Branding your business is an important process that sets the tone for how your customers and your audience perceive your brand.
Regardless of it, your business is small, a new launch, or a large incumbent, branding is a key element to your marketing plan and overall success.
What is branding?
Branding is everything your audience sees including ads, website, videos, social media pages, email, billboards, logos, taglines –all of it!
One of the most important, and sometimes hardest elements of a good branding plan is to stay consistent across all your marketing channels and points of customer interaction. Often mid and large size companies have multiple employees that handle communications for different parts of the company, this is where coordination and brand guide is important to ensure that your brand remains true to the original intention of your marketing plan and feel.
Below is a branding project we worked on to update and release a new packaging look!
Creating a brand guide is a great way to keep a consistent brand feel and look, it can serve as a quick guide to any new content, updates, etc made and also be provided to vendors and marketing partners to ensure that they also maintain a consistent look throughout their work with your firm.
How to Brand your business
Think about who your audience is. Marketing should generally always be framed from the point of view of your audience. Whether B2B or B2c, the specific industry, who your customers are, who your competitors are all have an impact on how your branding should be constructed. Clearly document the average customer, why they buy from you, what your competitive advantages are over peers, and the type of person – if b2b, that makes the purchasing decision.
The messaging and visual tone that you develop can greatly help your brand or weigh it down. The more you understand why your customers buy from you, the better, as that helps you to decide on how to develop your brand’s identity.
Visual identity
The visuals of your brand are typically the most striking and memorable, as most people retain images better than text. Everything from your website, web store, business cards, brochures, emails, social media postings, and logo is a part of your visual identity. You want them to stand out, from competitors and make a positive mark, not a negative one. If your website looks like it was from 2003, and your competitor’s websites are much more modern designs, prospective customers seeing your website will be a negative, not a positive.
Work with your marketing team or agency to develop a consistent visual style that’s professional for your industry and that can be used across your website, etc.
Below is a great example of knowing your audience, with a little humor involved. This client of ours saw a drastic jump in CTR and marketing ROI switching to video instead of static ads on paid social channels.
Content marketing is another key aspect of building a brand, content marketing will drastically improve your search rankings which will generate more inbound leads, and it will also promote your business as a thought leader on certain subjects. Again, any content marketing, whether video content marketing or static traditional content marketing should be made to fit within your brand’s visual theme.
Video content in particular has a powerful impact on your audience, as it is much more engaging, thus generates several times the clicks, and level of engagement that static ads do. Consider at minimum a few pieces of video content that can be repurposed for a variety of marketing uses such as email, your website, social media, and even broadcast or digital paid channels.
Video content is one of the most important aspects of branding a business in 2021, as more and more, video is seen as no longer optional, but a necessity to maximize the effectiveness of your ad spend. Campaigns that integrate video are much more successful than those that don’t and have a much higher ROI even in light of the video’s higher production cost.
How much does Video production cost in 2021? Take a look!
Getting Customer Reviews
Customer reviews can be integrated as a strong aspect of your branding, not only are customer reviews critically important on Facebook, yelp, google, trip advisor, etc, as a way to build SEO and incoming leads, but they also are a great way to build content that resonates with your brand’s identity on your website or even email marketing. Using customer reviews in sales meetings and featuring some on your website is a great way to build trust with incoming website visitors and increase the number of meetings booked.
B2B and B2C Branding in 2021
We touched on video brand marketing above, but it’s important to realize that video is rapidly being used and adopted as a major aspect of marketing for many companies. If you haven’t already, think hard about incorporating some type of video into your marketing plan. In 2021, the video will only become more essential to marketing success.
Virtual Reality branding is another important content type that can be used in a variety of ways to brand your business or startup in 2021. Virtual reality takes engagement to another level and is currently the most engaging form of media for all sorts of marketing projects. Virtual reality trade show marketing is becoming a major component of trade show success. Web-based virtual reality content is another way to implement 360 VR marketing without having in-person events.
Web branding is absolutely critical for any business that seeks to sell products or do business online. Expectations for web stores have risen significantly in the last 5 years, with the rising of services like Shopify and others, there’s no excuse to have a terrible looking and poorly operating web store in 2021. Take a look at your competitor’s websites and web stores, your’s needs to be at least as good, hopefully, better. You will drive or lose sales based on the first impression prospective customers have of your web store and website. The investment you make in transforming a outdated, poor-performing website to a clean design that is mobile friendly, is easily navigable and loads quickly will be quickly worth it.
This Kia ad is an example of keeping Kia’s brand guidelines in mind when designing ads that will be used on broadcast, digital and social media channels.
Social Media Branding not an option in 2021, your audience will expect you to regularly communicate offers, special events, product releases and other news through a number of social media channels. Which social media channels you use depend on your niche and industry, but Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube are major assets for nearly any company. If your competitors are active on social media and you aren’t…. well, that’s a major problem. Social media marketing doesn’t have to be hard. Even just talking behind the scenes photos, product photos, showing new offers, etc on posts that stay within your brand guidelines will generate shares and potentially business.
How to Create Brand Guidelines
In short, a brand guidelines document includes everything someone needs to make a piece of content fit with the style of your marketing plan and identity. Include how colors should be used, fonts used, the tone of voice in email and written content, logos, how logos should be placed, and any other specific information that might be needed based on your selling points and industry. Often a bullet point list of major selling points or competitive advantages are included, along with motos or mission statements.
Want help creating video content or a brand guideline ? Give us a shout.
Most companies also have cloud-based storage or any assets needed, this could include templates for web pages, emails, social media posts, font packages, any logos in various formats, and all sorts of other content depending on your brand.
Communicate clearly with your team on why cohesive brand identity is important. Remember, direct customer interactions are make-it-or-break-it moments for the company. Make sure that your team members understand your mission, values and always focus on making sure that customer interactions are a positive experience, which will make it much more likely that they give you a review!
The value of your business is directly affected by how good you are able to brand it. Building a strong identity within your niche, and being recognizable visually and known for certain attributes is critically important for building your firm’s value. Some firms, such as Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, etc, have such strong brands, that their names and brand recognition are worth more than their financial statements and pure financial analysis would point to.
It takes time but branding for starts up and branding for small businesses can drastically improve the financial performance of your business. Many of the steps needed to build a strong brand are not necessarily expensive, considering that many must be done with or without the focus on building a cohesive brand guide and identity.
Volan Media is a top Tennessee branding company and top Tennessee content marketing firm specializing in generating action with marketing content and planning. We’ve helped dozens of businesses build their brand through video content, Tennessee trade show marketing 2021, Tennessee video production company, and Tennessee startup marketing services. Our startup marketing video production explainer video work spans years across health marketing projects, automotive marketing, and others!
Get in touch today for a free marketing guide and consultation on building your brand in 2021!
