Today more than ever, the companies and organizations that are paying close attention to their brand and the experience it offers in the marketplace are the ones who are winning wallet share, market share, and customer admiration.
Whether you are a newly formed startup with a billion dollar idea, or an established company looking for a competitive advantage, putting resources behind smart branding ensures you move the pendulum from reactive to proactive while staying effective and efficient for long-term sustainable success.
To ensure you’re thinking about your brand in the correct light, start with these five essential elements and strategies.
1. Understand Your CORE Audience
No brand can survive without understanding and acknowledging its core audience and that audience’s wants and needs. Spending time in your customer’s shoes will allow you to enhance all aspects of your brand and turn your visitors into advocates.
The need for niching down on your core audience becomes imperative here because as a brand, you cannot be everything to everyone. Focus on your core audience and service them to the best of your ability. As they say, “the riches are in the niches”: sticky note this saying onto your computer because as you grow and start attracting potential customers to your business, bright shiny new objects can steer you from your focus. The data can become overwhelming, so you want to stay focused on the metrics messages that matter in understanding your audience and its particular needs.
2. Define Your Positioning
By understanding your audience and your own personal perception of your brand as well as the industry in which you operate, you can begin to see the position your brand holds within your industry. Your position is the line in the sand in which your brand lives its core values on a day-to-day basis. It’s the problem you are solving for your audience.
Like your thumbprint, every brand has a unique position. The goal is to find the position you hold and live it every day within every audience interaction and touchpoint.
3. Articulate Your Story Through Messaging
Your brand story is a culmination of taking your core audiences insights and mixing it with your brand DNA (your core values, positioning, and voice). This allows you to create a brand narrative of features and benefits that can connect with your audience on an emotional level while being able to address their wants and needs.
The best brands look at their story as a way to be the hero and take their audience with them on a journey. This is done by showing your top quality content on social media or through your marketing and by illuminating all facets of your brand, meaning your culture, the successes, and failures that accompany being a brand.
4. Package It Based On Data
Your brand’s visual identity should be based on the data collected including your audience, your competitors, as well as the position your brand is holding within your industry.
Senior designers understand that a great design becomes a great design when it emotionally resonates with an audience. This is why it’s important to base your designs on your data, your gut, and emotional perspective of your audience.
5. Strategy of Consistency
The biggest brand killer is inconsistency. Instill a culture of proactiveness and your brand will soar to new heights. If you’re being lackadaisical with your brand position, you’ll start to watch cracks appear as you grow – or worse, don’t grow – because you don’t understand your brand’s position.
Understanding that every brand touchpoint is an opportunity to build trust with your audience, taking a consistent approach should be a non-negotiable within your organization.
Do you believe in your brand or do you just use your brand to sell?
[Originally posted on 7/1/2018 from the Drexel University Resource Center]
