Pixbrand Team
Published: 23/02/2024
The world has become a compact place today, thanks to the capabilities that technology has brought to the fore. This connectivity comes with its fair share of challenges for enterprises too, where staying alive means standing out from competition and delivering excellent experiences, even if the products and services offered are similar.
This is where branding plays a pivotal role and is a make-or-break for enterprises in many ways. Brand consistency is now just a factor and a small cog in the overall scenario of branding your business.
Today, a brand has become much more than a logo and brand title. It now revolves around creating an identity that is aligned with your target audience, while also sorting out factors such as customer service, pricing strategy, and product quality.
When we talk about international branding, elements like understanding cultural differences, partnerships, and aligning with region-specific brand messaging while also ensuring legal compliance have taken the front seat.
Before we go any further, it’s important to understand that sticking and ensuring the right set of fundamentals is crucial, and this is going to play a huge role as we proceed further.
It’s a world governed by budding businesses and startups now, where around 305 million startups are seeing the light of day each year. There is no rocket science here; the right branding can indeed, help you in setting yourself apart from the competition.
What is a Brand?
You can think of a brand as an intangible concept of any business, responsible for lending them a unique identity so that the target audience can ensure easy identification.
A few quick branding elements defining a company’s value set include:
- Domain names
- Logos
- Unique products
- Taglines/slogans
A rightly positioned brand can be crucial in establishing trust and loyalty, increasing the chances of making a purchase, reviewing your products, or successfully converting referrals.
A consolidated brand image can make all the difference between a well-established business and a struggling one.
How to Build a Brand This Year in 2024
Identify the Company’s Values and Goals
Like any other process, branding also deserves the right start. Defining the business goals and objectives is the first step to taking your company ahead. The right set of goals and values helps in developing a great understanding of the purpose of your company and the kind of measures needed to fulfil them.While there is no particular set of parameters to define, a few key elements can assist you greatly:
- Mission: How the products/services offered by you will make an impact on the masses with the steps needed to achieve it.
- Vision: Your company’s purpose and long-term goals in just two or three statements.
- Values: Principles and ethics for members of the workforce to be followed in everyday activities.
Research the Target Audience for your Brand
Conducting proper research allows your company to understand potential customers and also have an idea about the marketing strategy that they find appealing. For branding a business, using a market persona is one of the best ways, where it is an ideal representation of what your ideal customer will look like.The following steps describe the process of creating a user persona:
- For existing customers, you can begin by analyzing their demographics like age, gender and location. As a small business owner, you can select a particular market group within your niche.
- Conduct proper research in the case of similar brands and thoroughly study their existing clientele.
- Indulge in user studies, surveys, and interview processes to understand the needs, preferences, pain points, and user behaviours.
- Create a buyer persona with the gathered information based on the common characteristics.
Competitor Analysis
Keeping a track of competitors is very important to identify gaps in the existing market and leverage them to make better offerings to customers. For a highly effective competitor analysis, these steps are very crucial:
- Fill in your niche on Google and view the list of all businesses that appear when you do so. You can also make use of various competitor analysis tools that are available and easily accessible.
- Perform a SWOT Analysis to identify their areas of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Analyze the different aspects of their offerings such as their pricing structure, promotional strategies, as well as locations.
- Social media portals, reviewing platforms, and community websites such as Reddit for figuring out the pain points of their competitors.
- Develop better overall products and solve those issues to capture the market effectively.
Define Brand Positioning
Brand positioning offers a fair bit of idea for branding your business, where you make yourself stand out from the competition to present yourself as a unique prospect for your customers.For this, you can begin by highlighting some of the crucial benefits/features that your competitors are not offering, such as:
- Innovation in products: Charging low for your products no longer makes a similar impact. Instead, focus more on creating products that offer something unique to the customers.
- Economical Pricing: Economical products always attract more customers. But the flip side is that this strategy now has a diluted effect in the overall scheme of things as mentioned above.
- Great User Experience: Ensure that the entire user journey is seamless and immensely enjoyable for the customers. In the context of software development companies, this experience can be built through cross-platform functionality, a great interface, and very simple navigation.
- The Premium Factor: Customers with a preference for high-end products value quality more than the affordability aspect. To penetrate this market segment, you can focus on better product quality by emphasizing the quality of materials and key benefits offered.
Create Powerful Branding Communication
A clear communication strategy assists businesses in conveying their message effectively and ensuring that their values are aligned with the buyers. Begin with a catchy business name, a great tagline, and the perfect story to back your brand ethos, and you are good to go.A few things to consider while choosing a business name:
- Relevance to your business
- You can also try to merge two names into one
- If your business name is long, try to use acronyms to build your brand.
