5 Quick Tips for Effective Brand Building

Are you struggling to create a branding strategy that works? If so, the following five quick tips for effective brand building will help you find the path to developing a successful brand identity.

5 Quick Tips for Effective Brand Building

1. Persistence Should Drive Your Brand Strategy

Once upon a time, only a few companies were truly able to create a brand strategy that earned them national or regional recognition, let alone international recognition. These were either businesses that were lucky enough to get media attention or were well-funded enough to employ top marketing and advertising agencies.

Today, thanks to social media and content marketing, the playing field has been significantly leveled. Startups no longer have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue to foster brand recognition.

SEE ALSO: How to Build a Digital Brand with No Money

Instead, it is persistence that is most likely to pay off. Continued production and promotion of great content and customer outreach are the two things that are now key to developing your brand.

2. Create a Brand Persona

Essentially, your branding will tell your customers and potential customers who you are. Part of this is sight recognition. This includes your logo, slogan, the color scheme that you pick for your web design and product packaging, signage, etc. The other side of branding is all about personality.

Think about the fast food chain Jack in The Box. Jack, the fast-talking, sarcastic, and witty clown that serves as the company’s ‘CEO’ and brand representative is essentially its brand personified.

While your company may not need a mascot, developing a branding persona can help you to define the personality and character that you want customers to associate with your business. For other examples of companies that have successfully created branding personas, consider the following:

  • Red Bull
  • Travelocity
  • Southwest Airlines
  • Geico
  • Chipotle

These brands use everything from content writing to television commercials to communicate a specific personality and character that makes their branding instantly recognizable. Take some time to answer the following question:

If I had to create a character that had all of the traits I want to associate with my brand, how would I describe that character?

3. Never Underestimate The Role of Every Team Member

Literally every piece of content that is associated with your company plays a role in the creation of its branding identity.

Stop for a moment, and take that in.

The use of the word literal is not an exaggeration. Content isn’t limited to blog posts, videos, infographics, Facebook posts, Tweets, or other social media content.

This means, the content on every page on your website, customer support emails, the writing on your packaging, your company profile information, etc. has an impact on your branding.

This means that you have to consider your branding strategy all of the time.

Every employee and every department must be on the same page with regard to your branding strategy.

Marketing might be in charge of defining your branding strategy, but efforts to cement that strategy is the responsibility of everybody who works for you.

Of course, social media content is an efficient way to reach your audience with your branding efforts. Because of this, your branding strategy must contain a strong plan for creating and curating top quality content, that furthers your branding, on a consistent basis.

4. Bring in a Pro to Help With Your Logo

Now, let’s get back to the visual side of your brand identity. If you are operating your business on a tight budget, you’ve probably chosen to go the ‘roll your own’ route with a lot of things. That’s fine, for many things. However, there is one area in which you really should bring in a professional. Your logo.

quick tips for effective brand building

A well-designed logo, created by a professional designer can really do wonders when it comes to brand recognition. Remember that your logo will be displayed in print ads, on your website, on your packaging, and in dozens of other places. It should be professional looking, and it should be consistent. It will be worth every penny that you spend to get your logo designed by a pro.

Even better, your designer may also be able to help you to select an overall color scheme to use in your web design, blog, packaging, and other materials. They can even help you select the perfect font for your brand. This will help to complete the visual look and feel of your branding efforts.

5. Use Tools to Power up Your Brand Strategy

Developing and carrying out a successful branding strategy is no easy feat. Fortunately, there are many tools that you can use to make this task a little bit easier. Check out this list of great branding tools.

Perceptual Maps – Create a perceptual map to help determine your brand’s position compared to your competitors’. You can use axis ideas such as quality and pricing, value and luxury, or formal and irreverent.

Apester – Quickly create engaging, interactive content such as social media quizzes. These include personality tests, video quizzes, and more. Interactive content is a great way to weave your branding persona into one of the more shareable forms of content available.

BuzzSumo Pro – While the free version of BuzzSumo is great for finding content ideas that are working well for your competitors, you really need the professional version to help you create your branding strategy. You will receive content alerts that are triggered by author, keyword, or competitor. You can even use the tool to track your competition’s content performance and run detailed analysis reports.

Conclusion

Until you have a strong branding strategy in place, your content marketing efforts will never be as effective as they could be. Use the tips above to create your brand strategy, then use it as a roadmap to drive your marketing decisions.

Have any quick tips for effective brand building to add? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

 

Written by
Kerry Creaswood

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