What Is A Brand?

A brand is what sets your company apart from the others. It can be logos, slogans, unique products, or anything else only your company has. If we want to get a bit technical about it, advertising legend David Ogilvy defined a brand as the intangible sum of a product’s attributes. Essentially, it’s what the product is in the eyes of your audience.

Brands, in turn, can’t be separated from branding. If brands are the result, branding is the process. Branding is creating and shaping your brand in the audience’s mind. It’s building your brand’s image so people can know and remember it.

You might be wondering why you should go through all this effort to build your brand. It’s because branding has a massive impact on your company’s visibility. Companies with more recognizable brands generally get more business than those without. Plus, a well-known brand increases your business value, giving you more leverage in deals and making it more appealing to investors.

How to Start Building Your Brand

If your company is a physical store, your brand is the facade and signage that tells people your store exists. If the brand isn’t attractive, most people won’t give it a second glance.

Brand-building from scratch sounds like a daunting effort, which could be if you don’t know what you’re doing. But even if you don’t, I’m here to help you learn how! I’ve broken down the brand-building process into nine simple steps. Let’s start.

1. Know Your Audience

If you want your brand to resonate with the audience, you gotta know them first. A brand that works for middle-aged tradespeople likely won’t work for TikTok-scrolling Gen Z-ers. That means you gotta start with the target in mind: who you’re planning to reach.

A good way to understand your audience better is to make buyer personas. These are sketches of the “archetypes” of people you want to sell to. A persona usually contains essential details like age, income, gender, and occupation. The persona can also have more advanced information like favored brands, buying preferences, and behaviors.

You can make more than one of these, but keep this saying in mind: “If you try to be everything for everyone, you’ll be nothing to no one.” Target just several brand personas with some overlap so your brand messaging stays consistent.

2. Learn About Your Competitors

Whatever your industry, you’re likely vying for customer attention with other brands and companies. Standing out and making your brand heard through all the noise is tough, but you have a secret weapon: You. One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the competition is to be unique, and that’s where competitor research comes in.

Examine what your competitors are doing. Understand their strengths and weaknesses to help you carve a niche of your own that sets your company apart. This way, instead of fishing in a spot with hundreds of other people, you’re on the other side of the lake by yourself.

3. Define Your Purpose

Consistent branding needs a purpose. If your brand is a bus, the purpose is the driver that ensures your branding goes where you need it to go. So, defining your purpose is an essential part of branding.

As the name implies, your brand purpose is what you want your brand to accomplish. If you’re at a loss trying to define it, answer this question:

“Why does your company exist?”

From the answer, you can craft a brand purpose to inform how your company moves.

4. Develop a Personality

A brand personality is one of the best ways to show your uniqueness and set you apart. Just like how your friends act makes them unique in your eyes, your brand personality will keep your company visible among other similar companies.

Naturally, your brand personality should resonate with your target audience. For instance, if you’re targeting young professionals, your brand should be confident and knowledgeable, though maybe with some playfulness. If your target audience is middle-aged parents, you want to sound reassuring and relatable.

5. Create a Brand Story

People relate best through stories. In this context, a story doesn’t have to be big like a movie or a novel. Even a simple story like defining your customer base’s problem, how you can help them solve it, and why they should buy your product is enough of a brand story to start hooking them in.

Of course, you can always create more elaborate stories. Either way, having a story behind your brand is a good way to explain your deal without going into too many complications.

6. Name Your Brand

Why is brand naming so far down this guide? It’s because you want to choose a brand name that fits your target audience. In addition to being easy to remember, you want it to sound nice to the people you want to market to.

There’s a lot of creativity involved here, and there’s really no one solid way to make a brand name. Even the world’s top brands use varying methods to come up with their names, like Nike using the name of a goddess, Adidas using a shortened version of the founder’s name, and Facebook using a combo of already-existing words.

Whatever brand name you land on, do a quick Google to ensure you don’t have any other brands that share the name or are close enough to be mistaken for each other. That’ll save you a lot of grief down the line.

7. Make the Logo and Brand Elements

So much of branding today is visual. In addition to the logo itself, you need to come up with the brand’s color palette, typography, and imagery. It’s a good idea to research color theory to understand what colors are the best to represent your product.

Typography is similarly important because fonts can project brand identity as well. Script fonts are more playful, serif fonts are more authoritative, and so on.

8. Integrate Brand Elements Into Your Business

Once you have the foundations of your brand, let’s put it all together. A great way to integrate brand elements into your business is by using and implementing a style guide. Style guides outline how your brand sounds, looks, and feels. This style guide should inform everything you do, from social media posts to website design.

