How to make a brand for your business: The simple guide to succeed

If you want to create a brand for your business, this couldn’t be a better time to do it. Because this will help you increase your brand awareness in the customers’ minds and make your brand unique in the global market. While building a brand is extremely necessary, there are many businesses that take this lightly. In this blog, Arrowtheme will instruct you how to make a brand for your business with ease through only seven simple steps. Then, explore with us right now! 

What does a brand mean?

The brand, not as simple as a recognizable name and logo, is how people view you whenever they interact with your business. To put it plainly, a customer’s total view of your business will define your brand. In other words, your brand tells your reputation in the global market. 

Besides, elements such as: names, products, colors, fonts, logos, voices, and reputations all contribute to what a company is and how it is perceived.

What is building a brand?

In fact, you can’t build and develop a brand without being consistent, and you can’t keep that consistency when you expand your brand into other areas. Moreover, building a brand is an ongoing activity that necessitates planning. The continued effort, on the other hand, will result in long-term consumer relationships. Hence, this can result in a consistent increase in leads and sales, as well as word-of-mouth recommendations and product or service endorsement.

What’s more, the purpose of brand development is to create a unique and lasting image in the marketplace by adopting tactics and campaigns to raise knowledge about your company.

           Brand success = positive image + standing out

In addition, branding includes three high-level phases. Now, we will dig down further for more information about each phase. 

#1. Brand Strategy

For more detail, the good brand strategy will show your target customer how you are unique, trustworthy, memorable, and likable. Besides, it will communicate your mission, promises, and how you help people solve difficulties. When building a brand from the ground up, this is the first step you must do. Moreover, you should consider the brand strategy as a roadmap for how you want the rest of the world to perceive your business. In addition, as part of the process, an effective and comprehensive brand strategy should incorporate the following elements:

• Brand discovery
• Competitor research
• Target audience
• Brand voice
• Brand message & story.

Alternatively, brand strategy plays a significantly necessary and basic role of any successful brand. 

#2. Brand Identity

The method that you communicate this to the audience through graphics, messaging, and experience is known as Brand Identity. For maximum impact, your brand strategy will determine how you communicate your identity and how it aligns with your purpose. Besides, Brand identity components should be applied consistently across all channels. Above all, it’s how people will recognize your business. Furthermore, Brand Identity comes with:

• Logo
• Patterns and icons
• Collateral
• Website design
• Patterns and icons
• Content and messaging
• Advertising
• Print or packaging

#3. Brand Marketing

Coming to the final phase called Brand marketing. Simply speaking, it is the process by which businesses or organizations emphasize and promote their products or services by strategically communicating their values and voice to the right audience. What’s more, there are a variety of digital marketing actions that can be used to effectively amplify your brand’s image. Then, you can see them below:

• User Experience 
• SEO & Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Paid Advertising 

How to make a brand for your business?

#Step 1: Research your target market as well as your competitors

First and foremost, you must gain a thorough understanding of the existing market, including who your potential clients and competitors are before making a decision regarding your brand. Then, this can be accomplished in a variety of ways:

• Firstly, you should examine the direct and indirect competitors that come up when you Google your product or service category.
• Secondly, let’s examine subreddits about your clients and listen in on their discussions and product recommendations.
• Thirdly, don’t forget to refer to the opinions of people in your target market and inquire about the brands they use in your industry.
• What’s more, you need to examine the accounts or pages on social media that your target audience follows and responds to.
• Finally, let’s try to go shopping, either online or in person, to get a sense of how your customers would look for and purchase things.

Not only that, make a note of the following while you conduct your research:

• Who can you most easily sell to?
• Who are your top-of-mind competitors? Exactly, they are the established and well-known companies in the market.
• What do your consumers say and how do they say it? From that, you can determine their interests and the language they express them in.

Before moving forward, make sure that you understand this. Because it will not only determine what your brand should focus on but also how it can differentiate itself from competitors.

#Step 2: Choose your personality and emphasis

Your brand, especially at the start, will be a very faint one for everyone. Therefore, finding your focus and allowing it to inform all other aspects of your brand as you grow is an extremely critical thing. Then, you should take a look at the following section that includes some questions and branding exercises to help you think about your brand’s emphasis and tone.

What is your positioning statement?

Simply speaking, one or two lines that stake your claim in the market constitute a positioning statement. In other words, this is to help you answer the proper questions about your brand and to assist you come up with a tagline for it. And, you don’t need to put it on your website or business card. The following is a structure of a positioning statement:

We provide [PRODUCT/SERVICE] for [TARGET MARKET] to [VALUE PROPOSITION].

Unlike [THE ALTERNATIVE], we [KEY DIFFERENTIATOR].

Moreover, the only thing you’re competing on is your unique value proposition. So, it is really necessary for you to find it, capitalize on it, and incorporate it into your brand’s messaging. Not only that, you can also write this down as a mission statement that makes a clear promise to your customers or the world if the firm you intend to create has a cause at its core.

What words would you associate with your brand?

This will inform your social media voice as well as the tone of all of your creative, both written and visual. Besides, pitching three to five descriptors that characterize the type of brand that might resonate with your audience is a fun and productive branding activity. Below is the list of characteristics prepared to assist you in getting started. Let’s take a look:

What metaphors or concepts come to mind when you think about your brand?

First of all, let’s consider your brand as a metaphor, or personify it, to determine the unique characteristics you want it to have. 

