How To Build a Brand — Everything you need to know
The next presentation we made for the Ad & Pr Lab was about how to build a brand as well as a case study of a growing brand — but we’ll talk about that soon.
The first thing we did was to study a comprehensive guide from Hubspot and Rebrandly about how and what it takes to build a brand and then summarize and present the key-spots — here they are.
Etymologically speaking, a brand is
“a sum of all expressions by which an entity intends to be recognized”.
But what does that mean? It means that it could be the colours, the textures, the smells, the rituals, etc. but none of them seperately; it includes all of them. It ensures the stability of the whole company/organization/business — you name it, by providing orientation, fostering trust and enabling self-expression. What matters the most about branding’s function is the recognition.
Now that we have made clear what a brand is we need to understand what it takes to build a brand. Ever since the Internet came into our lives it has changed many things — including branding. Things on the Internet take time if you want to build a successful brand and although Internet is an equalizer, in order to have a big voice you need to have a consistent differentiator. That is to say that no matter the channel, they should all demonstrate the unique experience that your brand represents — or you’ll be one of the rest.
Looking deeper into that, if you aim high and want to create a strong presence in the long-term, a brand strategy is a necessity and a brand consistency vital ‘to it. The basic elements that should remain the same are the following: the logo, the colours, the tone & voice (regarding whether your brand is irrelevent, professional, academic etc), the images, the domain name and the branded links.
What is more, you need to understand how your audience and customers perceive your brand and create a solid ground. How? Through website design, content creation and/or social media, also known as branding essentials which all are really important in order to communicate directly with your audience and establish your brand as trustworthy in their minds.
What’s also really important is to make a value proposition: a promise of value to be delivered. This can be achieved by clarifying what you do, how you do it, for whom you do it as well as what makes you different. In order to determine your value proposition you firstly need to have a deep understanding of who your customers are, their needs and goals and after that create a byer persona: a profile of the customer that sums up who they are, what they want and what their life is like. This includes: demographics, job level/seniority, information sources (where the byer is going for information) pain points, objections and a typical day to identify all the little details and bring your job to another level.
After all these it is time to enter the game. Buyer personas will allow you to segment and personalize your brand experience. Building on that, you have to make sure that not only do you provide lots of content but also a targeted one. Remember: ‘’interesting content means interesting brand, boring content means boring brand’’.
We’ve talked about the social media presence before but it is essential to determine which one of the social platforms will best help you to reach your target persona. Whether that is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or most likely a combination of them, it is important to focus your efforts on building up the brand and your presence on those specific channels.
Last but not least, you need to create a brand voice. Don’t worry; it could slighlty vary from one medium to another, but it should definitely naturally adjust to suit the medium in which the content is being published (as well as to the people you are attracting to that particular media).
To sum up,
“brands can be built in an instant and they can be destroyed just as quickly”
as the guide points out.
Branding needs effort, strategy and time to evolve and can improve as the company’s most valuable asset.
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