Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By James Daniels

Advertising is a fickle process. You can do the same things multiple times and consistently get different results. John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Through work and perseverance, however, you can start to see patterns. You can create consistency within your business, showcasing who you are as a brand. Marketing ultimately comes down to a plan, and within that plan, you define what makes your business unique. You can choose colors, taglines, messages, and images based on who you are and what you have to say.

Branding is about creating a message you take with you across every platform. It’s a representation of your identity and your connection with a community and is built to represent everything you stand for as a business. Consistency is key; consistent branding across all platforms can increase revenue by as much as 23 percent.

Here are five tips for building your business’s brand:

1) Create your customer avatar

A lot has been written about developing customer avatars, yet few businesses utilize them to their fullest advantage. Creating a persona for your customer base helps you get into the heart of your customers and allows you to create a bio of your ideal customer’s characteristics and values. It helps peek into their mindset, discover what they truly want, and speak to them in their language.

You can start the development of your customer persona by detailing their demographics: sex, age, marital status, career, hobbies, and interests. Then dive deeper with questions like:

-What is their biggest frustration?

-What makes them angry?

-What keeps them up at night?

-What trends affect their daily living?

-What is their secret desire?

-What do they crave?

-What websites do they visit?

-How do they spend their days?

This gives you a good understanding of what motivates them and, more importantly, what influences them. Using this information will help you develop a compelling message for your brand that reaches the right people.

2) Identify your message

Consistency is key. You’ll see that message repeatedly rings true as you define your branding. The deeper you go into who your customer is and explore how to reach out to them, the more you’ll start to see the story you need to create. What resonates with you? What do you prefer? Your message defines your business and provides everything you stand for in a concise manner. It develops the voice you’ll carry forward.

Identifying your message is similar to defining your customer avatar. It’s putting words together to speak clearly to your audience, but instead of asking questions about who your customers are, it’s asking questions about the values you stand behind every day of the year.

Too many businesses leave this to chance. They allow it to develop haphazardly over time, with little thought about impact. If you’ve done your work on your message before you release it to the world, you’re more likely to be right on target every single time.

3) Develop recognizable branding

Branding includes the visual elements that are specific to your company, including colors, fonts, images, graphics, logos, taglines, and so on. The unique combination of these will become how consumers recognize your brand and what your company is all about. A Coke can with the words “Coca-Cola” removed would still be identifiable.

Today’s design tools make it easier than ever to develop creative content, but if you use templated graphics, it’s easy to lose your branding. It’s essential to define your branding ahead of time and stay within those parameters with everything you create. The more you define at the onset, the easier it is to maintain consistent, recognizable content down the road.

4) Know your market well

Seventy-one percent of consumers say they want the brands they do business with to take a stand on social issues and help raise awareness. They expect brands to be culturally relevant and boldly embrace those issues within their branding.

You can’t do this without realizing who you are and what you stand for, so take some time to think about it. Then tap into audiences whose perspectives align with yours. It’s an ebb and flow while building your community, but if you do it right, you’ll have customers for life.

One of the easiest ways to start doing this is simply by paying attention. Choose the social sites you want to invest your time in carefully and take a look at competitors who are doing it right. Through careful analysis, you can start seeing what resonates with your target audience and figure out where you see yourself.

5) Use a branding workshop to solidify your brand

Branding is not a one-time activity.  It’s important to develop your branding as you launch your company to the world, but you also need to be prepared to update it as your company matures. That could be where a branding workshop can benefit you most. A branding workshop can help you look at all the pieces in the larger picture and distill them down to what really represents your company and how you want to use that.

This goes beyond picking colors and choosing words. It includes constructing your overall branding strategy and creating personalized campaigns. You can also tap into a network of partnerships that will assist you in developing true brand equity.

Once you’ve built a strong brand, you can use it to connect deeper with your audience through every channel you use. A well-developed brand can be used to impact all your messaging to ensure it’s recognized everywhere your business shows up. Remember, consistency is key.

Partnering with an experienced branding agency can give your brand the edge it needs to stand out. InnoVision Marketing Group can help you get started. Reach out to see how they can help build your business’s brand.

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James Daniels is a freelance writer, business enthusiast, a bit of a tech buff, and an overall geek. He is also an avid reader, who can while away hours readireading and knowing about the latest gadgets and tech, whilst offering views and opinions on these topics.