No matter what type of business you’ve created, you’ve likely heard of how important it is to build your brand. A brand is not just about the color scheme and logo that you use for your business. It also refers to how you communicate your company philosophy and what your business is all about. For instance, the Nike brand has a clear brand identity that’s displayed through a “swoosh” logo and a “Just Do It” slogan, both of which are immediately identifiable by millions of people around the world. When you’re trying to create a strong brand, it’s important that you align your brand with your business goals. If you choose a brand logo or slogan that doesn’t match well with the goals that your business has, you’ll likely find it difficult to obtain lasting success.

A clear and focused brand message will foster loyalty among current and prospective customers and aid in your digital marketing efforts. Keep in mind that a good brand is consistent, which means that the messaging for your brand should be in line with your values and brand identity. Simon Senike said that “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” With this in mind, the following article offers a thorough guide on what it takes to build a brand by establishing a digital presence.

Things to Consider When You First Begin to Build a Brand

When you’re getting ready to build a brand, there are many considerations that you should keep in mind if you want your efforts to be successful. For one, make sure that you identify the core values and philosophies that are held by your company. Core values are a set of values that your entire organization will basically follow to the letter. The list of values that you create should be present on your website, described in your mission statement, and practiced by everyone who works for the company. The core values and philosophies that you set for your business should help you increase customer loyalty and attract talented employees who believe in your company values.

The modern consumer cares a lot about what companies are all about. They want to provide their money to companies that share the same values as them. To that end, you might want to consider providing your customers with ethical services and products that are sustainably sourced, both of which are trending at the moment. Consumers are caring more and more about sustainability and helping the environment, which means that it might be easier for you to retain customers who care about this cause if you make a commitment to sustainability. To understand how important the environment is to potential customers, around 35 percent of all consumers prefer to purchase Eco-friendly products whenever possible.

Modern consumers typically want to feel good about what they spend their money on. Since an increasing number of companies are focusing on improving their brand image and providing customers with a brand that’s similar to them, consumers have many great options available to them. If your company doesn’t make the customer feel good when they spend their money, they can easily take their business elsewhere. If these customers don’t connect with your current brand or message, you won’t be able to retain them. However, these issues can be fixed, which is why you should focus on giving them a reason to come back.

To Build a Brand, Research Your Users and Competition!

When you want to build a strong and effective brand, you should conduct extensive research on your users and competition. The only way for your brand to be strong is if prospective customers respond well to it, which is why the research that you do will likely be a significant factor in how well your brand performs in the long run. Your main goal when performing this research should be to find out who would be interested in your product or service while also identifying which companies are doing similar things to you.

User and Customer Research

The first and likely most important element of research for your brand is user/customer research. Causes like sustainability aren’t the only things that are able to foster customer loyalty. While many customers view sustainability as being highly important when purchasing a product, there are also several additional factors that prospective customers look for in a brand. If you want to focus your final brand message on something that eventual customers will care about, it’s important that you determine what the main demographic of your customers is. Younger customers between the ages of 18-25 have far different needs when compared to older customers. Once you identify your main demographic, your customer research should become much more focused.

Research Methods for Building a Brand

You also need to ask the right questions if you want your research to provide you with the right results. What things do your primary demographics have in common? What do they require assistance with? How do their needs relate to your service or product? If you can answer these questions with your research, you should have the information that’s needed to create a strong brand that’s relevant to the needs of your main demographic and target audience.

While performing research, you should also talk directly to your customers through surveys, in-depth questionnaires, and face-to-face interviews. This type of research will allow you to gather accurate information about the audience that you would like your brand to target. Once you’ve collected all of this research, you may find it difficult to sift through it. To do so, you will likely want to piece together personas. A persona is a combination of a person’s attributes, character traits, and psychographic information, the latter of which refers to the things that make a person tick. When combining this information, you should be able to obtain an accurate representation of the people you want to attract. After you’ve created personas of your primary audience, you should be able to more readily form real relationships with these individuals.

