Here’s a quick guide on how to build your brand from scratch. Learn the importance of branding and how to create a brand identity for your company.
If there’s a checkmark anywhere, it’s Nike. When someone says fried chicken, you automatically assume they are talking about his KFC.
Even if you don’t know the brand name, you can buy the product just by looking at the logo. Sometimes I listen to jingles on TV and hum along all day long.
These are powerful branding effects.
Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Jeff Bezos
Branding is more about the experience provided than the products/ services offered by a business. That said, 87% of customers agree that they expect brands to offer a consistent experience across multiple devices and platforms.
Branding is about identifying and defining your brand voice. Marketing is all about building brand awareness.
For example, Indulgeo Essentials branding is that they are an all-organic and natural beauty brand.
Contents
- What is a Brand?
- What is Branding?
- What is the Importance of Branding?
- 1. Branding increases recognition
- 2. Branding helps acquire new customers easily
- 3. Branding provides a good reputation
- 4. Branding sets you apart from your competitors
- 5. Branding helps you stay focused on your goals
- 6. Branding adds value to your business
- 7. Branding increases employee pride and satisfaction
- How to Build a Brand From Scratch
- Conclusion
- FAQ’s
What is a Brand?
A brand is the element or combination of elements that distinguishes your company from others.
It contains multiple features such as colors, slogans, logos, visions and icons.
Apart from these tangible elements, brands also classify intangible elements such as the experience a customer has when interacting with a company.
Brand – Starbucks
For example, if you can buy coffee at a street coffee shop, most people will choose Starbucks. Because Starbucks is a brand.
A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
Seth Godin
What is Branding?
Branding is about creating a unique identity and experience for your business. It’s a very comprehensive process that requires a lot of research and strategy discovery.
From your brand’s visual appeal to the type of experience your brand offers to your customers, everything must be carefully calculated before you take action.
Furthermore, the main goal of the branding process is to differentiate yourself from your competitors and other companies in the market.
Source
For example, Apple Inc. is a technology company that chose the name Frucht for its brand name and logo. It’s a quirky decision that has set us apart from our competitors for decades.
Branding helps present a unified front in the market. We use the same brand elements in our advertising, packaging, and marketing.
It helps with brand recall, where customers begin to associate the brand over time without any visual or auditory stimulus. Branding is not just how the market and customers perceive your company. It also plays an important role in enhancing brand reputation and brand value.
A strong brand in terms of recognition, trust, and recognition makes a company invaluable to its stakeholders.
Pro Tips
Contrary to popular belief, brands are not just about companies, people can be brands too. and beliefs, etc.
What is the Importance of Branding?
Now that you have a basic understanding of what branding is all about, the next obvious question is, why is it important?
So here we cover some of the reasons why branding is important for every business:
1. Branding increases recognition
Branding helps create a unique identity for your business in terms of logos, taglines, value propositions, and more.
When you use this identity in all your communications, people will recognize your brand with the simplest cues such as your brand colors and logo.
2. Branding helps acquire new customers easily
When people see a company with a good brand image, they are more likely to buy from it. A brand with a great identity has a much easier time acquiring new customers.
Also, a strong brand attracts a lot of positive word of mouth. Your loyal customers will recommend you to their friends and family.
3. Branding provides a good reputation
Maintaining your brand reputation is easy because managing reputation is a big part of branding.
As mentioned earlier, when customers start to trust your brand, they will say good things about you within their sphere of influence.
4. Branding sets you apart from your competitors
When you start a business these days, your competition is usually global. Finding a competitive advantage is therefore critical to the survival of your business.
Branding creates a unique identity for your business and helps differentiate it from its competitors.
5. Branding helps you stay focused on your goals
When you start a business these days, your competition is usually global. Finding a competitive advantage is therefore critical to the survival of your business.
Branding creates a unique identity for your business and helps differentiate it from its competitors.
6. Branding adds value to your business
Without branding, your business is all about the products and services you offer. Even if it is of high quality, it does not add value to your business.
Strong branding, on the other hand, helps add value to your business beyond your physical assets.
7. Branding increases employee pride and satisfaction
Branding affects not only your public image but also the way your employees see your company.
