5 Amazing Ways Branding Helps Your Business
Establishing a strong brand presence can be crucial for businesses looking to stand out in a crowded market. Whether you’re launching a new product, increasing awareness of an existing one, or even just wanting to build customer loyalty and engage new customers, investing in a branding helps your business grow.
The term branding comes from when ranchers would use hot irons to brand their livestock to show distinctive ownership. Today, companies use branding to define and differentiate themselves from other companies. A company’s branding should be unique, clear and virtuous to cleanly stand out in their field of the market.
Explore five different ways for how branding helps your business grow and thrive. They are:
- Establish trust in your brand.
- Create Recognition with visuals.
- Connect with your audience.
- Craft a consistent message.
- Know your audience.
How Branding Helps Your Business
Establish Trust in Your Brand.
Branding establishes trust and credibility within your market/field, helping to differentiate you from your competitors. This can be especially useful for businesses that are just starting out, or ones that may have had bad experiences. With a strong brand you can tap into customers’ values and create a positive association with your product or service. Establishing trust will not just get more customers but it can also help keep them in the long term as loyal customers who keep coming back.
Customers can lose confidence in whether they can complete their goals. Also, if the business can do what they need or if the business is a legit one. These customers will likely give up trying to complete their goal or try a competitor instead.
Create Recognition with Visuals.
One of the most effective ways to create recognition for your brand is through visuals. Your logo, color scheme and typography can all have an effect. They help evoke a strong visual impression in customers’ minds, making it easier for them to remember you. Use of consistent visuals will also create a sense of reliability and trust. Customers know what to expect from you every time they come across your brand. Try focusing on one key message that you want people to remember about your business and use visuals to reinforce this core message.
Most people are visual learners so they like to have visual cues that indicate what to look at or where to go. Do this by reinforcing topics or ideas with images, infographics, and logos. This includes cartoons, graphics, and photographs (yes, stock images too). Since most people are visual learners, use beautiful yet relevant images to reinforce ideas of the text.
Make sure there is good contrast between colors and keep in mind the color-blind when choosing colors (look up common types of color blindness for this). The best colors for design of a website newsletter depend on what the website is for, who will be using it, and what the tone of the site and the owners want and like.
More professional websites usually have neutral/cooler colors as their main colors with a primary or secondary color for accent to give a formal/subdued feeling. For a more casual and comfortable tone, websites usually have more warm and brighter colors to make their users more calm and relaxed.
Connect With Your Audience Emotionally.
People connect emotionally when they feel that you understand them and their needs. Your brand should be authentic to your company so that it resonates with people. Let customers get to know your story, share your business values and show how you’re different from the competition. This approach can help you build a stronger connection between customers and your brand and foster a more meaningful relationship over time. Providing quality content, engaging visuals, and effective storytelling can help to increase customer loyalty and drive sales.
Make sure your branding also has good accessibility. Accessibility is the state of being able to find, get access to, and use safely and without difficulty. People need accessibility to something in order to use it. A brand with bad accessibility or usability will have few users and even fewer customers. For more about accessibility, try our post, “Good Usability for Websites”.
Craft a Consistent Message.
To build a successful brand, you need to ensure that all of your messaging reflects a consistent message. Your visuals should match your brand’s mission and be connected across all channels from physical to digital marketing. This includes developing logos, newsletters, taglines and catchphrases, calls-to-action, etc. to manage customer perception when engaging with your business. Building vocal consistency and creating a set of rules for written materials, web design elements and visual elements will help to develop an attentive audience with clear expectations. Not only will it make it easier for potential customers to understand who you are quickly but also help keep the right people coming back.
Also, make sure to use plain language to aid your audience’s understanding. Plain language is content that is written to ensure that the reader can easily scan a document, understand its main points, find specific details quickly, and use the document as intended. This is critical for content writers, technical writers, bloggers, and other content creators.
Know Who You’re Talking To and Why You’re Doing It.
Before you create any sort of branding for your business, you need to know who you’re talking to and why. Consider your goals and your target audience and their goals when determining the frequency of website updates. If you have a business blog, for example, frequent updates could increase engagement and show that you’re actively active in the industry. On the other hand, if your website is more of an information portal, it might not be necessary to update content on a daily basis. Knowing your goals and who you are trying to reach can help you decide the right content frequency for your site.
You need to understand who your customers are and what they want. You should also consider their demographics (age, gender, income level, etc.) and psychographics (interests, values, needs, wants, etc.). Once you’ve identified your target audiences, you can use surveys to learn more about them.
From this you should start making a user persona for each main target audience. This should be a fictitious person that represents the target audience that you are trying to attract. You’ll need to know the target audience a bit better to finish the persona, such as why they are patroning you in the first place.
Doing this important step will allow you to tailor messaging specifically to them which will further help establish a strong connection with customers. Not only does this ensure that your messaging rings true but also makes it more likely for potential customers to recognize the value your brand offers over those of your competitors.
Summary
Establishing a strong brand presence can be crucial for businesses looking to stand out in a crowded market. The five different ways for how branding can help your business grow are:
- Establish trust in your brand.
- Create Recognition with visuals.
- Connect with your audience.
- Craft a consistent message.
- Know your audience.
