Building a brand is perhaps the most important element of a business.
Okay, you need a product or service people want or need. That’s obviously number one.
But beyond that brand building is what will drive the majority of your marketing efforts as you work to get new customers.
So with that in mind it’s important to know how to build a brand whether you’re starting from scratch or if you’re already in the process of working your business.
Here are the important elements of building your brand.
1. Determine Your Top 1-3 Brand Values
Your brand is really the vision you have for the business. It’s the values you want to put into the business that will drive all the efforts.
So the first step to building your brand is to determine your values.
From this value or couple values you’ll find it easier to make decisions on many aspects of your business including marketing, hiring and making operating choices.
For example, let’s say you’re starting an online jewelry boutique. You want the brand to be unique and to showcase your personal tastes, but also the tastes of customers like you. And you want the brand to empower women from all over the world to do great things; whatever those things may be.
A value statement or vision can be a short list of bullet points. It could be a paragraph describing those values.
It can really be whatever you want it to be. This exercise forces you to think about the long-term future of your business and what you want it to become. From that vision you can work backward and use the values to make business decisions.
2. Use Those Values To Drive Communication And Decisions
The saying is that your brand is what people think and say about you.
You can control that in the sense that you use your values to drive your communication and decisions.
Let’s focus on the boutique again.
The first value was for the company to have a unique style.
This can drive merchandising decisions. It can also drive hiring decisions. You can bring on people that share the same value and style. And you can give them direction to express that value when speaking with customers.
You can create content for your website like product descriptions, videos and social media content based on the fact that your brand has a unique style.
Over time, your audience and customers see how you use the value of unique style to drive decisions and communication and they respond to that. It becomes their interpretation of your brand.
3. Partnerships
Growing a business often includes partnerships.
The idea is that two complementary businesses with similar target customers get together and form ways to create something that appeals to both of their current customers. And as they work together they get each other’s audience or customers.
I read an interview this past week on Willie Nelson. He said that he was very deliberate in the early ‘70s to bring in different opening acts and big acts for his festival. He wanted a diverse group of fans. And over time, actually just a few years, he built a huge fan base of diverse, but connected people. And he became one of the biggest acts in the world.
This is a simple marketing concept, but fits well with brand building. Once you have your values you’ll be in a better position to find partners. You can find companies that have similar values and when you work together you can communicate your values in the communication you have with customers on whatever the project is: email newsletter, webinar, social media, etc.
4. Public Relations
Next up is public relations.
Don’t be scared off by this one. We’ve talked about it before. You probably won’t start out by getting a huge story on a national TV show, but that’s what you can build up to.
Public relations is getting coverage, even on a basic level, for your brand.
To get that coverage you need to build your story in a way that helps the publication’s audience.
So let’s go back to that boutique. They would build a story around the idea of being unique. They could create a guide that helps women find their unique jewelry style or a list of 10 essential accessories to fit your unique style this season.
Then you take that pitch and reach out to industry bloggers, social media influencers, YouTube channels, local newspapers, etc.
As you work with the writers or producers you can stick with the talking points of your values. They will pick up on this and mention it in their coverage and your brand grows from there.
5. Tracking Metrics
Finally, we have to touch on how you track your brand building efforts.
It’s a little tricky because it’s really not a mathematical equation.
But you can pay attention to what people say about you and how they express their feelings about your brand. You can do things like surveys. You can speak with new customers and ask them how they came to find out about your brand and what their feelings are about your brand.
Any time you get feedback from a customer like a comment that fits exactly with what you want customers to feel it’s important to show that to everyone involved with your company: employees, partners, etc.
These people need to see that their efforts to grow your brand toward the vision are working. And you can even use comments as testimonials on your website and in other places to show potential customers how others feel about your brand.
Conclusion
Throughout this post we’ve talked about values and vision.
The reason these are important is that people need something to latch onto. They want to know how to categorize you and what to compare you to so they can make a decision on what you are.
Hopefully the examples and tips have helped get your brain turning so you can start building your brand. It’s perhaps the most important element of what will become your marketing efforts going forward.
