When it comes to purchasing a product or a service most people would prefer buying from brands they are already familiar with. Now we can’t blame them for that as for most familiarity equals trust and reliability but this puts small businesses far behind in the line and harder to get noticed. And that’s exactly where branding comes in. 

An effective branding not only conveys your product or service but what your brand stands for. Therefore, for any company, it’s important to build a brand before getting started. Now, before we get into what goes behind building (and sustaining) a brand let’s define the latter for a clearer understanding of what we’re about to get into!

What is a Brand?

A brand is far from just a name and a logo. It’s a whole bunch of perceived experiences based on interactions and impressions you can and cannot control. 

Think about it in terms of an actual human being. We all make a different impression on different people and that’s aided by factors such as our name, face, communication style, way of presenting ourselves, etc. This forms an overall perception in people’s minds and the same goes for brands.

The brand’s name, logo, aesthetic, voice, and reputation help us form an opinion of who they are. Your brand is your reputation and it’s what’s responsible for maintaining a long term partnership with your customers. Needless to say, this is where all sorts of ROI’s take place with an increase in sales, leads, brand loyalty, and word of mouth referrals.

Therefore, it’s important to have a brand and to stay consistent with it.

Research to Mark What Makes Your Brand Stand Out

Research Is Everything

No surprise here, the first step when getting into anything is research, and that’s no different for building a brand. 

Now, there are two essentials you need to cover when it comes to researching your current market:

1. Your Current Competitors

Conducting an extensive competitive analysis online and offline helps you seed through the mistakes other brands have made in your industry, leaving you with a handful of lessons on what works and doesn’t work for that specific audience. 

And after all, you can’t convince a customer to purchase you over them if you don’t offer something others don’t.

2. Your Potential Customers

Social media is the easiest place to start. Look at what kind of pages your target audience follow and engage with. Online reviews & social mentions are often overlooked avenues of finding useful information that gives you an insight into what your target audience feels (and bonus, how they speak)!

Discover Your Purpose

Now, once you have nailed down your research it becomes easier to define your brand’s purpose. A purpose is what connects you with consumers on a more emotional level, simultaneously achieving business while benefiting the society.

The reason for spending time to categorize your purpose is to build a relationship long term that not only boosts sales but loyalty as well. Your purpose is something that adds value to society in general, making it a great tool to set yourself apart from your competitors.

Where to begin? Well, markers today have made this job a lot easier. Simon Sinek’s The Golden Rule is a great resource for this.

There are 3 parts to it:

Vector Note: Recreating the vector below with just the circle encompassing the words ‘Why’, ‘How’, and ‘What’ in the same structure it is in with the text ‘The Golden Circle’ and our definition of the same, that’s written below the image, on the right-hand side. Can keep ‘Simon Sinek’ as well. To clarify further – we’re not using the text in grey that’s in the image but instead replacing it with the copy of ‘what’, ‘how’… we have below. For further ref of another structure for the golden circle – ref.What do you do? The products or services you offer.How do you do it? Your process – this is what sets you apart from your competitors.Why do you do it? Beliefs, motivation & purpose behind what you do. Alt Tag: The golden circle simon sinek

Once you’ve answered these questions you’ve nailed the first step in identifying your unique brand purpose.

Begin Where Your Audience Is

Define Your Target Audience

Clearly defining who your target audience is and what their needs and desires are helps you convert them from followers to consumers of your product or business. 

This exercise will affect and benefit every area of your brand building process. 

Now, while you can visualize who your target audience is, the best way to go about this process is utilizing all the information you have at hand to make a buyer persona of what your ideal target audience will look like. So, let’s get into it.

Create a Buyer Persona

Creating a brand relies on deeply understanding your buyer persona. It’s often a step that’s missed by most marketers and that’s exactly what you can capitalize on to make your brand stand apart.

Let’s take a live example of a brand we worked for, to give you a more practical look on how you not only create a user persona but build an ad on the basis of that. 

A small brief: The client is a digital marketing institute looking for potential leads for their classes. The target audience here were people looking to switch fields and here the breakdown for the same –

Vector Note: Creating a simple table.

User Persona
Demographic		Psychographics
Age	28	Goals	To make more money.Have a more dynamic & flexible job.
Gender	Male
Education	Bcom	Values	Work-life balance.Job to engage with & not just for sustenance.
Occupation	Accountant
Marital Status	Unmarried	Fears	Cost of changing their field. Unsure + lack of knowledge of other possibilities.Aren’t aware of anyone else they know doing anything differently.
Income	4 LPA

Now that you’ve built your user persona it’s easier to build anything and everything you need to around these. 

For example, this is the ad we built for our client on Quora based on our defined user persona.