- Take down notes from folklore and pop culture to relate them to your business, if possible.
- Use domain name generators to come up with appropriate domain names for your brand.
For a great slogan, you can incorporate the following steps:
- You can brainstorm phrases that relate to your chosen niche or industry.
- Your slogan should be simple and to the point. Use an online slogan generator for the best results.
- Conduct A/B testing on the created website, social media portals and presence on other marketing collateral to evaluate which option works best for you.
To convey a great brand narrative and story, the following ideas can do a great job:
- Give a good background: Narrating tales of the inception or humble beginnings of the founding members can instil a feeling of relatability among audiences.
- Try for the best scenario: Identify an issue persisting within your industry and then go about by crafting smart marketing campaigns around these issues.
- Make your challenges public: Bring the challenges you faced while raising your brand in front of your audience with the remedial means you used to overcome them.
- Clarity and Honesty: Make sure that you are very clear and honest about your brand with your customers. This brings increased brand loyalty, a big benefit for you in the long run.
Create a Visual Identity for Your Brand
Visual elements play a very important role in developing a brand identity, such as logos, colour palettes, as well as fonts.You can use the following steps to create a great brand identity using these elements:
- Choose a good website theme and colour palette.
- Invest time and energy in creating a spectacular brand logo.
- Align your brand’s personality with the core intent and industry.
- Select and close on the best font set for your brand.
- Understand and correct the gaps in the visual identities of your competitors by implementing them in your visual efforts.
- Create a proper, well-crafted branding guideline that details how the business partners and other stakeholders are expected to regulate and use the finalized elements in your visual identity.
Branding the Company Website
In this new digital world, a website has become a crucial element in bringing the brand to life on a global level. A beautiful and user-friendly website not only helps in maintaining good online visibility but also assists in generating effective leads for your business. Today, it’s easier than ever to create a website, thanks to numerous online website creation tools that come with super-easy setup and template options that you can customize according to your needs.A few important elements are must-haves for a business website to make an impact:
- A Good Home Page: This is the first point of contact of a user with your brand, so it should directly convey your brand to them.
- About Us Page: Company vision, target audience, and business story; these should be the main elements you should convey in your About Us page.
- Landing Page: A landing page is a proven method of making users/visitors perform certain actions on your website, like subscribing to a free trial, signing up to receive weekly/monthly notifications or newsletters, and more.
- Customer Testimonials: Displaying positive customer reviews on your website establishes a certain amount of trust in your brand, motivating them to give a chance to what you have on offer.
Once you are ready to go ahead with a website, try to incorporate the following suggestions in its design:
- Ensure Consistency: Logo consistency, as well as consistency throughout the different elements such as fonts, plays a big role in giving the whole website a uniform appearance, leading to fewer distractions among users.
- Prioritize User Experience: A built-in search bar and intuitive website navigation are crucial elements to help visitors quickly find relevant content, offering them a very pleasant browsing experience.
- Page Optimization: Once a website is created, it is important to also optimize it, that is, bring it out to the world. Implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one very effective way to do it.
Use Content Marketing to Create Authority
Branding your business is a constant process, and delivering the right content to your customers forms a big part of what your business is all about, and where you see it going forward. Creating regular blog posts on your website helps you establish relationships with your visitors and keep them updated about the latest industry trends. They also help in highlighting your expertise in the domain. Conducting keyword research can help you identify the areas where Google visitors enter the maximum number of their queries in the form of search volume, on which you can take action. Then, use these high-volume keywords to create relevant content that continues to offer continuous utility to readers.You can try to create the following types of content after shortlisting your keywords:
- Case Studies: Success stories of the past, telling about how your past clients availed your offerings to elevate their experiences.
- Guides and Manuals: Create encompassing guides and tutorials so your readers do not have to waste their time learning the procedure of using what you have for them.
- Industry Reports: Studies, reports, and other fact and data-driven content pieces help you generate impressive backlinks while also being very valuable for the readers too.
Brand Integration with Other Marketing Channels
When it comes to branding a business, you should try to integrate your brand with multiple marketing channels like e-mails, search engines, as well as social media platforms too for that matter.- Social Media Marketing:
- E-mail Marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization and Marketing:
Brand Reputation Maintenance
You can begin with a brand, but maintaining it for a long time is what the trick is all about if you wish to see your business thrive.Look down for some of the most proven tips for maintaining your brand:
- Excellence in Service: The more satisfied your users are, the more likely they are to advocate your brand. Make sure that the experience you offer is nothing less than excellent.
