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Essential Guide to Building a Brand for Your Business

2016-05-24 09:00:00 | Brooke Kwasny | Business,entrepreneur,starting a business,startups

Branding your business can be one of the most difficult parts of starting your own company. Many small business owners recognize branding as a key aspect of running a business, but a large percent don’t know why it’s important.A simple way to look at building a brand is to think of it as creating your business’s identity. Your business’s brand should define your business, your employees, and your audience.

Learn more about the importance of brand image and loyalty in this blog post.

You should know that building a brand is much more than choosing your color scheme, logo, and slogan. While those are key, identifiable aspects of your brand, that’s really their only purpose – to serve as the external brand that your audience can recognize. But you should focus on your internal brand too.

Below is your essential guide to building a brand for your business.

Answer the Key Questions

The first step to building a brand is to define your business.

What products or services do you offer?
What sets you apart from businesses like yours?
What is your business’s purpose?
Who is your target market? What are they like as consumers?
What are your core values?

Answering these questions will help you bring clarity to your business’s identity. Use the answers to these questions to create your brand’s story. Starting with these basic questions will help you craft a compelling story that your audience will be interested in.

Think About What You Want to Be Associated With

At the end of the day, your brand boils down to what the public thinks of your business. So it’s important to think about what you want your audience to associate your business with. What is it that you want people to think of when they hear your business’s name?

This aspect of your brand isn’t 100% controllable, but there are things you can do to manage what people think of your business. Ask around! Ask your clients, customers, and employees what they think of when they think of your brand. Are their answers consistent? Are you okay with being associated with those answers? If not, what can you do to steer your audience in a different direction?

Be Original

When you’re running a small business, it can be easy to look up to big name brands and want to do what they do. But when you’re building a brand, it’s imperative that your brand is authentic to your business. What works for Nike and McDonald’s probably won’t work for your business because there are a lot of differences between your brands.

Staying true to your business is ultimately what’s best for your brand in the long run – so define your brand identity, and stick to it!

Live Your Brand

After you’ve spent all this time defining your brand, creating it, and promoting it, it’s important that you live and do business in accordance with your brand identity. The public wants authenticity, so it’s in your best interest to be consistent. Every aspect of your business should represent your brand.

Building a brand, and managing it well is important for your business. It will help your customers relate to you, create brand loyalty and advocacy, and can even boost sales.