Are you looking to create a branding story for your business? Do you think creating an emotional connection with your customers through your brand can improve revenue? Are you looking to expand your brand across different platforms?
Creating a story for your brand helps make your business authentic. Building a story allows for your business to connect with your customers through storytelling and can cleanly align all marketing campaigns and future business decisions.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is crucial when building a successful brand. This will help your brand stay on track with the message you are trying to portray. Perform as much research as possible and conduct a market analysis to help strengthen your brand focus. Dive deep into research on demographics, age, and decipher if you are going to target business or consumer sectors. More specifically, if you are targeting businesses, what types of business would need your service? You will need to determine what your customers can and cannot afford, so you can market more successfully to that demographic. Remember, it's all about staying in tune with your audience.
Creating Your Story
Once you've established your audience, it's time to create your story. How does your brand connect with your audience on a personal level? Try to make your brand stand out and beat the competition, so you can reach your audience effectively.
Creating a story about your brand will portray a better understanding of the history and significance behind it. The more open and vulnerable your story is, the more compelling and credible it will be. For example, if there were specific hardships that were involved with creating your brand, don't shy away from the details. Be open and honest with what the motivation is behind the brand. Get to the nitty-gritty without dragging out the story. You don't want to bore your consumers quickly.
What defines you as a brand? Who are you and how can you impact consumers and the community? How do you make a difference? Create an enticing opening line that will immediately hook your audience.
TOMS shoes is an excellent example of connecting with consumers and making a difference. According to their website, "we believe we can improve people's lives through business. Founded in 2006, we understand the imperative for our company to operate responsibly and know that you want to buy from a company that works hard to integrate sustainable and responsible practices into all that they do."
By giving back to the community, consumers feel they are making an impact when making their purchase, which can result in customer retention.
Logo, Typography, Website, and Social Media
Once your story is complete, it's time to think about your logo design, website, and social media platforms. Consistency and coherency are keys.
Find colors, symbolism, and fonts that best represent your brand. What symbols will you use for your logo? What font type is clear, legible, and modern? Perhaps creating a visual board will strengthen your creativity, so you can visualize your brand.
When choosing your color scheme according to "color psychology", blue ties closely to the sea and the sky. Blue represents stability, harmony, peace, calm, and trust. These are just some of the feelings your consumers may notice about your brand when you integrate the color blue. On the opposite side of the color wheel, orange represents stimulatory, conjuring feelings of excitement, enthusiasm, and warmth. It is a fun, energetic hue found in the branding of many sports teams.
When choosing a logo symbol, think about various words, phrases, images, characters, and other visual depictions or sounds that represent your brand. For instance, the FedEx logo appears to be fairly uncomplicated and easy on the eye. However, if you look closely, the white space between the "E" and "x" is a hidden arrow, which symbolizes speed and precision. There are endless possibilities when creating your logo. This is an opportunity to have some fun and expand your imagination.
After looking into the symbol that best represents your brand, delves into research on the importance of typography. Typography makes up a large portion of your brand's visual identity. Popular fonts for 2020 include Helvetica, Ambit, Plantin, and Untitled Sans. These particular fonts are crisp and are quite visibly pleasing to the eye on both print and digital media. You'll want to arrange the text in an enticing, interesting, and legible while still getting your message across.
Now that you have your logo, color, and font you can start building your brand website. Start by writing your mission statement, add your brand story, choose landing pages, and create a theme for your website. Consider adding video, photography, and infographics. Since we live in a digital age, the less content you have on your website, the better. Your audience will not want to read massive amounts of content. Similar to your brand story and mission statement, keep the content precise and stick to the point. Make sure to include your social media links, business contacts, and addresses. Depending on the size of your brand, choose the date of the website launch. Conduct a "soft launch" internally first before going live. This saves you time, money, and allows some to preview the site and provide feedback, so you can make any necessary changes before the official launch.
You may want to conduct a social media audit before launching a website. Sites like Hootsuite, a social media management platform offering social media analytics supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. Once you established which social media channels you want to use, make sure you stick with the same logo, typography, color palette, brand story/mission statement across all channels. Create a hashtag and go live on Instagram to help promote your brand. Posting giveaways, and asking followers to tag your brand can help boost morale. Encourage your followers to ask questions and designate someone to answer those questions.
Hiring a Third Party
How will consumers find out about your brand other than your website launch and social media? Possibly hiring an SEO specialist can improve your credibility. This also improves visibility and your brand will be trusted because you now have a reliable performance indicator. Moreover, it gives you better insight into the status of your performance, and you will have the ability to track ROI and website traffic which can make the process more manageable. In the long run, hiring a third party may reduce costs and could prevent you from hiring people if your brand continues to grow.
Looking to Invest in Your Brand?
If you find yourself needing to find funding for your business, First Union Lending is here to help.
We have nine different business loan types to choose from. This means that we're uniquely qualified to help you find the perfect loan to open your small business.
Applying for a business loan doesn't affect your credit. Better yet, your business loan may be approved as soon as the same day.
To discuss our business loans with one of our lending experts, click here or call 863-825-5626. We'll talk about our various business loans and help you find the right one for your medical practice.
Get started with the process now by learning more about our business loan types.