate entity to make it sellable in the future.
What is Your Core Message? What Do You Want Your Brand to Stand For?
As you work on developing your brand, one of the factors you need to figure out is what your core message or big idea is and how that relates to your business. Your core message is so important for your success because it will help differentiate your offers from the rest in a way that speaks directly to your ideal customer about your “why.” Getting to the reason or why of what you do requires a little digging and research.
To develop your core message, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What is your ideal customers’ problem(s)?
- What is your solution to the problem(s)?
- What results have you produced?
- What makes you different from the competition? Why you?
You must remember that everything you say impacts your brand. Because of this, it’s important to take the time to truly develop your brand so that you have an idea of how to answer certain questions that may come up in the future to best represent your core message and values. If you cannot easily explain what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and what makes you unique, you have some work to do.
What do you want your customers to hear?
If you can step outside of yourself for a moment and focus on the message you want the customers to receive from you rather than what you want to say, it’s a lot easier to craft the message. Saying what your customers want to hear because you truly mean it is not compromising anything because your business is all about them, not you. If you remember that as you create any piece of content your customers will consume, you’ll be a lot more consistent with your messaging.
Write the Core Message in a Few Sentences
Once you get all this information together, you’ll find it a breeze to put together your basic core message in a few sentences that you want the world to hear about your business. It’ll explain who you help, what you help them with, and what makes you different or unique. Remember some basic storytelling fundamentals such as showing not telling, relate the story to your why, and leave people feeling something.
Remember, everything you ever say in public, online and offline, will be related to your business whether you like it or not. For this reason, taking the time to develop the core message you want people to know from day one about your business is going to help you keep it all much more consistent for your audience. You can use this information to inform and inspire product creation, content creation, and all the innovation, conception, and implementing that you want to do.
As you can see, branding is huge part of your company’s success. What does your brand look like?