People who work for brands with a strong positive image in the marketplace are twice as likely to be job satisfied and feel proud to be associated with the company.
Here are some of the reasons why branding is so important to your business. But branding is also an ongoing process with long-term goals.
So let’s take a quick look at how to build a brand, where to start, and how to approach this process.
How to Build a Brand From Scratch
We may sound repetitive here, but a lot goes into the process of building a brand. To make it easier to understand, let us break the process down into 3 categories.
These are the 3 important steps in the branding process:
- Creating the brand strategy
- Creating the brand identity
- Handling the brand marketing
Now we can go ahead and take a closer look at each of these steps and everything that goes into them.
1. Brand strategy
The first step in building a brand is creating a brand strategy. This includes researching, identifying, and establishing brand voices and unique selling propositions.
Determine your brand’s voice
Determining what your brand sounds like is very important to the branding process.
Does your brand exude luxury, power, or strength? Is your brand friendly and approachable or ironic and humorous? Does your brand set trends or follow trends? are you there?
Simple questions like this can help you find the right voice and tone for your brand. For example, Tiffany’s trademark voice is elegant, witty, and classy. The brand maintains this voice in social media posts, press releases, and marketing campaigns.
The brand voice is also what the brand stands for. These attributes can also determine a brand’s voice if the brand promotes sustainability, authenticity, and empowerment.
Over 71% of consumers say they expect brands to take a stand on sensitive topics and help raise awareness.
For example, dub voices are generally very strong and positive. Promotes positive images of equality and beauty through her advertising and social posts on her media.
Once you’ve identified your brand’s voice, be sure to maintain that voice and tone consistently.
Determine your brand’s ideal market
There is no question why you need to identify your target market. If you want to sell something, you need to know who is likely to buy it.
Determining your ideal market can help you focus your marketing efforts and save a lot of time and money.If you target the right audience, your chances of converting them into customers are also much higher. increase.
Determining your ideal market is a research-intensive step in branding. You need a framework to fill in the details that you think would make an ideal customer.
Aspects of this framework include gender, age, location, interests, challenges, fears, and more.
If you sell yoga mats online, your ideal customer might be:
| Framework | Ideal Customer Details |
|---|---|
| Gender | All gender |
| Age group | 18 to 40 years old |
| Location | USA |
| Challenges | Stressful work environment Unhealthy food habits No time for a workout |
| Goals | To stay fit Increase focus Manage stress better |
| Interest | Yoga Aerobics Fitness |
There is no question why you need to identify your target market. If you want to sell something, you need to know who is likely to buy it.
Determining your ideal market can help you focus your marketing efforts and save a lot of time and money.If you target the right audience, your chances of converting them into customers are also much higher. increase.
Determining your ideal market is a research-intensive step in branding. You need a framework to fill in the details that you think would make an ideal customer.
Aspects of this framework include gender, age, location, interests, challenges, fears, and more.
If you sell yoga mats online, your ideal customer might be:
Research competitors and top players
Once you’ve determined your brand voice and identified your Once you have your brand voice decided and your target market locked the next step is to conduct an extensive competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis is like testing the water by dipping your toes in before diving deep into it.
You need to find out who your competitors are and who are the top players in your industry and target market.
Here’s how to collect information to help you with your branding process:
- Visit their website to analyze their brand identity like colors, logo, tagline, vision, mission, etc.
- Analyze their pricing strategy. How competitive are their prices? Can you offer a lower price somehow?
- Go through the customer reviews and ratings to find the pros and cons of your competitors.
- Visit their social media channels to find their brand voice and how they are using it on these platforms.
- Analyze their unique selling points. What sets them apart from the rest of the businesses in the market?
- Find out if they are addressing their customer’s challenges and pain points. This is basically your window of opportunity.
A SWOT analysis is nothing but an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your major competitors.
Of course, when you’re just starting out, it’s impossible to go head-to-head with the top players in the industry. However, you can learn a lot from a SWOT analysis, grow your brand, and even compete with top players one day.
Determine your brand’s Purpose and USP
I’m sure you started your business with a purpose and set some goals. But when it comes to branding, purpose, and goals alone are not enough.
