Creating a brand that is unique and appealing to your target audience can be a challenge. You need to consider what the brand looks like, how it makes people feel, and if it will be memorable and meaningful to your target audience.
When you start thinking about how to connect your product to your target consumer, you will inevitably have some questions. Our guide on how to start a business can help you get started.
If you have an idea for a business or want to change your current branding, here is what you need to know about creating a strong identity for your business.
What Is a Brand?
A brand is more than just a recognizable name and logo. It’s what sets you apart from the competition in a crowded market.
Your brand is how people perceive you when they interact with your business. The impressions you can control as well as the ones you can’t.
We all have personal brands. Our name, face, style, and way of communicating all contribute to the impression we make on others.
Businesses have many different elements that make up what they are and affect how they are perceived. These elements include names, products, logos, colors, fonts, voices, and reputations.
If you want to create an effective brand, you need to be consistent in everything you do related to your business. You also need to maintain that consistency as you extend your brand to different parts of your business. The best way to build a brand is by first establishing what consistency you want and what feeling you want your brand to evoke.
How to Build a Brand
As you create your brand identity, you must consider each aspect of your brand, and you might have to revisit some steps as you go along.
We need to establish some principles to guide us in building a successful business brand.
Research Your Target Audience and Your Competitors
Before you can make any decisions about how to brand your business, you need to understand the current market conditions. This means understanding who your potential customers are as well as your current competitors.
There are many ways to do this step of how to make a brand:
Search for your product or service category on Google and examine the direct and indirect competitors that appear.
Monitor subreddits that are important to your customers and join in on their conversations and product recommendations.
Interact with individuals who comprise your target market and inquire about the brands they shop from within your industry.
Identify which social media platforms your target audience is most responsive to, and look at the pages and accounts they follow on those platforms.
You can get an idea of how your customers would shop by either going online or offline shopping yourself.
As you go about your research, make a note of:
The easiest customers to sell to are your “lowest hanging fruit” customers.
Who comes to mind as your top competitor—the established and well-known brands in the market?
What your customers are interested in and how they express themselves through the language they use.
Before you continue, it is important that you understand this. It will tell you what your brand should focus on and how it can be different from your competitors.
Pick Your Focus and Personality
You cannot make your brand be anything that everyone wants it to be, especially in the beginning.
It’s important to find what you’re passionate about and allow that to guide the development of the rest of your brand.
The following are questions and branding exercises to help you determine the focus and tone of your brand.
What’s Your Positioning Statement?
One or two lines that stake your claim in the market is called a positioning statement. This is something that helps you answer the right questions about your brand and aids in creating your brand’s tagline, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be something that you put on your website or business card.
You need to find the one thing that makes you different from your competition and focus on that. Make it a part of your brand’s messaging.
You can also start your company by writing out a mission statement that makes a clear promise to your customers or the world. This is especially useful if your company has a cause at its core.
What Words Would You Associate With Your Brand?
One way of thinking about how to build your brand is to imagine your brand as a person. What sort of person would they be? What kind of personality would your customers be attracted to?
Your social media voice and the tone of your visuals and writing should match.
A helpful way to create a new brand is to come up with three to five adjectives that would describe the type of brand that would appeal to your target audience. The following is a list of qualities to help you get started.
What Metaphors or Concepts Describe Your Brand?
When thinking about your brand’s identity, consider it as a metaphor or person. This will help you determine the specific qualities that you want it to have.
Find something that has a prominent reputation in your mind and that summons the sort of vibe you want your brand to give off. This can be a vehicle, an animal, a celebrity, a sports team, or anything else.
For example, if your target market is entrepreneurs, you might want to use the raccoon as a starting point for your brand. Raccoons are known for being scrappy survivors who will do whatever it takes to thrive.
Animals are a great way to understand different aspects of personality. If your brand identity was an animal, what animal would it be? There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, but it can be a helpful way to think about your brand’s personality. For example, if your brand was a dog, you might say that it’s loyal, friendly, and eager to please. Or, if your brand was a cat, you might say that it’s independent, aloof, and sleek. Think about what qualities your brand has and how they might be similar to an animal. Then, decide which animal best represents your brand and why.
Choose Your Business Name
For example, if you want to open a bar, you may want to ensure that your bar has a name that is memorable and appealing to potential customers. What does it mean to have a name for your business? Depending on what kind of business you want to create, it can be argued that either your name will matter a lot, or it won’t matter as much. For example, if you are opening a bar, you will want to make sure that your bar has a name that will stick in people’s heads and look appealing to customers.
We have explained before that a brand is more than a name. The personality, actions, and reputation of your brand identity are what give the name meaning in the market.
When you are a small business owner, one of the first big decisions you have to make is what your company’s name will be. This will affect your brand logo, your domain name, your marketing, and whether or not you decide to trademark your name. Keep in mind that it is harder to trademark a brand name that is generic and describes what you sell.