Specifically, this might be a vehicle, a celebrity, or anything else as long as it has a well-known reputation in your mind that conjures up the vibe you want your brand to elicit. 

#Step 3: Choose a unique name for your brand

In fact, the size and kind of business you are planning to start will decide a lot to your brand’s name. 

Simply speaking, a brand is much more than a name. Your brand’s personality, behaviors, and reputation are what give the name meaning in the marketplace.

However, as a small business owner, deciding on a name for your firm is likely one of the first important decisions you’ll have to make. If you decide to go that path, it will affect your logo, domain, marketing, and trademark registration.

In particular, it is better if you can come up with a brand’s name that is difficult to imitate and much more difficult to confuse with existing competitors. What’s more, if you plan to grow your product lines in the future, keep your business name broad rather than adopting a brand name centered on your product category.

Best of all, you are able take advantage of one or all of the following methods:

• Firstly, make up a word
• Secondly, reframe an unrelated word
• Thirdly, use a suggestive word or metaphor
• Fourthly, describe it literally
• Nextly, alter a word by removing letters, adding letters, or using Latin endings
• Create an acronym from a longer name
• Finally, combine two words. 

Because your brand name will influence your website’s domain/URL. Hence, you need to do some research to see what’s available before settling on a domain name. Then, if nothing else, it’s a good idea to run your name past a focus group of close friends to make sure it doesn’t have an unexpected meaning or is too similar to something else you could have overlooked.

#Step 4: Create a slogan

A memorable slogan is a nice-to-have tool that you can use as a tagline in your social network bios, website headers, bespoke business cards, and anywhere else when you only have a few words to make a significant effect. Moreover, you should keep in mind that you can modify your phrase when you discover new marketing opportunities. Additionally, a good slogan is succinct, memorable, and leaves a lasting impression. Then, you can refer to following ideas for coming up with your own slogan:

• Stake your claim. 

• Make it a Metaphor
• Adopt your customers’ attitude
• Leverage labels.
• Write a rhyme.
• Describe it literally.

#Step 5: Make your brand’s appearance your own (colors and font)

After you’ve decided on a name, you’ll need to consider how you’ll visually represent your brand, including colors and fonts. Overall, this will be useful when you begin creating your own website. 

• Selecting the colors

To put it plainly, colors not only establish the aesthetic of your brand, but they also convey the emotion you want to transmit and help you keep it consistent across all of your activities. Thus, in order to avoid consumer confusion, don’t forget to use colors that set you apart from your direct competition.

Furthermore, although color psychology isn’t a precise science, it may assist you make better decisions, particularly when it comes to the color of your logo. Also, this infographic gives a good overview of the feelings and associations that various colors elicit in most people. Alternatively, it’s crucial to think about how legible white and black text will be against your color palette, as well as how colorful text will seem against white and black backgrounds.

• Making font selections

Aside from colors, you also need to look at fonts you might like to utilize on your website at this time. Besides, in order to prevent confusing visitors, let’s use no more than two fonts: one for headings and another for body text.

#Step 6: Design the eye-catching logo for your brand

When it comes to developing a brand, one of the first things that comes to mind is usually a company logo design. This is because it is considered as the face of your firm and it might be found anywhere your brand exists. Usually, you will want a logo that’s distinct, recognizable, and scalable to work in a variety of sizes. Then, let’s consider all of the places where your brand’s logo should appear. For instance, your website, Facebook page profile pictures, YouTube channel banners, etc.

#Step 7: Branding should be used throughout your business

When you use your logo throughout your company, it will create a unified brand story. A brand story is a description of who your company is and what it stands for. It sets the tone for every customer engagement with your brand, both in-store and online.

For more detail, according to Shopify’s study on what gains buyer and customer trust, buyers purchasing on an online store for the first time often seek a firm’s mission and purpose to see whether they share any values with the brand. Then, they will go to the company’s About Us page to discover more about who they’re buying from and, for more socially concerned customers, how the company operates. If your company has a brand story, tell it to your customers. Because it can comfort them that you are a legitimate and reliable business.

While your positioning statement can help you get started, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions to create a brand story:

• What inspired me to start my own company?
• What is the company’s purpose?
• How can we make a difference in the world?
• What is the backstory of my company that the customer should be aware of?

Of course, not every firm has a purpose or principles. But if yours does, offer your brand story and explain why the company was founded. 

How to develop your brand as you grow?

In fact, the process of developing a brand does not end with the creation of a logo or tagline. Or, even with the debut of your business. From the theme you choose for your website to the marketing materials you develop to how you package and distribute your products, your brand must be present and consistent everywhere your customers engage with you.

What’s more, as you expose your brand to new people and learn more about who your customers are and how to communicate with them, it will continue to form and evolve.

Importantly, you should keep in mind that you will never have complete control over how others view your brand. In addition, you can steer clients in the correct direction, make a fantastic first impression, and manage your reputation. However, you can’t control what people think about your brand. Hence, in order to achieve the goal of connecting with your core audience at every opportunity, you need necessary tools, knowledge, and resources to get started. 

Wrapping up

In conclusion, this article is step by step that guides you how to make a brand for your business successfully. Although this process isn’t quite difficult, it requires care and creativity so that your brand can stand out from any of your competitors. Above all, Arrowtheme hopes this article will bring you a lot of useful information you need to apply for developing your brand. Moreover, if you have any questions on this topic, don’t hesitate to CONTACT US for more details.