In the last few weeks, we have been asking people to tell us what are they questions and challenges when it comes to branding their businesses; we are answering them via video, but we are also going to start a new series of posts with exercises to help your business from the beginning.
We’ve put a series of ten posts that will take you through a ten-week journey branding your business. Each week we’ll give you some tasks that will help you develop the brand you need. So, stay tuned, do your homework and please share this with anybody you think it’d be useful.
We’ll start with the assumption that you know what branding is and why you need one. If you haven’t read our posts, that explain it, do it before you start, it will take 5 minutes.
Why is branding important for small businesses?
#askpixelandink: Why do I need a brand?
Let’s start then! Whether you are after to brand from scratch, to re-brand or to create a personal brand, the start is always the same.
Understand why you are in business
You need to analyse your business, know what you do but most importantly why you do it. And why you are different from your competitors. Only then you will understand who you should be selling.
It’s good to investigate your competitors, not to copy them but to make sure you are different from them. Some will offer faster delivery, and others will claim a personalised service. There will be some that will make themselves cheaper. We advise against that path, customers that look for cheap services won’t value what you do. They only look at the price which will make it difficult to put prices up.
Now that you know who is around you, you must find your why, why are you in business? Money shouldn’t be your ‘why’ because money is a consequence of it. Steve Jobs didn’t start Apple to be rich; he started because he wanted to change the world.
Find out who is your potential and current audience
Knowing who your customers are it’s the key to your brand success. Branding will tell your potential customers whether you are for them of not, so if you design you design your brand for them they will find you attractive and spend money with you.
The way to discover who these people are is by making educated guesses. If you are already in business, you can analyse your best customers. But if you starting from zero you will need to discover them. One of the popular ways to find who your customers are is creating buyer personas (semi-fictional representation of your ideal audience). Knowing their gender, age or where they hang out will help you later to set your look, tone of voice and what social media should you join.
These two points are vital as they will set the base for your brand, remember that you brand for your customers, not for you. Now it’s over to you!
If you thought this post was useful tell your friends and subscribe to our newsletter, so you don’t miss next week’s post – we’ll talk about Naming your business.