What’s your brand concept?
Your brand is the foundation of your entire business. It’s how customers relate to your business and the connection they have to your company. A strong brand means a strong business.
You have customers who are loyal because they understand your company and you understand your customers.
Do you want to know how you can create a powerful brand concept and present it in a way that resonates with your audience?
Keep reading to find out.
Defining Your Brand
Do you know what a brand is? It’s not your logo. It’s not an icon. It’s a promise. It’s also how people perceive your company and how they talk about your company. When your promise and customer perception are the same, you have a strong brand. When you don’t deliver on your promise and customers don’t have a good impression, your business will suffer.
You need to have a promise and consistently deliver on that promise. That will create a strong impression in the minds of customers. Here is the step-by-step process that shows you how to do just that.
Your Audience
Your business has one purpose. Believe it or not, it’s not to be profitable. Profitability is important, but you’re missing a big part of the equation. Your purpose is to serve your customers. When you do that and always put your customers first, it’s inevitable that you will build a profitable business.
Everything about your business, including your brand, needs to start and end with your customers. You need to understand your customers in order to create a brand that matters to them.
Think of a brand as a rallying cry for your business. What would compel people to rally around your business?
Do a deep dive into your audience to get this answer. You want to know demographic information like age, gender, income, and location. Follow that up with psychographic information. That addresses the motivations behind a purchase.
For example, you have a fitness business that caters to women in their 40s. It’s easy to assume that they want to lose weight and focus your brand on that.
However, you could be missing out on an important factor, like feeling younger or being able to fit into a dress from years ago.
These underlying factors are critical to helping you create a brand that resonates with your target audience. It’s hard work to do, but worth every second spent on it.
Research Your Competition
Once you understand your audience, you want to see how your competition addresses their needs. Using the fitness business example, you may find that no one in your area targets women in their 40s, or they just focus on weight loss.
What you want to do is pick 3-4 of your top competitors in your industry. Look at the key messages they use to attract customers.
You also want to note how they communicate those messages visually. What kind of colors do they use? What fonts and images do they use?
Be sure to note the types of services they offer, how they market their business, and how their business is perceived in the marketplace. You can get a lot of that information online and by reading reviews from their customers.
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Why is Brand Consistency Important for Business?
What Sets Your Business Apart?
This is the most important question you need to answer about your business. It defines your business and your brand.
In your competitive research, you should have found gaps in how your customers are being served. You can take these gaps and use them to your advantage.
This is your opportunity to position your business to address one or more of the gaps that your competitors don’t address.
In the roofing industry, it’s hard to set your business apart. You find that everyone seems to offer emergency services, but you find that no one addresses navigating insurance claims. That’s usually left to the homeowner.
You know that no one likes to deal with insurance claims, so you position your company to help your customers to deal with them. That becomes part of your brand concept.
Your Brand Personality
This is one of the most fun exercises to do when developing your brand concept. You treat your company and your brand as an actual person. Answer these questions about your brand:
# What kind of car would your brand drive?
# What would they wear?
# Where do they shop?
# What’s your brand’s favorite song?
# What does your brand read?
# Where do they get their news from?
# Where would your brand go on vacation?
Go back and review your answers and make sure that it’s consistent with your target audience. You may find that your brand personality is high-end, but your customers are price shoppers.
If there’s an inconsistency, go back and revise your brand personality or adjust your target audience.
Designing the Brand Visuals
You should know enough about your brand concept to create the visuals for it. People can interpret visuals much faster than text. This is where color, fonts, and images all work together to create a visual representation of your brand concept.
Develop a Color Palette
Colors say a lot about your brand concept. You can use colors to convey emotions like security or happiness or urgency.
You may be working with one or two colors initially. You can use a site like Coolors.co to create a color palette that is unified.
Typography
You want to choose 2-3 fonts the visuals of your brand concept. This will be applied primarily on brochures and your website. You can use one primary font for plain text and then have 1-2 other fonts for headings.
Executing Your Brand Concept
The one place where companies stumble is in the execution of your brand concept. Your brand concept relies on consistency in order to work. That consistency allows your brand to become more recognizable, and it can lead to more revenue for your business.
What happens is that people recognize your brand after repeated and consistent views. This builds trust over time, which leads to more purchases. Here are some tips to help you execute your brand concept consistently.
Brand Guidelines
The very first step in executing your brand concept is to create a set of brand guidelines.
Your brand will be used across many different departments. Marketing, sales, operations, and customer service all have an impact on your brand.
Brand guidelines will help you deliver that consistent experience. This spells out the color scheme, logo usage, and fonts. This ensures that the visuals are used in a consistent fashion. You can see Spotify’s brand guidelines as an example.
Website
Your website will be the centerpiece of your branding and marketing efforts. It’s where people will go to learn more about your business and decide if they want to book an appointment or buy from you.
You want to make sure that the brand story and look is consistent throughout the site. The messaging needs to focus on the customer and why your brand is different from the competition.
You have to be able to answer the question, “why would I buy from you?”
You do that through color, typography, images, and storytelling. It’s not easy to do, but when you hit the mark, you’re bound to get sales.
SEO
You have Your centerpiece set up, now it’s time to set up ways to get traffic to your site. One of the most effective ways to do that is through SEO. It allows you to reach people who are searching for your product or services.
Your brand concept needs to be present throughout every customer touchpoint. Customers have a process before they buy from you. You can use a company like www.seoexplode.com to reach customers at every stage.
Customers will try to solve the problem themselves, research options, and then decide where to buy from.
A bicycling company can reach people by offering tips on bike maintenance and great places to ride. These articles will reach people who are already cycling and want general information about biking.
The company can then offer articles that compare different brands to target people who are researching bikes to buy. SEO can then be used to target people who are ready to buy and search for “bike shops near me.”
Most businesses make the mistake of targeting people in the later stages of the buying process. While your company will be in front of these customers, you aren’t making the connection between your brand and potential customers.
Targeting all stages of the buying process gives you the opportunity to share your brand concept, build credibility and trust with buyers.
Build Your Brand Concept
There’s a lot to creating a brand concept. You have to create a brand that resonates with your target audience and sets your business apart.
You also have to make sure that your brand is consistent across your company. That’s where brand guidelines can be of great use.
When you have a brand that’s aligned with your audience and consistent, you have a way to break through the noise and set yourself apart from the competition.
Do you want more great content? Check out the web design section of the blog for more web design inspiration.
