Creating and maintaining a successful brand is hard, ongoing work. Here are strategies you can employ to increase your chances of making all that difficult work pay off.
Building a brand takes time, effort and dedication. The result is rewarding – an identity and reputation that reflect your values. But the process of building your brand isn’t as easy as letting your creative juices flow. It’s important that you leave no ingredient undercooked, from your marketing to your mindset. To create the brand that will truly resonate with your target audience, you need to provide the perfect basis to grow from. Here are the five steps that you need to nail to build your brand the right way.
PR: Make a good first impression
As a PR professional, my advice is always to build your brand alongside a strong PR strategy. Craft your storyline – which includes a unique mission, bespoke values and an inspiring origin – and deliver a consistent message with your storyline at the forefront. Communicate with your target audience through multiple channels, such as press releases, social media and media appearances. A multipronged strategy helps you establish credibility, build brand awareness and create a positive image for your business.
“The toughest part with any brand is staying consistent.”
To make the perfect impression, ensure that all your PR materials and communications are well written, professional and natural. Use clear, concise language that accurately represents your brand and your values. Establishing a tone of voice to stick with throughout your brand strategy aligns your messaging to your values, and sets out a foundation for social media comms. Bonus points if you are confident, articulate and engaging when speaking to the media or appearing in public; your own personal profile can go a long way in supporting the reputation of the brand.
It never hurts to have the media on your side, so build relationships with journalists and other media representatives (or hire a PR agency to manage this for you), and provide them with news and updates about your brand regularly. Be proactive in offering them information and resources that will be useful to them, so that they represent your brand accurately and positively.
Additionally, be strategic in your approach to crisis management. Plan for potential challenges or negative scenarios, and have a protocol in place for responding to them. This will help you minimise damage to your brand’s reputation and maintain credibility with your audience.
Marketing: Connect with your target audience
With your PR strategy in place, it’s time to develop and strengthen a strategy centred around marketing. If you have not established your target audience yet, now is the time. Become an expert on your target demographic – become accustomed to understanding their needs, wants and behaviours. The best marketers know what their audience wants before they do, and this starts with building a relationship with them.
To connect with your target audience, consider their preferences and habits, such as what social media platforms they use, what type of content they enjoy and engage with, and what types of products or services they are into already. Use this information to create marketing campaigns that are tailored to their niche, and leverage the channels that they actually use to reach them and cut through. You don’t have to be on every platform just to tick all the boxes.
Community management on the social media platforms that your target audience is primarily active on boosts your brand’s reputation and creates customer loyalty and retention. Combining this with targeted advertising campaigns that feature engaging content rounds out your social media marketing strategy.
Influencers aren’t a passing fad, either. Partnering with influencers who have a strong following in your target demographic can bridge the gap in connecting with your audience and give you the credibility that can be so hard to build in the early stages of your brand. Make sure you research carefully before choosing whom you partner with – you don’t want to get cancelled because you are aligned with someone with a bad reputation.
Identity: Make your brand unique
The third step in building your brand is establishing a unique identity. This involves creating a visual and verbal representation of your brand that sets it apart from the competition. You need a logo, colour palette, typography and messaging that reflect your brand’s values, personality and mission.
Establish a unique identity alongside a professional designer to create a logo that accurately represents your brand. Choose colours and typography that are consistent with your brand’s image and messaging, and ensure that your branding materials, such as business cards and website, are consistent with your brand identity.
Your identity should also be reflected in your messaging, including the way you communicate with your audience. Go back to that tone of voice that you developed in your PR strategy, make sure that it is consistent with your brand personality, and use it consistently in all your communications, from website copy to social media.
Developing a clear mission and values for your brand is also important here. Your brand should represent something larger than just your product or service offering. What is the deeper purpose that drives you? What real change can you create in the world that your target audience will want to join you in? This will create a personal connection and build a loyal following.
Resilience: Build a strong and adaptable brand
With PR, marketing and branding in place, you’ve covered the bases for driving the business forward. Being resilient means you accept that failures will happen, but you also have the strength to adapt and make changes to your strategy to stay relevant and grow.
Be transparent by responding to negative feedback or issues in a respectable fashion, and work hard to address issues when they occur. Having a resilient structure keeps you prepared for the tough times, whether it’s a recession or a decline in market share.
Be open to making changes to your branding strategy when required and stay informed about trends and the shifting demands of your target audience. Resilience doesn’t only protect you from failure, it gives you the strength to be ahead of the curve and stay competitive in an evolving market.
Staying consistent: Maintain your brand’s image
The toughest part with any brand is staying consistent. There are busy periods, quiet periods, challenges, changes and a plethora of other external forces that threaten your ability to maintain consistency. To succeed, you need consistency and the motivation to maintain it. Your brand image and messaging across all communications need to stay consistent with your brand’s identity.
This involves ensuring that all your branding materials are updated and accurate. Ensure that your employees know the brand values and messaging so that they have the tools to stay consistent.
Interact with your audience in a timely and professional manner, be active and engaging, and your brand will stay top of mind.
In conclusion, building a strong brand requires careful consideration and planning. By following these five steps, you can create a brand that is PR-savvy, connects with your target audience, has a unique identity, is resilient to change and challenges, and stays consistent. It will take sleepless nights and plenty of setbacks to make it happen, but the end result will be a brand that resonates with your target audience and helps you achieve your goals.
The most important thing to remember is that building a brand does not have an end point. It means continuously evaluating and refining your strategies to remain relevant and effective.
This article first appeared in issue 40 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
