Benefits of Branding - How Branding Boosts Your Business
The benefits of branding are enormous: It differentiates you from your competition, builds trust, and fosters long-lasting customer relationships. Establishing a strong brand is more important than ever. Branding is not just about logos and taglines; it encompasses the essence of your business and how you connect with your target audience.
Before we go straight to the benefits of branding, let’s get clear on the essentials first:
What is Branding?
Branding is the process of creating a unique and distinctive identity for a product, service, or business. It involves developing a set of attributes, values, messaging, and visual elements that differentiate a brand from its competitors and resonate with its target audience. Branding goes beyond logos and taglines; it encompasses the overall perception and reputation of a brand in the minds of consumers.
Branding plays a crucial role in shaping how a brand is perceived, recognized, and remembered. It helps businesses establish a distinct personality, establish credibility, and build long-lasting customer relationships. Effective branding evokes emotions, connects with consumers on a deeper level, and influences their purchasing decisions.
Key elements of branding include:
Brand Strategy: This is the long-term plan and approach that guides the development, management, and positioning of a brand in the market. It involves defining the brand's purpose, values, target audience, and unique selling proposition, as well as determining how the brand will differentiate itself from competitors and create a strong and consistent brand identity.
Brand Positioning: The strategic positioning of a brand in the marketplace relative to its competitors. It involves identifying the brand's unique selling points and value proposition and communicating them effectively to the target audience.
Brand Messaging: This involves crafting a unique brand voice, tone, and messaging that align with the brand's values, mission, and target audience. It communicates the brand's story, key messages, and value proposition to connect with consumers emotionally.
Brand Identity: This includes the tangible elements that represent a brand, such as its name, logo, colors, typography, and visual style. These elements help create a recognizable and consistent visual identity.
Brand Experience: The overall experience that customers have with a brand across various touchpoints, including interactions with products, services, customer service, and marketing communications. Consistency and coherence in the brand experience help build trust and loyalty.
Branding is a continuous process that requires careful planning, research, and consistent implementation. It requires a deep understanding of the target audience, market dynamics, and competitive landscape. Successful branding creates a strong brand identity, fosters customer loyalty, and drives business growth.
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The Importance of Branding
Branding helps to differentiate you from your competition: In an overcrowded marketplace, standing out from the competition is crucial. Effective branding helps you to differentiate yourself and create a unique identity that resonates with your target audience.
Building Trust and Credibility: Trust is the foundation of any successful business relationship. Branding plays a vital role in building trust and credibility with customers. Well-crafted brands communicate through authenticity, transparency, and reliability. Through consistent brand messaging, exceptional customer experiences, and delivering on brand promises, businesses can establish trust and foster long-term customer loyalty.
Emotional Connection and Customer Loyalty: Branding has the power to create emotional connections with customers, leading to increased loyalty and advocacy. Think about how excited people are when Apple releases a new apple product to the market. That emotional connection comes through incredible products and exceptional branding.
Pricing Power and Market Positioning: A strong brand enables businesses to command premium pricing and establish a favorable market position. Branding increases the perceived value of your products and services, so that customers are willing to pay a premium for a trusted and respected brand. Think of brands like Gucci, Versace and all the other luxury brands. They speak the language of prestige and people who want to be associated with this are happy to pay premium prices.
The Four Steps of Branding
If you do it correctly, you can develop a spot-on Brand Strategy and purposely tie it to your branding. For this, follow these four crucial steps that will bring you closer to your successful branding:
Step 1: Gain Clarity on your Business Strategy
Before you start, know what you want to achieve with your business. What direction are you heading and what is your goal for the next year, five years, ten years. Break big goals into small achievable steps and plan with a buffer.
How are you as a business overall aiming to compete in a particular market?
What products and services do you want to offer?
What makes you special?
Which unique skills differentiate you from your competition?
Your Brand Strategy is the foundation and core of your brand. It entails the following components:
Brand Purpose: Why is your business/brand here? Why was it founded? What higher purpose is it here to achieve? This goes beyond “making money” and rather serves a higher meaning.
Brand Vision: What will your brand have achieved in 10 years? What is the future state your brand will be in?
Brand Mission: How exactly will your brand achieve this future state? (By doing what?)
Brand Values: What does your brand stand for? What are the ways of working and promises of behaviour it establishes and continues to enact?
Brand Personality: If your brand was a person, what personality would it have? Would it be rebellious and outspoken or soft and kind?
Brand Voice: How does your brand speak to its ideal clients? What words and phrases will it use? Does it use specific slang or jargon to resonate with a specific target group?
Develop your Ideal Client (Persona)
Once you have this plan, define and get to know your ideal client. What is this person like, where does he/she hang out? What needs and desires do they have?
Be very specific on this and make sure to take your time to include geographics, psychographics, and sociographic.
This step is important for you to understand who you are targeting with your business and brand. It is the north star of your brand strategy to guide you in terms of decision-making. It will help you to craft an irresistible offer once you have nailed down the personality and needs of your buyer persona. It will help you to understand what your ideal clients resonate with and hereby to craft your brand voice and brand personality.
