Why you need to build a strong brand
Your brand is much more than a logo and a tagline.
Your brand is key to defining and designing your customer and employee experience.
Are you using your brand to its full advantage?
Being on brand makes what you do instantly recognisable. Whether that’s social media, advertising, emails, transactional emails, PR, events, internal communications and so on.
It’s not just about how things look!
The words you choose to use matter too. Everything you do or say should reflect your brand.
And that goes for the people you work with too.
Your brand should be an inspiration to your team and something your customers can be a part of.
What’s bigger – your brand or your business?
What do people talk about most?
Perhaps it’s you – as the business owner you may be intrinsically linked with your brand.
Maybe it’s members of your team. People like doing business with people.
Chances are that your brand name keeps coming up. Your business is building your brand.
It’s also what people are going to remember. It’s recognisable. It has things associated with it – qualities like value, reliability and luxury, and memories of emotions like happiness, delight, frustration or disappointment.
For smaller businesses the power of your brand is often overlooked
Every so often marketing industry articles come out talking about the value of large brands like Apple or Coca Cola. Brands like these actually have a value that sits on their balance sheets.
Whilst your brand may not have a value that’s possible to calculate yet, there are things that you can do build a strong brand.
A strong brand helps people decide who to buy from, know what to expect, gauge value and recognise your business or product. It’s what your marketing promotes and is a key part of any activity.
You can’t fake it!
Your brand needs to be truly authentic – not just paying lip service to ideas that sound good and your target audience will respond to.
To be authentic you need to be true to what you believe.
If it’s not what you really believe, if the ideals that you’re creating aren’t really your own, you won’t be able to keep to them and people will see through you – your customers and your team. They’ll be more than disappointed; expressions like ‘let down’, ‘lied to’, ‘fooled’, ‘fake’ are likely to be used. Don’t go there!
If you can be authentic, you know how you make people’s lives better and you’re working to do that everyday you’ve got the start of a strong brand.
This is something the people you work with can get behind. A purpose that creates a shared value. If you’re all working together towards the same goal for the same reason success is more likely.
Once you have an authentic brand it becomes evident in everything you do.
Your brand will define your customer and employee experience
You’ve got a brand that’s shining through but you can’t leave your customer and employee experience to chance.
Just because it should happen, doesn’t mean it will.
You need to keep your brand in mind and define what your vision of the experience is. Then actively work towards it.
When you’re doing this your customers and your employees will become increasingly engaged. Those shared values, the fact that you’re finding out what matters to them and improving your business in line with all of this will pay off. Your customers and your staff will be more loyal, they’ll stay with you longer and they’ll tell other people about you.
That keeps your cost of recruitment down. And your retention figures up.
Are you making the most of your brand?
Here’s a few statements to find out how you’re doing. How many are true for you?
❓ My logo and tagline are documented with a ‘how to use’ guide
❓ I have a vision statement that everyone in the business uses to guide decision making
❓ I’ve created a set of authentic brand values that my team and I live by
❓ The tone of voice and personality of my brand are all documented so that everyone knows what they are and can use it for reference
❓ The brand guidelines contain information that’s used for internal training
❓ I’m confident that the brand is used consistently across all the business’ channels and touchpoints
❓ We’re using the brand to define our customer and employee experience
How did you do?
If you agreed with most of them then you’re really on your way to making the most of your brand 🔥🔥🔥 Congratulations!
If you didn’t – you’re not alone!
We’re going to be talking more about brand, so keep your eye out for our posts.