A great store name would be hard to copy and easy to distinguish from other stores. If you’re planning on expanding your product offerings in the future, it’s best to choose a name that is broad and easy to change, rather than one that is based on your current product line.
How to Build a Community Around Your Brand
A brand community can help a business keep its customers by providing a space for customers to connect with each other and with the brand. Customers who feel like they are part of a community are more likely to stick with a brand and recommend it to others.
Building a community around your brand can help keep customers in touch and engaged.
This additional contact will eventually lead to more sales, customers talking to others about your product, and customers who are more loyal overall.
Here are some tips on how to build a community around your brand, along with examples of successful brand communities, to give you some ideas on how to make your brand community a success.
What Is a Brand Community?
A brand community is a group of people who are passionate about a company’s products, services, and values.
Brand communities help businesses to keep their customers by making them feel connected and encouraging them to identify with the brand’s values.
The feeling of belonging to a community can also make people more likely to purchase a product or service. You are already a part of many communities based on different brands, even if you are unaware of it. Some of these communities are very powerful and people make the brand a part of their lifestyle. The sense of belonging to a community can make people more likely to buy a product or service.
In a world where consumers are constantly bombarded with choices—5,000 brands of cars, 24,000 brands of beer and 300,000 brands of books—brands that have built up thriving communities can serve as a social pillar to guide customers through the purchase funnel. Whether you’re talking about the latest iPhone release or tagging Nike in your Instagram Stories of your workouts, brand communities are all about generating a buzz around a brand.
You can create customer loyalty and keep them coming back to you to buy more if you can build up a strong brand community with a sense of shared identity around your business.
If you want to build a community around your brand, keep reading. This article will give you some tips and examples of successful brands that have built their own communities.
How to Build a Community Around Your Brand
It takes time to build a strong and engaged brand community. You need to be patient, creative, and committed to creating something valuable for your customers. If you do this, you will be able to grow a community that will be very beneficial for your business.
Boost Brand Affinity
One of the most important things for a brand is brand affinity, which is increased when customers are in close contact with the brand’s values on a daily basis.
If you want your customers to remain loyal and engaged, try to find common values and beliefs that you share with them. Creating a strong bond with your customers will make them more likely to want to buy from you again in the future. When customers feel like they are investing in something rather than just spending money, they are more likely to be happy with their purchase.
It is beneficial for companies to create a community because it will loyal customers who will buy from that company instead of its competitors. Building a community requires knowing how to communicate and connect with customers.
Generate Brand Advocates
The customers who are loyal to your brand and passionate about your products are also the ones who are most likely to recommend your brand to others. A thriving community of brand advocates can help you spread the word about your business to a wider audience.
Despite the incredible growth of influencer marketing in recent years, recommendations from family and friends are still one of the biggest drivers of people’s decision to buy from certain brands. A personal recommendation from someone you know carries double the weight of an influencer or celebrity recommendation. Therefore, the more word-of-mouth publicity you can get, the better it is for your business.
A brand community is a great way to turn customers into brand advocates by promoting better brand loyalty. If you post regularly in your brand community, it’ll help keep your brand at the forefront of people’s minds, and they’re more likely to tag a friend or share your post with others.
This will help turn your customers into advocates for your brand, as they will be more likely to share your products and content with people they know. Add social sharing buttons to your product pages, email marketing, and landing pages, and make sure to include calls-to-action like “Share this with someone you love!” in your marketing copy to encourage brand advocacy.
There are some easy things you can do to get people interested in your brand, which can lead to more sales in the future.
Improve Customer Success
If you can build a supportive community around your brand, you can use this community to help other customers.
At Thinkific, their Studio community is always helping each other out. Whether it’s answering questions, giving recommendations, or offering feedback and advice, their members are committed to each other’s success. This often happens outside of office hours when their community moderators aren’t online. This expands the scope of their community and offers a 24-hour support system for members.
This type of brand community helps you retain more customers and also gives customers a better experience. That means they are more likely to be active members of your community and continue to use your products and services for longer.
Drive Up Customer Lifetime Value
It is tempting to focus on monthly sales reports and increasing your customer base when you are first getting your brand up and running. More customers usually mean more revenue. However, long-term, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can be a very important metric for your business.
When you take on a new customer or student, ask yourself:
- How long will they be a customer?
- How often will they make a purchase?
- How much will they spend in total?
If you want to calculate the customer lifetime value for different types of consumers, you can use these three questions. Customer lifetime value is an estimate of the net profit you’ll make from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your brand.
If you have a community of customers who are loyal to your brand, you will be able to increase your customer lifetime value. Having a community allows you to get closer to your customers and encourages them to make repeat purchases. It also provides an opportunity for you to get feedback from customers so that you can learn how to improve their experience and strengthen your relationship.
Any business’s key to success is increasing their Customer Lifetime Value numbers. If they focus on building a community around their brand and keeping customers, they will be closer to increasing their CLV.