Your business’s brand is responsible for attracting new customers and retaining your existing customer base. If you want to grow your business, you’ll want to develop a brand that speaks directly to its customers in a way that’s elegant and inviting.
When developing your brand message, you want to think about how your business presents itself online. How are your images reinforcing your brand message? In what ways can you improve the way your brand communicates with its customers?
Here are six steps that you need to take to get started building your brand online and attract loyal customers that are willing to support your business.
1. Conduct Market Research
The first step in building your brand online is identifying your customers and evaluating your competitors.
Start by doing a quick market analysis in your market category. Determine the average age, gender, income, and location of your ideal customer.
For example, if you have a business selling mechanical keyboards, search for information about your mechanical keyboard and find out who is the most likely to use mechanical keyboards.
If you have Facebook Ad Manager, you can also use Facebook’s Audience Insights to quickly gather information about your target audience. There are a handful of tools online that can help you learn more about your business’s target market.
In addition to analyzing your target customers, you’ll want to see what your competitors are doing.
Look at your competitor’s website and analyze how they present their products, their marketing copy, the colors they choose for their brand, and how they use their social media to engage with their customers. You’ll likely find inspiration for curating your brand to better speak to your audience.
2. Make Your Brand Unique
Decide what makes your brand unique. Your business’s mission will help you greatly in deciding how to present your business and build your brand message
After brainstorming details about your business, you may find that your product or service is better than your competitors or that your business offers philanthropic incentives that your competitors don’t. Put these details at the forefront of your brand message and let that drive customers to your business.
3. Bring Out Your Brand’s Personality
Your brand’s personality builds trust with customers. Your brand’s personality encourages customers to promote your business and advocate for its use. A brand’s personality needs to be authentic, memorable, and trustworthy.
There are both visual and non-visual elements that make up a brand’s personality. Non-visual elements include values, personality traits, and how the brand portrays its values and personality. Visual elements include color palette, font and logo.
4. Non-Visual Personality
Brand Values: Your brand values reflect what you believe as a company. Your brand values should be honest and represent your brand’s commitment to authenticity.
Here is a shortlist of values your business can represent:
- Adventure
- Altruism
- Authenticity
- Beauty
- Community
- Creativity
- Diversity
- Fun
- Humor
Try to come up with a list of 5-10 values that are at the core of your business and customer. Values are not exclusive, so feel free to use the values that we’ve given you in this article.
Personality Traits: If your brand was a person how would you describe their personality? Choose five adjectives that describe your brand’s personality.
Examples of personality traits include: agreeable, brilliant, calm, charming, confident, courageous, dedicated, energetic, friendly, generous, hardworking, logical, and reliable.
Showing Up: Employees at your organization need to reflect your brand’s personality every day to give customers a consistent experience and build your brand’s reputation. Every time a customer interacts with your brand they should get the exact same experience, i.e. express those personality traits– if your brand is funny, it should be funny via email, in your copy, in advertisements, on its blog and anywhere else a customer might see or interact with your brand
Additionally, you can show up for your customers by bringing them with you on daily business activities. You can do this by being active on social media channels like posting daily to Twitter or having new Instagram stories to share every day. You want to make your customers feel involved like they’re part of the brand family.
Alternatively, you can use a mascot to personify the brand – think Ronald McDonald.
5. Visual Personality
Color Palette: The colors you use on your website, in your logo, or other imagery, are going to create the visual cues that represent your brand. Ideally, the colors you choose should reflect your brand’s non-visual elements, e.g. if your brand’s personality is energetic, pick vibrant colors to reflect that.
If you need help picking colors, check out Coolors. Coolors allows you to design your own color palette by offering complementary colors to colors you like.
Font: Use one or two typefaces to easily keep things consistent and keep down the visual clutter. Find a font that reflects your brand’s non-visual elements — does a quirky font suit your brand best or something more traditional?
A useful tool to use to pick a font is FontPair, which is similar to Coolors but for fonts.
Logo: Your brand’s logo should ideally reflect both your brand’s non-visual and visual elements. If you’re working with a graphic designer, communicate these elements to them. A good graphic designer knows how to take these elements and bring them to life.
There are seven types of logos you should know about:
- Monogram: NASA. These are logos that are made up of the brand’s initials.
- Wordmark: MasterCard. Wordmark logos combine the brand’s font, color palette, and brand name to create a word-based logo. These logos are great for new brands without overly long names.
- Pictorial Mark: Apple. A pictorial mark is a graphic-based logo that is instantly recognizable. Think about what symbols or values represent your brand and how to turn those into visual cues.
- Abstract: Pepsi. An abstract logo is a type of pictorial mark that uses colors and shapes to create an abstract image.
- Mascot: Kool-Aid. Mascot logos are logos that involve a character. Many food brands and fast-food chains use Mascot logos.
- Emblem: Hogwarts. Emblems typically consist of fonts inside of symbols or icons. These are traditional logos popular with universities and car companies.
- Combination Mark: Burger King. Combination marks are logos that combine logotypes. Examples include Burger King, which uses both a wordmark and pictorial mark.
6. Come Up With A Slogan
To come up with a great slogan, make a list of your favorite slogans and emulate them. You can also try these methods:
- Make a bold claim, like BMW’s “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
- Make it rhyme, like “Be All That You Can Be.”
- Make it rhythmic, like Kay Jewelers’ slogan “Every Kiss Begins With Kay.”
- Use your company’s values, like Avis’ “We Try Harder.”
- Ask a question that relates to your business, like Capital One’s, “What’s in Your Wallet?”
- Make it inspirational or motivational, like L’Oreal’s “Because You’re Worth It.”
Keep your slogan to one line and use it on your website, e-mail, and business cards.
Your brand is inseparable from your product or service. It’s what keeps customers coming back to you and advocating for your products or services. It’s the personification of your business that allows customers to connect with your brand on an almost human level. All it takes to build a great brand online is a little market research, some creativity, and relentless consistency.
