Top Tips for Building A Stronger Brand

Branding is a long term investment that acts like the Godfather for everything you do and everything you say. Step out of line and we all know the consequences!

This post has nothing to do with horses, but your brand really has to be built to last and it has to be trusted to deliver on every promise you make. So any time you spend now getting this right, will influence every ounce of social content you write and everything your company puts out.

I promise you'll learn something useful about your business brand by reading on - even more if you get in touch. In the meantime, here are some practical things you can do to make sure your brand is fully understood by everyone who interacts with it.

Write Your Brand Story

What does your brand stand for? What does it represent. Where have you come from, what do you believe in? You can start with a bullet list of core values, but then you'll need to build an engaging story that will support each value. It doesn't have to be more than a few sentences but try to thing big - you really need to understand what your brand stands for and the extraordinary impact it hopes to make on the world.

Create a Strategic Positioning Statement

How exactly does your product or service proposition cater for a particular need in your ideal customer? You can write a positioning statement to communicate this by featuring your brand’s core characteristics. This is a really useful training exercise for your marketing staff because it instils everything your brand stands for into all the marketing content that flows thereafter.

Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your ideal customer is probably the one that has the highest retention rates and loves to refer your products/services to other people. The ideal customer profile is a description of future customers that have the characteristics of your most important customer success stories. If you don't have any success stories yet, I can help you with that too.

Write Down Your Brand Promise

The more any brand delivers on the promises they make, the more trusted their brand becomes. So whatever you are going to promise, make sure you can always deliver it. The bigger your business is, the more difficult it is to make sure that every member of your sales team understands the impact of not delivering on brand promises.

Confirm Your Visual Identity

This is about the first impression - the visual aspect. The images you use, the design elements on your merchandise and in your digital spaces. The images you use to make the right impression that reinforces your other brand values.

A short description of the visual identity includes all of the imagery that expresses who your brand is and why you are different from everyone else. You could start by creating a style guide for the whole team.

Review Customer Brand Touchpoints

A brand touchpoint is a point of contact between your audience and your brand. Try and identify all the ways that your customers can interact with your brand. They might see a banner ad on a fence or railing, or an advert in a magazine or your email newsletter, social media profiles, website and so on. Defining al the potential customer touchpoints also helps with building your KPIs and Buyer Personas

Define Your Brand Voice

The main ingredients of a brand voice are quite straightforward, but if you think of your brand as a human with a clear voice, it gets easier to imagine the impact your brand can have if it is clearly defined. What kind of human being do you trust?

First, imagine you brand as a person - alive and talking to your perfect customer. What would happen if the customer felt intimidated or treated like a number? So make sure your brand voice is true to the brand values you've defined and make sure it has a social presence that connects.

Set Up Regular Brand Audits

There are many benefits to schedule a regular tempo of brand audits. First, you establish standard performance benchmarks. Additionally, you create a routine of incrementally improving your brand strategy.

Building a strong brand takes a bit of doing and some time to steep in society, but get it right and everything you try to sell and promote afterwards will be much easier and cheaper.

My Brand Strategy training templates are available on request, or by subscribing to this blog. Alternatively, get in touch and let's have a coffee.