9. Review and Make Changes If Needed

Brand consistency is good, but refusing to change if something doesn’t work out is folly. Sometimes, the Band-Aid of rebranding needs to be ripped out to realign yourself to your audience. If a brand element doesn’t work out, try making adjustments to your brand and see if your new brand image resonates better with your audience.

Ideally, though, you should test the rebrands before shouting it from the rooftops. Get direct feedback from existing customers to ensure the changes won’t be too jarring.

Brand Strategies: How to Grow Your Brand Further

Building a brand is just the first thing. The next thing to do is put it in front of your target audience’s eyes. That’s where brand strategies come in. They make your company stand out, which may lead to purchases.

Brand strategy also “forces” you to understand your brand, so working on your strategy helps you internalize your business values and brand purpose, helping you make better decisions.

I do have a more detailed guide on brand strategy you can check out. But here are some ways you can grow your brand:

Use the 3 A’s

It isn’t enough to have a brand. If you don’t grow your brand, you’ll be left in the dust as your competition keeps growing. Growing your brand requires the 3 A’s:

• Awareness: The first step is to make people know your brand. At this stage, you’ll launch marketing campaigns and use your various channels to reach the audience. This is the foundational step because the two A’s after this will need people to know about your brand.

• Affinity: Once you’ve successfully made people know your brand, it’s time to draw them in further. To build affinity, you need to provide high-quality products and services to keep them coming back.

• Advocacy: If affinity is like, then advocacy is more akin to love. Customers who have become advocates can be your evangelists, organically recommending your products to the people in their social circles without incentive.

Identify Trends That Work for You

Trends in branding and marketing come and go. It’s a double-edged sword since following every trend blindly can dilute your brand while ignoring them can make you look static. The key here is to get on trends that work for you and skip the ones that don’t.

A good way to identify whether or not a trend will work for you is to see if it connects to your brand meaningfully. Jumping on trends with no rhyme or reason will make you look like a bandwagoner. Meanwhile, relating it to your business values can help you make a meaningful connection with your audience.

Build Brand Equity

Brand equity is what makes people prefer brand-name items, even if they’re more expensive. The more people see value in the brand, the more money they’re willing to shell out. To build brand equity, you need to make people more aware of your brand and foster customer loyalty. Loyal customers become ambassadors and evangelists, spreading the good word about your brand to others.

Top Branding Tools for Beginners

Branding tools make up your toolbox for creating a great brand presence. It saves time and helps you perform tasks that you may have difficulties doing without them. What branding tools are good for beginners? Here are some of them:

• Canva: Easy-to-use online design tools that help you build logos, brand elements, and designs to bring your brand to life.

• Google Trends: Free trend-watching tool that helps you check search interest for keywords.

• Trello: Project management and scheduling tool with a simple, easy-to-use Kanban concept.

• Google Alerts: Google Alerts brings you email notifications whenever your specified terms pop up somewhere on the Internet. It’s a basic but free tool to monitor brand mentions, and it’s great if you’re just starting.

• Buffer: Buffer is a social media admin and scheduler app that helps you manage multiple social media platforms from one place. It also has analytics tools that allow you to monitor social media performance.

This is nowhere near an exhaustive list. Check my list of top branding tools for even more recommendations.

Building Lasting, Effective Brand Partnerships

Getting eyes on your brand can be tough if you’re just starting out. People don’t know who you are and usually don’t have a reason to care. But there’s a good way you can make them care: partnering up with a bigger brand.

A rub from a more well-known brand can help your brand gain more visibility. Brand partnerships come in many forms, from the ones that make sense, like James Bond movies using Land Rover cars, to ones that are strange at first glance but work out well, like Louis Vuitton and Supreme.

I have a more in-depth article about brand partnerships, but let’s go over the basics here.

Brand Partnership Benefits

Brand partnerships are well-loved because they bring a lot of benefits. Let’s take a look at how you can benefit your business by partnering up with another.

• Attracting a new audience: Exposing your brand to new audiences is one of the main benefits of a partnership. If your partner has a great presence in a niche you’re not strong in, that can be a door opener for you.

• Adding value to your existing audience: Your current audience can also gain from a partnership, especially if your partner can offer exclusive deals.

• Improving brand awareness: When you partner with a bigger brand, you’re asking someone to pull you onto a bigger stage. That can do wonders for your brand awareness.

Brand Partnership Types

Brand partnerships come in different shapes and sizes. Here are some of the most common partnerships you can encounter:

• High-low pairing: Pairing a luxury brand with mass-appeal products, like the collaboration between H&M and Mugler. This gives the mass-appeal brand exclusivity, while the luxury brand gains access to a whole new demographic of customers.