Competition Research

The next component of research involves competition research, which should give you a better idea of what works and what doesn’t when creating a brand. However, it’s essential that you don’t simply copy the brand image that your competitors have. Instead, you will need to stand out. If you’re too similar to your competition, your prospective customers will choose to stick with the brand that they’re already familiar with. You want to provide these customers with a reason to do their business to you.

You can perform accurate market research via platforms like SEMrush and Google trends, both of which have proven to be very powerful tools. Make sure that you also visit the websites of your competitors and make notes of the content that’s contained within. If your competition has a highly successful blog on their website, make note of the posts and content that are popular. You will likely need to create a blog and write content yourself, which is why it can be useful to follow a successful blog. If your competition has online reviews, check those out to gain a better understanding of what your competition does well and what they do poorly.

Creating Brand Aesthetics and Logo

Once you’ve performed all of the necessary research, it’s time to create brand aesthetics and a logo that matches this research. In order to do this, you will need to take your company’s philosophy and visually communicate what it’s about. Designing a logo can be difficult and time-consuming since you’ll likely want to create a logo that stands out. The logo that you create should clearly communicate who you are and what you value as a brand.

To start out, make sure that your logo is visually appealing. Modern design sensibilities generally require logos to be simple and clean, which should make it easier for you to create a good logo for your brand. The logo should also be classic as opposed to trendy. Logos that focus on being trendy have a tendency to go out of style over the years. While the logo should be simple, it should also be memorable. You also need to consider how customers visually process what they see and assign meaning to various images. Research has found that customers will assign different attributes to different shapes and colors.

Once you’ve designed the right logo, the logo will need to be paired with a creative tagline. This tagline is a phrase, sentence, or word that’s used to summarize your market position. The tagline should be simple and communicated clearly. You will also need to choose a color scheme at this time. Colors have a psychological impact on how a brand is perceived by the audience. For instance, brown is hardly used for branding since it’s very rigid and only really benefits companies that are going for a rugged brand. On the other hand, blue and green are highly popular and versatile colors that most customers respond well to.

Enhancing Your Brand With Digital Marketing

When you have established and built your brand, you should consider enhancing it with digital marketing. The marketing materials that you create and distribute will put your brand front and center for the first time, which should give you a better idea of your brand’s potential success. Even though it’s tempting to use the digital marketing that you create to primarily advertise the characteristics and benefits of your products, customers are known to respond better to the brands that tell a story that they can relate to.

As detailed in a previous article, there are three major forms of digital direct marketing that you can use when attempting to create an effective marketing campaign, which includes email marketing, web browser marketing and mobile marketing. The marketing strategies that you use should always center around what the customer wants and needs. While there are plenty of traditional marketing options for you to consider, digital marketing can make for a more targeted marketing approach that’s also much cheaper.

When you are working on your marketing materials, make sure that you focus on who your customers and users are. The answer to this question will determine which marketing tactics are going to be most effective at reaching them. Customer and competitor research should be performed on a continual basis if you want your digital marketing techniques to be effective. It’s also important that the language you use in your marketing materials matches the personality of your brand.

Make sure that you tap into social media as well since these platforms give you the ability to create distinct and exciting marketing strategies that users will react well to. Because of the many platforms on the internet, there are a substantial amount of destinations you can go to when you want to establish your brand identity. Keep in mind that effective digital marketing should also be paired with high-quality SEO. Search engine optimization refers to optimization that can be performed on a website and the content within to make a website rank higher on search engines like Google. If your website ranks in the top three results of relevant searches, you should be able to increase site visibility and bolster the number of visitors that reach your site.

Need Help Establishing Your Digital Presence?

Establishing a brand is an integral component of long-lasting success for any business. When customers see your brand logo or tagline, your company should automatically come to mind. Your customers will also know what to expect from you if you have a brand that they can pair with your company name. By now, you should have a better understanding of why customers should care about doing business with you, what differentiates you from your competition, and the various tactics that you can use for digital marketing.