Business purpose is different than brand purpose.
For example, let’s say you sell skin care products. Your business purpose may be that you are passionate about skincare products and want to develop your own skincare product line. The brand’s aim goes something like ‘to develop a completely organic and eco-friendly skincare product line’.
British-American author Simon Sinek has developed a unique and helpful model for identifying a brand’s purpose. This is called the golden circle.
His three parts in this Golden His circle are:
What do you offer your customers?
How are you different from others?
Why do you exist
Simon believes that people notice the ‘what’ first, but it’s the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a business that turns them into customers.
People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
Simon Sinek
Pro Tip
Here is a simple template that you can use to come up with a unique positioning statement for your business. We offer “products/ services” for the “target audience” to help them “combat a challenge faced”. Unlike other brands and organizations, we “your brand purpose”.
2. Brand identity
Visual cues play an important role in branding. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “I can’t see, I’m crazy.”
This phrase has some very serious marketing implications. Keeping your target audience exposed to your brand’s visual cues is all it takes to build brand awareness.
However, these visual elements cannot be random. It should be consistent and reflect your brand values.
Determine your brand colors
Starting with the obvious looks and color go hand in hand. Deciding on your brand colors is the first step in creating your brand’s unique identity.
With so many colors and shades to choose from, finding the perfect color palette for your brand can be a challenge.
Also, different colors have different psychological effects on people. The food industry uses red, the jewelry store uses beige, the automotive industry uses blue and black, and so on. This is called “color theory”, and understanding color theory is very important in choosing brand colors.
You should be choosing hues that describe your industry the best. You can start by analyzing the colors used by your competitors and the top players in your industry.
Take a screenshot of your competitor’s website. You can use Imagecolorpicker.com, which is a free tool that helps you pick the colors used by the brand, along with the HEX code for each color.
Another helpful tool to find color palettes that blend well with each other is Coolors. This is a color palette generator that you can use to find the best hues for your brand.
This website helps you pick colors from images too. So you can upload a screenshot of your competitor’s website or social media posts to find inspiration.
When you have a color palette ready, the rest of the actions involved in creating your brand identity becomes a lot easier.
Come up with a brand name, logo, and tagline
Ideally, when starting a business, you start with a name. However, when building your brand, you should reconsider the name you choose and make sure it represents your business in the best possible way.
Your brand name doesn’t have to be flashy, but it should be unique and stand out.
Here are the different types of brand names with examples:
| Brand Name Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Simple | Dove, Apple |
| Descriptive | The Beard Company, The Shoe Factory |
| Strong and bold | Amazon, Virgin |
| Greek | Apollo, Nike |
| Invented/ made up | Google, Adidas |
| Acronyms | HP, BMW |
| Location-based | Qatar Airways, California Pizza Kitchen |
| Founder’s name | Ford, Calvin Klein |
Hopefully, these examples have given you some inspiration to come up with a name for your brand. If you are still short of ideas, you can use brand name generators like Looka, Namelix, etc.
The next step is to design a logo for your brand. Again, there are multiple types of logo designs that you can choose from.
1. Monograms – IBM
2. Wordmarks – Coca-cola
3. Brand emblems – Harley Davidson
4. Pictorial representations – Twitter
5. Mascots – KFC
To create logos, you can use tools like Canva, Adobe, etc.
These websites already have dozens of logo templates that you can customize for your brand. If not, you can take inspiration from it and design your own logo.
Finally, think of a tagline or slogan for your business. Every major brand has its own slogan that we all instantly recognize.
For example, Nike’s “Just Do It” or L’Oreal’s “Because you’re worth it.”
Creating a tagline takes creativity and wordplay, which may not come easily for a lot of people. There are lots of AI tools that can help come up with some taglines that you can further personalize for your brand.
Create a professional eCommerce website
The final piece in the puzzle of creating a brand identity is a stylish and professional-looking website.
Building an ecommerce website is different from others as it requires integrating ecommerce features such as shopping carts, payment gateways, and shipping options.
