5 Best Ways to Brand Your Business

Your brand is an important PR tool. It tells the public who you are, describes your products and services, and explains your focus. It also gives details about your ethos, strengths, and beliefs. It sells your story to the world. This is why you should build a unique and exciting brand. 

Why it's Crucial to Brand Your Business 

Branding your business helps you make potential customers aware of who you are and what you offer. They need to be familiar with your company’s offerings and know you will provide exactly what they need. They are aware that you’re trusted and manufacture quality items. For this reason, they are willing to purchase your products and services.

Your branding starts with your business, but it doesn’t end there. It’s also about your products, services, website, marketing content, social media messages, customer emails, and more. Every communication you have must be branded. The more you do this, the more you have what is called ‘branding consistency’. Your message is clear every time you say something; it’s your identity. This is how you create awareness.

You want people to recognise your brand, so you make it distinctive. You create a logo for them to identify with that stands out from the crowd, you use the same font and colours on your logo every time you write something to make it easy for people to identify your brand with those colours and fonts. Look at the Nike logo and its ‘swish’. It immediately tells you that this is a Nike product. The same goes for McDonalds, Marks & Spencer, and other well-known brands.

Why use Branding?

• To identify your products and services so they are recognisable, and give them a personality.
• To set your business apart from the rest.
• To make your business familiar and give it an identity that people acknowledge.

The 5 Best Ways to Brand Your Business

We’ve compiled some tried-and-tested methods to brand your business effectively so you can get ahead of the pack. Read on…

1.  Give Your Audience What it Wants

When you start your business, you build up a persona or avatar of who your potential customer or audience is. You find out who these people are so you can understand what they want, what they like and dislike, and how they live. Once you know these people intimately, you will know what they want and can work out how to give it to them.

This knowledge gives you the secret recipe to success, the opportunity to provide them with unique products that answer their every requirement. Most of the market is saturated, so your offerings have to be unique and tick all the boxes if you wish to be successful.

By knowing who these people are, you can brand your business to attract and reach them. You can offer them products and services that wave a magic wand and make their wishes come true. You’re like a magician, answering their needs before they even know what those needs are.

The more you give an audience what it desires, the more likely you will be successful. Brand your business with the specific voice that speaks directly to this audience, and you’ve found the magic potion.

Understanding who your potential customers are is the first step toward success. After you’ve worked this out, branding becomes much easier.

2.  Build an Original Brand

It’s not only about giving your products an identity; your entire business should have a distinct personality. Your business is your brand, and your product or products are extensions of that brand. You’re giving your audience something they need, even if they aren’t aware yet that they do need it. That’s what will set you apart from your competitors.

You have that magic wand because you worked out specifically who your audience is. Now give these people exactly what they want. The brand must be a particular entity; it must stand alone, and be unique and your audience should recognise it immediately.

The best thing about branding is to keep it consistent. The more your brand is out there, the more recognisable it will be. Use your branding in every type of communication so that it becomes part of your audience’s vocabulary. Sure, there may be similar products and services in the marketplace, but if yours is the best quality and the best-known, it will grab people’s attention first.

3.  Use Branding Tools to Get Ahead

There are several branding tools you can use to stay ahead. Let’s look at some of the most important:

• Logo and tagline: You want your product to be instantly recognised, like Google, Disney, Audi and Nikon, so choose a unique logo in a specific font and with distinctive colours. Also, find an identifiable tagline that resonates with your audience. Disneyland, for instance, is known as “The Happiest Place on Earth”. Beauty brand L’Oreal’s tagline is “You’re Worth it”. The minute we hear these words, we identify the brand with them.
• Website visibility: Statistics have shown us that 75% of Internet users don’t scroll past page one in Search Results. So how do you grab an audience? You need to be one of the top three on that page! To be in the Top 3, you need to use the latest trends in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Use keywords to keep your content at the top to increase the number of users visiting your website. This will strengthen your branding.

4.  Be Consistent

Staying true to your brand – consistently being the same as you’ve branded yourself – is the secret to success. Whatever your brand focuses on, whether it’s a pleasurable experience (many food manufacturers use this focus), a prestigious experience (think of Landrover and Mercedes Benz), or something that is cut above the rest (Apple and Microsoft brand themselves this way).

Use your particular branding on everything you communicate to your audience and potential customers – your website, on the product itself, your communications (content marketing, Social Media, customer emails, etc).

5.  Market it Right

Use many different online marketing channels – not just one. The more channels you use to communicate your brand message, the more successful you will be. It’s the only way to get your message out there.

Online and print ads have an impact, but personalising your relationship with your existing customers through email marketing also works, as does offering informative blogs on your website, creating infographics on your website – the list is endless.

When you identify your audience, you can decide which Social Media channels will work best to communicate with them. Some platforms work together, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You need to know how you speak to your audience on each channel to get the best results. Certainly, being visible digitally is always a good idea for a brand.

Let us Help maake Your Business Grow

We want to help you discover your business strength. One of the key focuses of maakeAcademy is to show other small businesses how to improve their sales and marketing strategies. To do this, you need to identify and benchmark your company’s current performance. 

We have devised a questionnaire to help you improve your performance in Sales and Marketing while optimising your operations.

Take our three-minute questionnaire and discover how to take your business to the next level.

Watch out for more innovative methods and an online course to grow your small business!