With every new business, a new brand is born. Every entrepreneur faces the challenge of finding a visual and thematic identity for their business, but it’s crucial to their eventual success to develop and refine their brand. A brand is more than just a style, though — it’s the personality of their business and how they express themselves to others.
When developing your brand, you’ll want to minimize your costs while enhancing your ability to connect with your target audience. Let’s look at some ways that new businesses can achieve a strong brand identity, encompassing both visual assets and textual tone.
Refine Your Brand Story
Your brand story should always stem from your business’s story. Why did you start your business? What motivates your efforts? How do you want to serve your customers? What describes your company? Answering these questions is the first step toward understanding what makes your brand tick. It’s important to remember that your marketing is what you say about yourself; your brand is what other people say about you.
That doesn’t mean you don’t play a strong role in shaping your brand identity. You need to establish the visual tone, textual tone, and, most, importantly, the value proposition. To help your business stand out from the crowd, you need to demonstrate how and why you’re unique.
Determine Your Tagline
Not to be confused with a slogan, a tagline is a short, memorable yet powerful phrase that expresses your brand to a customer. Think of taglines such as “Open happiness” or “Just do it.” These taglines do more than beef up the business name; they also express what customers should expect and how they should feel when they do business with you.
While your tagline may not have the name recognition that these major taglines do, it can still be an important part of your brand identity. Invest in a good copywriter who can help you encapsulate your brand promise and story in a short phrase.
Then, pair that phrase with your business name. You may also incorporate it into your logo as well.
Which brings us to…
Host a Logo Contest
One of the most affordable and effective ways to get your business’s logo is to host a logo design contest. In a logo contest, designers compete to have their design become your winning logo. It’s a great way to get high-quality work for an affordable price.
While you can run your own logo contest, it’s more cost-effective to have your contest hosted through a site like Hatchwise, which handles the logistics for you. Talented designers each create a version of your logo, and you pay for the iteration you like the best.
Start a Blog
Content marketing is the practice of creating authoritative content that can be used to drive traffic toward your business’s website. Generally, this entails publishing blogs that show up in Google search results and offer valuable information to visitors.
Marketers can always draw upon blogs for social and email content; the key is to create content that will be of interest to your business’s target audience. A blog is also an important — and affordable — opportunity to establish your industry expertise and demonstrate to your customers that they can trust you.
You can forge a connection with your audience by publishing regularly and using your brand story to express your value proposition. That communicates to your audience that you’re fully invested in their success.
Take Time to Connect
As mentioned above, a brand is what your customers think of you, not what you’re trying to be. That means that you need to invest quite a bit of time in connecting with your target audience, so that they’ll get the impression that you “walk the talk” for your business.
Your marketing strategy needs to incorporate tactics that will help you forge a connection with your audience in a way that supports your value proposition. Engage with your followers, as well as prospective clients, every day on all your digital channels.
That includes commenting on your followers’ social media posts, engaging with them on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and responding to them via email. It’s completely free to have conversations with people who care about your company — and that’s essential to building your brand.
Wrapping Up
Branding is not to be taken lightly: it’s a complicated, difficult task that’s also crucial to your business success. The good news is that it’s mostly affordable so that you can start maximizing your profits right out of the gate. By following the tips above, you can efficiently and effectively build up your Branding strategy and start connecting with your target audience sooner.