We all know that building a website requires coding skills and technical knowledge. For this reason, many sellers are reluctant to open online stores. However, ecommerce platforms like SellKer make it very easy for sellers to build an ecommerce store without tedious coding or design.
SellKer allows you to create an e-commerce website in 1 minute. Just enter a few details and let SellKer AI build your e-commerce website.
You can then select a different theme and add branding elements such as logos, taglines, and colors to the theme to customize your website. You need to make sure your website reflects your brand identity, values , and most importantly your brand voice.
3. Brand Marketing
The final part of branding is marketing your brand. We found the voice of the brand and analyzed its purpose. It also gives the brand its own identity with its own website and logo.
But the question is, how do people get to know your brand?
Building brand awareness is very important to create a strong brand image. This can be done with the following actions:
Create an SEO and content marketing strategy
Once your website is ready, fill it with relevant and SEO-friendly content.
Start with keyword research for your industry and niche. You can also find keywords that your competitors are using.
Then create a series of topics for your keywords and start blogging your site. If you’re not that type of writer or don’t have the time, you can hire freelance writers from sites like Fiverr and Upwork. Content marketing isn’t just limited to websites. Create content for social media platforms, host guest blogs, participate in Q&A forums, and more.
The only important factor to remember is that your content is relevant and engaging.
When your audience starts to notice your content, they want to learn more about your brand and visit your e-commerce site.
SEO and content marketing are the easiest ways to organically increase traffic to your website. These results are also very long-term.
Use social media to build a following
Social media is a very powerful tool for building a brand. At its core, building a brand is all about getting people to know you, trust you, and stay loyal to you.
There is no better way to reach out to the masses than through social media platforms.
The number of people using social media has been constantly raise and as of 2021, there are 4.48 billion active social media users.
Checking social media is the first thing people do when they wake up in the morning and the last thing they do before they go to bed.
However, you can use this fact to reach your target audience directly with interesting, innovative, and engaging content on social media.
Start with a great career like Wendy’s
And then start adding content that reflects your brand voice. for example, Innocent Drinks on Twitter uses dry humor that kind of mocks people in the funniest way.
Durex is a great example of content that teases its followers in a classy, yet funny way.
There is a learning curve involved in coming up with interesting and relevant content that is loved by your audience.
But once you get the hang of it, you can gain followers by hundreds, thousands, or millions even!
Run paid campaigns to create brand awareness
Paid advertising is the best way to drive traffic to your website instantly. Abbreviation for organic marketing.
Paid advertising can help build brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, and motivate your audience to take action.
When setting up your ad, you can target your ideal buyer with the right filters.
Paid ads also appear on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can research and analyze which of these platforms is the right place to best reach your target group.
You can also advertise on multiple platforms. However, continuous monitoring of these ads requires huge budgets and bandwidth.
📚 Recommended reading:
- How To Make Your First Sale With Google Ads
- How To Get Your First Sale With Facebook Ads: A Beginner’s Guide
Conclusion
Branding is an integral part of any business and organization. Every aspect of your business is tied to the brand you are building.
We don’t just build brands. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to keep your brand under control while adapting to changing market conditions.
Understanding the nuances of branding can be a very interesting and enjoyable process. Just make your business a celebrity that people instantly recognize and loyally follow. We hope this article has given you all the information and inspiration to start your own branding journey.
FAQ’s
What are the three critical steps of branding?
Brand strategy, brand identity, and brand marketing are the three key steps of branding.
What does the brand need?
Above all, a brand needs its own voice and purpose. Without these two elements, we would be just one of 100 companies.
How can I build my brand without spending money?
Building a brand without money is really hard, but not impossible. You can start your business for free on social media like Instagram, Facebook Market, etc. You have to work hard to build a following for your business on these platforms. Canva lets you create brand logos, business cards, and more for free. Add these little branded touches to your shipment with every order you receive. Slowly but steadily your brand will gain recognition.
What is a strong brand?
A strong brand has a strong purpose and its target audience believes in what the brand stands for. You must consistently express your purpose in your identity and the products/services you offer.
What is a weak brand?
Weak brands are brands that have very low awareness and generally do not stand out. They have no clear communication and customers are not connected with the company.