- Handling Negative Reviews: Be very quick in generating convincing responses to negative comments and reviews. Offer effective resolutions and compensation to help them keep faith in your brand.
- Tracking Brand Mentions: Regularly google your brand to find out the positive and negative reviews of your business. There are multiple tools available that help you monitor your brand mentions in the online space.
- Create a Better Employee Experience: Unhappy employees tend to rant on social media platforms about work culture, so it’s better to ensure a great culture and keep them satisfied with what they do every day.
It’s Perfectly Fine to Rebrand
Sometimes, it’s entirely possible that your existing vision does not align with the kind of brand identity you were carrying on with. In such situations, it is perfectly okay if you need to rebrand. Long-term survival and sustenance are key, and if a new brand identity will serve your purpose well, then there’s absolutely no harm in creating a new brand identity for your business.Steps to Create an Effective Brand
The following steps will help you create not just a brand that exists, but a brand that finds resonance with the audiences consistently with its solid presence and identity. You can create an effective brand by keeping these important steps in mind:
- Target Market Research:
Understand your current market: customers, competitors, and the like. This is a fundamental question when you start the process of creating a good brand for your business.
Brand logos, websites, and other marketing collateral cannot be created without an in-depth understanding of who you are creating this brand for.
- Define Your Brand Personality:
You cannot be everything for everyone all at once. A solid brand voice speaks to the audience more than you can imagine, so it’s crucial to define a personality and voice, about what your brand is all about and who you wish to cater to.
- The Right Business Name:
As a business owner, the business name you choose is easily one of the biggest commitments that you will come across. With a name that is not being used by some other company, you establish yourself as a unique proposition right from the start.
Branding a business revolves around selecting a name that is easy to remember but also not being used by anybody else.
- Brand Biography:
The way you present your brand story is one of the most engaging parts of how users will perceive your brand in the future. This is why it’s crucial to set it not just straight, but make it as interactive and detailed as possible, without overdoing it. Once that balance is achieved, there should be no trouble in getting those leads.
- The Right Set of Brand Assets:
Website, logos, social media banners, e-mail marketing templates, and social media avatars are just a few among the countless materials that comprise the assets for your brand. The right set of consistent brand assets is integral to establishing your brand as a formidable presence in the market.
Benefits of Creating a Solid Brand
For new business owners, investing time, effort, and energy to set the branding straight might not be an appealing prospect at first. However, the benefits it brings in the long run are significant, and you need to be aware of them.
Have a look:
- Better Credibility:
Established and consistent brands give the impression of increased authenticity, making your brand more credible in the process, and encouraging people to make their purchase.
- Better Recognition and Exposure:
If done correctly, the right branding can help in giving your business better exposure, as it becomes easier for customers to recommend you to more people. They know how to begin and where to end with you in terms of introducing your business.
- Bring the Right Set of Customers:
It is easier for businesses to attract the right set of customers when they are in tune with what the company is all about and what it aspires to be in the future. The mission statement of your brand becomes the hooking point in this context.
- Repeated Customers:
Defining and working on your USP, and offering it with authenticity has the ability to bring customers back to you repeatedly, increasing your brand loyalty and instilling faith among your customers to take you seriously.
- Better Revenues:
Good efforts to build your brand allow you to reap and measure its performance in terms of the revenue you generate. It’s a proven fact that brands that have a good presence enjoy more revenue than businesses that fail to make an impact with their branding
Final Words
Establishing your business in the market appropriately is what branding is all about. It has become a necessity too, given the kind of competition in every imaginable industry and domain today. It’s also important to note that branding takes a significant amount of time and investment too, so you need to plan things accordingly.
You can also go through our FAQ section below to understand more about branding and its related aspects from a service point of view.
Branding FAQs
How much does it cost to build a brand?
It depends on the kind of branding package that you are purchasing from your hired design agency. It could range from $5000-$100,000 depending on the kind of requirements you have. Hiring freelancers can also prove to be a cost-effective option for you, where the charges usually range from $15-$300 per hour.
What do you think makes a good, solid, and relatable brand?
A unique identity is one of the most visible identifiers of a great brand. Other than that, a brand’s core values, storyline, and design overall come together for a great brand.
How to create a strong personal brand?
Creating a formidable personal brand revolves around portraying your unique selling points and your expertise across various marketing channels and building a positive reputation for yourself. You should also seriously consider creating a website for yourself, as it can rank organically with the right search engine optimization efforts.