Step 2: Incorporate all of the above in your Brand Visuals
Once you have clarified all this, you are now ready to translate your foundation into your brand visuals. These are your brand colours, brand logo, brand name, brand tagline/slogan, fonts, patterns, and all your online and offline marketing materials - including your website.
Ensure you align your brand strategy foundation in your brand visuals to attract the ideal clients you have defined beforehand. For example, if you choose to be outspoken and rebellious as a brand, bold brand colours such as red and black with loud script fronts or young sans serif fonts would work well. In this scenario, a great graphic designer would ideally advise you to stay away from soft tones and colours such as purple or blue.
To ensure you align your brand strategy correctly within your brand visuals, I highly recommend hiring a professional brand designer to support you in crafting your brand visuals.
If you’d love to create an outstanding and unique brand design - check out our brand design services
The Importance of Brand Design
The images and personality your brand carries are important to make an emotional connection to your clients and be remembered.
“Humans remember and emotionally connect through imagery”
Our brains are primed to remember information through images. Images directly connect to our human brain’s visuospatial centers. Images help to remember difficult concepts by tapping into visual areas.
Visual stimuli have the power to stick in our long-term memory and transmit messages faster than audio. It allows us to understand things faster and trigger emotions.
As early as 1997, the company 3M found out in its research that the human brain processes visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text.
In addition, visuals evoke a faster and stronger emotional response than words, which influences how well we remember things. Excitingly, the visual centre exists in the medial temporal lobe of the brain - exactly where emotions are processed.
Retention of information is thus increased by the brain's natural tendency to be visual and at the same time by the brain's natural tendency to remember emotional states.
People buy feelings and emotions - not things
According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are unconscious. You've probably experienced this yourself: you bought something that you didn't intend to buy. It wasn't on your shopping list, nor on your mind. When someone then asks you why you bought it, you try to explain yourself somehow - maybe you even come up with some reasonable explanations - but if you are honest with yourself, they are all excuses.
Because deep down you know that you don't have a logical answer to this question of why you bought it. At that very moment, you know that something triggered your emotions, a need, and the desire that made you buy something. This is because emotions and decision-making is located in our limbic brain. This part of the brain, however, is not where language ‘sits’. This is why we cannot explain these so-called “gut decisions” or why we like or trust someone - it simply feels right.
Great brand design marries the strategic part of your brand with the emotional connector piece.
Over years, we have mastered to capture the essence of business branding - take a look at our branding services.
Step 3: Take your Brand Design into Action - on your Website and Marketing Collateral
Now that you have all your brand design finalised, it is time to build your website and your marketing. Your website should reflect your brand and have all the brand aesthetics you are looking for. Hiring a website designer is highly recommendable as a brand (unless you are a website designer yourself). Brands are rarely showing off with self-made websites - and often they are your number one sales tool and online “business card”.
If you are wondering how to choose the best website designer for your brand, take a look at this article
Step 4: Build Brand Presence and Become Top of Mind with Content
The best brand strategy and brand design won’t help your brand if you have not put it all into action. It’s important to create valuable content for your audience, so they can understand that you are knowledgable, trustworthy and top of their minds when they think of a specific topic. For example, Tony Robbins has developed such a huge personal brand for himself that people know immediately think of him when they hear “personal development”. This is what brands do - and this is why it is important to build that content up and build a following.
Ways to build your online presence are:
Social Media
The biggest one by far still is Instagram. Starting an instagram profile is easy. Try to find an instagram handle that ideally has the same name as your brand. If it is not available anymore, pick something similar - try to stick as close as possible to your actual brand name or personal name to help people recognise your brand.
Blogging
Long lasting content is simply fabulous. While creating content for socials might have immediate impact, creating blog posts for people to find you on Google is a way more long-lasting strategy. Write about your topic of expertise, give helpful tips and tricks and people will remember you. Just make sure the content stays close to your topic of expertise. For example, if you are a therapist, you might want to write about mental health and approaches to therapy, showcase case studies or client interviews (if your clients are happy to do that). If you out of a sudden post a review about the best beaches to visit in Portugal, that will hurt your brand, because it creates confusion.
Podcasting
Honestly, podcasts are great to create a following. People who listen to you will become your fans over the course of time. However, podcasts are rarely just randomly discovered and often need another marketing effort to be found. Think of what can accompany a podcast. Often, this is blogging, because transcription services can transcribe your audios and you can repurpose them as blog posts.
Youtube
Youtube is another long-lasting content piece and goes really well and continues to rise. What’s also really nice about Youtube is that you can actually make money from Youtube if you reach a high following - so perfect really if you love creating videos and enjoy speaking into a camera.
Speak at Online Events
Speaking at industry online events is a game change for many. You build connections and authority. This is a wonderful way to build your brand presence. There are tons of webinars on LinkedIn - a great way to collaborate and build a following.
Wow - what a journey!
If you are now thinking: Developing your brand is an insane task - yes, you are right. Often this process is totally underestimated in terms of work and effort. This is by brand and website designers are so valuable to have at your side when you are starting this journey.
Curious about our services? Take a look and let’s have a chat about your branding project.
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I’m Brand Strategist & Brand Designer and support you in building an emotional connection to your ideal clients through your Branding
