Your business branding extends well beyond the logo, colors, and name of your company. At its core, your brand identity is how others perceive your business. When you work towards developing a strong brand identity, your audience will easily recognize anything birthed from your company.
Whether it’s a new product, your social media messages, blog posts, ads, infographics, or images, people will connect your content with your brand, making your marketing efforts highly effective and relatable.
Therefore, establishing your brand identity is extremely important in separating yourself from competitors and giving you that slight edge. It should be strategically crafted so it authentically represents your company and positively influences the way people see and think of your company.
The good news is that it’s not too late (or too early) to take the steps towards improving and bolstering your brand identity. In this guide, we’ll highlight why it’s crucial to your business success and share vital tips to help you establish or revamp your own.
The Importance of Brand Identity
Here are a few more reasons why creating a strong brand identity is essential to your long-term growth:
- It serves as a guide in creating your content marketing strategy; branding is generally the first step to marketing, helping you get clear on your target audience so your content speaks to your ideal client
- It reveals the meaning and purpose behind your logo, message, and content
- You tell people who you are and what you truly represent
- Helps you design a website that aligns with your company’s vision
- Improves social media content and engagement; you’ll have rich content to feed your social tools like Hootsuite, prompting users to follow you, share your posts, and respond to your ad campaigns.
- You’re clear on how to offer value to your customer, eliciting quality services and experiences from your brand
4 Tips to a Strong Brand Identity
#1 Get Clear on Your Audience
Who is your intended audience? What market (or sub-markets) do you desire to serve with your products or services?
Getting crystal clear on your audience and the pains, problems, and challenges they experience allows you to tailor your content to meet their needs. Creating buyer personas is perhaps the best way to deeply understand your audience.
Knowing your audience is a huge foundation to a successful brand identity. Brands like WorkMarket have excelled in their space because of the clarity they have of their market and speaking to them in a way that fosters engagement, allowing them to become the #1 on-demand labor platform for freelancers and professionals.
#2 Perform a Detailed Brand Audit
Take a few minutes to assess where you are now in your brand identity. You want to gain a clear picture of your current state to move forward toward improvement. The following are some questions to ask in your assessment:
- What are the internal and external brand perceptions?
- How do your buyer personas view you versus your competition? Are they aware? How engaged are they?
- Where are the gaps in your brand performance?
For a more thorough audit, ask yourself what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats (also known as the SWOT Analysis) of your brand. These answers will provide real guidance in creating your brand identity.
#3 Create a Vision Statement
A vision statement describes what you want your company to become in the future. It should be aspirational and inspirational, clearly conveying your business’s overall goals. Your statement can also work as a tool for strategic planning and decision-making across your company.
Your vision statement can be a single sentence or a short paragraph.
#4 What is Your Brand’s Essence
The secret sauce to successful brands is they all have an “essence.” The essence of your company pertains to the emotions you want your customers to feel when they experience your brand. It represents your company’s heart, soul, and spirit, and is typically described best with one word.
Here are some pointers to help you define the essence of your brand:
- When customers experience your product or service, what emotions are elicited during this encounter?
- What are customers consensually saying about your company based on feedback?
- If your brand were a person, how would you describe its personality?
- View the 9 Criteria for Brand Essence to hone this strategy for your brand identity
Conclusion
Your brand identity is one of your most valuable assets to your company. How prospects view your brand and the way you market to them will have a tremendous impact on whether they decide to do business with you. By taking the time to create a strong brand identity, you will better position your business for influence and growth. The key is to be consistent in your messaging and tonality so your brand is easily recognizable when seen by your audience.
Looking for more great reads? Check out these related articles:
- 10 Event Marketing Stats That Will Make You Rethink Event Marketing
- The Best 3 Colors to Use in Your Branding
- Are You Listening? Going Social Beyond Publishing Content.
- How to Find Golden Opportunities on Twitter with Hubspot Social Monitoring
- Simple Tricks for Growing Your Business with Inbound Marketing
- They’re Talking About You on Social Media and You’re Not Even in the Room
