You need to stand out in a world of businesses that are competing for people’s attention. Having a solid brand is critical, and its impact on your business is powerful. Your brand is what helps you stand out. Your brand is a representation of you, and represents how you wish to be perceived. It can create interest and engender trust, creating new business and helping current customers to be happier. Having a strong brand is the foundation from which the rest of your identity, processes, products, and services will be built from.

What is branding?

Branding is all inclusive of who you are, and is not limited to your visual identity (we’ll get to that in a minute.) Branding is also not only meant for big businesses (in fact, it can be what helps separate you from the pack if you are a small business!). Branding is the manifestation of the foundational understanding of who you are, and why you do it. It’s a primary understanding of your vision, mission, and values. Branding sets the tone for the overall perception that potential and current customers will hold in their minds when they consider your company. It’s a large concept that encompasses many aspects of your company.

Vision, Mission, & Values

Your brand is inclusive of your vision, mission, and business values. These help to define your “Why”. Who are you serving? Why are you serving them? What are you learning? Why are you learning these things? How are you being purposeful in what you learn? How do they all tie back into your vision, mission, and values? When you act in alignment with these, your brand is strengthened.

A 2017 study showed that 89% of American consumers are loyal to brands that share their values. If you haven’t defined your vision, mission, and values, how will customers know that their values align with yours? By taking the time to understand and communicate these as part of your brand, you’ll tap into new markets. 

Perception

Your brand is in part defined by how you are perceived, and how you want to be perceived. This perception is built on first impression, ongoing communications, follow up, materials that potential and current customers interact with, the service they receive; all of it and then some. Your brand is all inclusive of these things. Being purposeful in defining who you are will help to build those processes and visual assets in a way that is structured and in alignment with your brand. Taking the time to do this well will strengthen your brand.

Why Branding?

As we mentioned earlier, branding is not only meant for the big businesses. It’s quite the opposite. When a small business can effectively understand and use their brand, they have an opportunity to stand out! While there are certainly very expensive brand administrations with expensive campaigns and flawless execution, not every level of brand execution has to be at that level. By having an understanding of how your vision, mission, and values affect your processes, products, and identity, you will continually strengthen your brand, and will be able to be competitive in your market. You don’t have to be a big business to see the advantages of having a well-designed and well thought out brand!

Reputation

It is also worth considering that if you are willing to start a business, that you have a reputation to keep. Your reputation will be forged in some way, the question is whether you will control that reputation and identity, or whether you will just allow it to happen. Do you want to be purposeful in how your reputation is built, or do you want to just allow it to happen on it’s own? Controlling the aspects of your reputation that are controllable by understanding them and then acting on them helps you to control your reputation and your image.

Recognition

Recognition is a strong point of branding, and is typically what people go to when they think of branding. We’ve established that branding is more than visual identity, though visual identity does play a large part in recognition. You want to make a strong first impression, but you also want to have good reviews. You want to have a reputation for having great service, and a quality product. Your visual identity does play a part in your recognition, but there are other aspects of your branding that are equally as important. You may not always remember what somebody wore or what they looked like, but you will almost always remember how they made you feel. That’s just as much a part of your brand as your visual identity.

Generate New Customers

We’ve discussed some of the things that branding is inclusive of. When we discuss the “Why” of branding, we have to end this section with one of your biggest goals, generating new customers. You want and need to generate income for growth. You do that through three main ways…

1. Selling new services and products to your existing customers
2. Increasing your prices
3. Getting new customers. 

Having a strong brand will help to generate new customers. When you have a strong brand, you engender trust and recognition. When this happens, your current customers will refer you to their friends. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing opportunity. Nielsen reports that 92% of people around the world trust word-of-mouth advertising over all other forms of advertising. Having a solid brand will inspire your customers to share your brand with their friends and family.

Visual Identity

Once you have established your actual brand, you’re ready to consider your visual identity. You have have already begun considering the way you’d like your logo to look, colors, typography, etc. It’s extremely important that you not jump to visual identity until you’ve considered and documented your baseline brand.

Your visual identity should reflect your brand. It’s your brand’s style, and often times your brand’s first impression. This includes your logo, your color palette, and your typography. This will then extend to your materials and content. This includes your business cards, your letterhead, signage, merchandise, any reading materials or lead magnets you create, your social media posts and profile images, any campaign materials you use, your website; you get the idea. 

Having the visual identity assets at hand will make creating these much more simple. Having the correct tools and templates will make it even easier for you to manage on your own, once you have your brand well defined and your visual identity well designed.

Wrap Up

Branding is all-inclusive. It’s a big concept that affects almost every part of your business. It’s not meant just for big businesses with big budgets, it’s very effective for small businesses too. Your brand is more than just your visual identity. It’s all-inclusive. It’s not as complicated as it may sound, it just takes a little time to work through it, document it, and then build the correct processes, products, and identity from it.