Defining a solid brand is essential to your long-term success. What does a good brand do? Your brand must communicate what you do and how you go about doing it, as well as establishing credibility and trustworthiness.
The problem for new businesses is how to set about creating a brand, so here are some tips to get you going.
Be Good at What You Do
The first and most important thing is to be good at what you do. This means making sure that you sell amazing products or services that your customers love.
If you don’t get this right, it doesn’t really matter what else you do. But if people love your products and services, you’ll make it a lot easier for them to love your brand.
Provide Value
Providing value is not the same as providing amazing products and services, nor does it mean being the cheapest. Instead, it involves ensuring your customers get value from using your products and services.
Perhaps your products last longer so even if your products are more expensive than your competitors’ products, your customers still feel like they are getting value when they buy them.
It involves working out what makes your products and services different from your competitors. If you know this, you can focus on providing more value to your customers.
Be Different
If you are the same as all the other companies in your niche, it’s going to be an uphill struggle building your brand. One of the best things you can do is be unique. So what makes you unique? It could be your products, or the way you operate, or it could be how you present your business to the world.
Being unique goes beyond the products you sell. It is also how you communicate. This involves developing a distinctive voice, not just for you but your employees, and using this everywhere that you communicate with customers, including your website, emails, social media, and in person.
Design a Memorable Logo & Tagline
Part of defining your brand and making it memorable involves developing a memorable logo and tagline. This should be something that people will immediately recognize as soon as they see it.
All of the biggest brands in the world are instantly recognizable from their logos. A good logo is something that you may have to spend a lot of time on, and you’ll want to make sure you get it right. Hire a professional logo designer to help you make it the strongest it can be.
Once you have your logo, use it everywhere so that people become more familiar with it.
Create a Community
Your community is essential when forming your brand, and these days this typically refers to your online community, including your website, blog, and social media channels, so work out how to use social media properly for your business. Choose a couple of social networks and focus on them, which should be the ones where your target customers are most likely to hang out.
Remember that it is your customers who determine your brand. Your brand is only what they perceive it to be, and you can only help to direct what they think. When people get involved in your community and have a positive experience, they will spread the word, and some may even become brand ambassadors.
This is where you can use specialist analytics like www.chatmeter.com for local brand management. Reputation analytics can be used to find out about new reviews immediately so that you can reply and keep up to date with how you are being perceived, as well as how to direct these perceptions.
Keep Your Customers Happy
A big part of a successful brand is having happy customers. Part of this comes through providing a great product or service, but part comes through providing great customer service. That means being there for your customers and answering their questions, and keeping your promises. The more happy customers you get, the more referrals you will win.
And Finally … Stay Consistent
All of the above points are important. But the one thing you have to ensure is that you keep it consistent.
Don’t change your messaging, even for different audiences. Use the same voice wherever you communicate. And in terms of your logo, your name, and your tagline, make sure these are the same whether you use them on your social media account or at a trade show.
This kind of familiarity is important. It creates trust, and that is essential for creating a stronger brand.
Author
Collin Holmes, founded Chatmeter, Inc in 2009 and serves as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Holmes is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside and graduated with an MBA from San Diego State University. Prior to Chatmeter, Mr. Holmes served as Vice President of Product Management and Director of Product Marketing for xAD, Inc. (LocalAdXchange) (also known as V-enable). Mr. Holmes comes with a couple decades of overseeing and developing product roadmaps, business development and managing the process of driving applications to market.