• Complementary products: In this type of partnership, two different products join forces to deliver an experience that’s better than the sum of their parts, like how GoPro provides action cams for Red Bull’s extreme sports events.

• Shock value: These partnerships are…weird. They’re often made to surprise the audience and gather buzz due to how weird they are, like Polly Pocket-themed Airbnbs.

How to Secure Partnerships

Now that you know the what, it’s time to learn about the how. Here’s a tried-and-true six-step process to securing brand partnerships:

1. Research potential partners and see whether their needs and values align with yours.
2. Build a positive track record before reaching out to companies about partnering up.
3. Pitch your partnership to the company.
4. Negotiate partnership terms.
5. Execute the partnership.
6. Maintain relationships to open doors for future collabs.

Brand Monitoring: Keeping an Eye on Brand Performance

You won’t know if your branding efforts are succeeding unless you measure its performance. That’s where brand monitoring comes in. It’s how you collect and measure mentions of your brand across your many channels and touchpoints to get a feel of what people think about your brand.

Essentially, brand monitoring helps you answer the question, “What do people think about our brand?” It’s more than measuring likes and shares; it’s also about understanding customer sentiment, post context, and more.

Check out my guide on brand monitoring for a more detailed look, but let’s go over some brand monitoring basics while you’re here.

Key Brand Monitoring Metrics

For effective brand monitoring, you need to know what to look for. Key metrics include:

• Brand and product mentions to measure your relevancy in the public eye.
• Hashtags, both made by you and organic hashtags, to track discussions.
• Competitor mentions, to know what they’re doing.
• Industry developments to stay on top of trends.

Where to Monitor Your Brand

The Internet is a wide sea, so you need to know where to do brand monitoring; otherwise, you’ll be overwhelmed. Here are some essential places to listen for chatter:

• Owned media, like your websites, blogs, and social media channels.
• Social media in general.
• Review sites.
• News and traditional media outlets.
• Blogs and online communities.

Brand Monitoring Tips for Beginners

New to brand monitoring? No problem. Follow these tips to avoid a rocky start:

• Set up Google Alerts: As a beginner, Google Alerts is your best friend when it comes to brand monitoring. It’s a robust, free tool that can give you a baseline monitoring system to use.

• Analyze holistically: Taking reviews and bad mentions out of context usually leads to rash decisions and overcommitting resources to fix a small problem. Step back and look at things from a helicopter view and make sure you understand the problem before taking action.

• Use your insights to improve: Brand monitoring data is just a series of fancy numbers and figures if you don’t act on them. Study your data and build an action plan to fix issues based on them.

Making Your Company Desirable to Employees With Employer Branding

Branding isn’t just important to make your company known to potential customers. It’s also important to attract new employees. Branding efforts to make your company more attractive to employees is commonly known as employer branding.

I have a more detailed guide to employer branding that you can check out, but since this is a beginner’s guide, we can go over the basics here.

Why Employer Branding is Important

Employer branding is important because these days, just posting job openings isn’t enough unless you’re a big-name company. It’s almost like marketing because you have to make your company as attractive as possible if you want to draw in new potential employees.

Benefits of Employer Branding

The main benefit of employer branding is that it makes recruitment a much better experience for you. A good employer brand means employees actively seek your company out instead of you having to spend time and money putting job openings on recruitment sites.

How to Build Your Employer Brand

Building your employer brand revolves around crafting an employee value proposition and showcasing it to potential employees. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1. Audit your existing employer brand.
2. Build on your EVP based on your audit results, focusing on your company’s unique qualities.
3. Define what you want out of building your employer brand, whether it’s increasing the number of applicants or reducing turnover.
4. Pick the appropriate metrics to track.
5. Choose channels to promote your employer brand.
6. Showcase company values on your channels.
7. Reinforce your message with employee ambassadors.
8. Review and fine-tune your branding efforts.

Conclusion

By now, you should already have the basics of branding down, from how to build your brand to monitoring your brand performance.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve learned:

• The basics of branding and how to start building your brand.
• How to secure brand partnerships and choose the right partner.
• Top tips to build brand equity and grow your brand.
• How to monitor your brand performance.

I meant for this guide to be a start in your branding journey. From here, you can take a look at my other branding articles and explore other sources on how to build your company’s brand. You might make branding mistakes here and there, but that’s how you learn.

Before I wrap this up, I’ll leave you with something to do: If your company hasn’t figured out its brand, start on the journey to create one. Outline what makes your company unique and design its brand identity around that uniqueness. From there, you should be on the right track to building a brand that resonates with your audience.