Every business needs to have a “brand”, and that will mean different things to every business. It is no less important for businesses now than it was ten, twenty, or even fifty years ago! On the outside, your business’s brand may seem to cover simple things like colors and logos, but in reality your brand is the entire identity of your business. It gives you personality and helps you stand out amongst an ever-growing sea of competitors! Consumers get exposed to dozens of new brands every day thanks to social media and digital marketing, which is great for the consumer but makes the market more competitive for businesses trying to make their mark. By investing in a strong brand that grabs and holds your customers’ attention, you have the chance to hold some control over how your business is perceived in the public eye. Branding is never something to overlook.
Building Brand Identity
Brand identity is the basis of your brand; it’s where you begin to lay out what you want your business to look like, how you want to present to your customers, and how you want them to feel in response. This can start with emotion and response - what kind of persona do you want to embody with your business? Do you want to come across as caring, warm, and comforting? Bold, energetic, and exciting? Calm, professional, and intelligent? You can promote these ideas and feelings with design aspects such as:
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Logo design and shape
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Color schemes
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Typography and fonts
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Image style and type
Design is all about psychology, whether we’re aware of it or not. Even subtle aspects like the boldness of a font tells something about your business’s personality and can influence perception. Inside your business and out, your branding should encompass a clear, complete vision and stick to the messaging you want to convey.
Consistency Across All Platforms
Building a cohesive physical design for your brand not only pulls design aspects together into something recognizable, but can also help your branding stay consistent. If you had to choose between a business with clear, professional-looking branding and a business that hasn’t made this effort, you probably know which one you’d trust more. Clear, consistent branding helps establish credibility with your consumers - it inspires confidence that you know what you’re doing with your business and they know what to expect. You’ve put forth the effort to prove that you’re trustworthy and reliable. Creating a style guide with specifics can help with this consistency so the same colors, fonts, and messaging can be used across multiple channels, whether it’s in your advertisements, in your business space or storefront, or across branded collateral like business cards, letterhead, and packaging. If you think about the most recognizable brands in the world, their design is always consistent and you almost immediately know what company’s product you’re looking at. Doing the same for your business is a big step towards gaining trusting, loyal repeat customers in your market.
Branding and Customer Loyalty
Your business probably isn’t centered around one-time customers who use your services once and never come back - you want to foster those relationships and create repeat customers as often as possible! With well-developed branding, you can give your business a personality that people can relate and connect to, building trust and developing those first-timers into loyal customers. When a consumer has that kind of connection, your business becomes more inviting and appealing than a company that’s cold, clinical, and all-business.
Giving your brand a touch of humanity and emotion appeals to the emotions of your audience. When you create this branding around a mission statement or messaging that people actually care about, then your customers feel the urge to connect of their own volition and won’t feel taken advantage of, either. You’ll put yourself and your business miles ahead of other companies who aren’t taking advantage of the appeal to their own consumers’ emotions.
Measuring Brand Success
The branding you develop is key to establishing your business’s identity, but it doesn’t mean it’s permanent and infallible. Even the most identifiable brands in the present day have evolved and been carefully developed over time since the company’s inception. You can measure the impact of your branding and strategies through a few different tangible indicators and measurable insights:
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Brand Awareness: Website traffic, social media followers, SEO, and brand recognition surveys can be primary indicators of brand awareness. Monitoring the growth and reach of your brand’s awareness can provide a tangible measure of impact over time.
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Customer Engagement: Social media engagement (like, comments, shares), email open rates, click-through rates, and time spent on your website are great ways to measure the level of interaction and involvement with your brand. Increased engagement signifies a strong connection resonating between your business and your audience.
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Brand Perception: Surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback can provide crucial insights into your brand perception through sentiment analysis and reviews. These in turn can help measure factors like brand image, reputation, trust and associations.
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Market Differentiation: Successful branding should make your business stand out from your competitors. Position yourself with distinction and compare metrics like brand mentions, customer preference, or perceived uniqueness to assess how well your brand stands out in the market.
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Financial Performance: Financial performance does not directly determine the success or failure of your branding, but it can reflect the impact of your brand on your business results. Common results like revenue growth, profit margins, or return on investment (ROI) can be included with other factors when determining the effectiveness of your brand strategy.
Investing in Your Brand
You shouldn’t expect to establish your business on a name or product alone and immediately reach your goals. Progress takes time, but that progress won’t get very far without strong branding to support your business. From a consistent, clear message through design and advertising to gaining loyal customers who connect with your business’s personality, making your mark with unique and carefully curated branding is a vital cornerstone to establishing credibility and trust with your consumers. And even if you’re unsure, there are metrics and measurements to monitor to determine your brand’s effectiveness in the public eye. Using those metrics to fine tune your brand can help you find the key to success.
Getting Started
However, developing strong, stand-out branding for your business may be intimidating, and you may not know where to start. It’s so vital to the success of your business in the short- and long-term, but how do you know what will be effective or not? AlphaGraphics has a slough of expertise available to you, and we’re never out of reach! From our in-house design team with the newest trends at their fingertips to skilled marketers always keyed in to new and emerging technologies and research, you don’t have to make this journey alone. We can even help you understand how to track your metrics and provide advice when adjustments are needed. Make an appointment with our marketing team today, and see how the right branding strategies can lead to your business’s success!
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