Digital Marketing:Learn for 90 days, Earn for a Lifetime. Who is the Training Designed for?People looking to Change FieldsCareer AspirantsFreshers  Enroll Now

Establish Your Brand Mission & Personality

Your Brand Mission & Vision

Before you build a brand that your target audience can trust you need to know what value you provide as a business. Your brand vision is what you envision for the future of your company. It’s everything you aspire to be. 

Think about where you want to be in 10 years time and write out a mission statement. This is what you’ll look at every time it comes to executing a strategy or collaboration.

Your Personality Speaks Before You Do

Personality is exactly what you think it means. Once you have your buyer persona and you know what language your target audience speaks in you’ve already got points to form the basis of your brand personality.

Here are some factors that make your personality successful – authenticity, trustability, value, authority and memorability.

Create your Logo & Tagline

This is where it all comes together. Your design should be able to emulate everything you’ve defined for your brand. Let’s get into it one by one.

Your Brand Logo

A logo is likely to be one of the first interactions people have with your company and it’s your opportunity to make a solid first impression. Ideally, you want to aim for a logo that has an easy brand recall, is unique, and represents your values and mission statements well.

Here are some things to keep in mind when building a logo:

• Adaptability
• Visibility of the companies name
• Connect with the target audience

A logo has very little to do with just design. We explain this further in our ‘Why Do People Pay For This’ post.

Your Tagline

Here’s where it gets interesting. Your tagline is the expression of your company’s mission and vision. In essence, it’s a memorable phrase or motto that defines your brand in the mind of your customers.

Some memorable examples:

• Amul: The taste of India
• Surf : Daag Acche hain
• Nike: Just Do It
• Debeers: A Diamond Is Forever
• McDonald’s: I’m lovin’ it
• Kingfisher: The King of Good Times

So there you have it! Everything you need to get started with building your brand. The next step you ask? Once you have your branding in mind it’s time to market your brand on social media. And as you can tell, we have a blog for it. Check it out here.

Sustaining Your Brand In The Long Run

So now that you have everything in your pocket to make your brand thrive you might be wondering what’s next? Well, your focus now shifts to ensuring the longevity and success of your brand. 

Here’s everything you need to do that.

Make Your Personality Bleed Into Every Aspect of Your Business

Now, you have everything laid out for you. And this is what you can capitalize on. Your branding process never stops and should seep into every aspect of everything that’s visible to your customers.

This includes everything that’s tangible and intangible – from your store, products, stationary, and packaging to advertisements, personal interactions, and your social media voice.

On digital platforms especially, consistent fonts, colors and visual style really matters. Digital Ready is one such brand that maintains a solid visual identity throughout their social media:

Their voice and personality, that’s so ingrained in their website, effortlessly seeps into their social media. Inconsistency confuses your customers and is overall bad for building your brand long term.

So, to sum it up, use your unique brand voice in every piece of content you create.

 Create a Social Media Strategy

According to GlobalWebIndex, 54% of people on social media research a brand’s products on these platforms, which means over half the number of people who see or hear about your brand check your social profiles before making a decision to purchase from you.

Now, how can you make this decision easier for them? Here’s where your social media strategy comes in. 

An effective social media is one that includes:

• Original, engaging and relevant content
• Quality content
• Easy to consume formats
• Content that educates, entertains, inspires or informs, &
• Paid advertising

Forming and planning your strategy is a giant step on its own. The next blog in this series covers everything you need to know to effectively create a social media strategy. 

Meanwhile, let’s look at how you can further help your content reach your target audiences.

Boosting v/s Advertising

Once you’ve optimized your social media strategy with relevant hashtags and all the catchy, quality and relevant content that further extends your brand, your posts get consumed organically, either by people who follow you or find you through the magic that is social media. 

But, for those of us who don’t have a large audience on our social profiles already (or just those who want to expand their range) there are other tools that come into play. 

Boosting

A boosted post is a post that reaches the news feed of people who engage with your page or people that you specifically, and manually, target. The options for the latter can range from age, location, and gender to likes and interests. This tool can be great for experimentation and just generally testing the waters to see how effective your social media content is.

Opportunities (/Pro’s)

• The easiest way to get your posts more engagement. You have the option of boosting any existing post on Instagram, Facebook, and even Twitter.
• Increases your click through rate through an added CTA of your choice to your existing post. This includes ‘learn more’, ‘contact us’, etc.
• Aids in helping you reach your goals, such as:
  • Clicks: maximizing the number of clicks to your landing page
  • Engagement: maximizing likes, shares, and comments on your existing post
• Choice of setting a total budget with the option of calculating your daily there itself.
• Option of choosing your existing audience or creating new ones directly, one at a time.

Shortcomings (/Con’s)

• Since it’s based on an already existing post there isn’t much you can change in terms of visuals to fit the kind of audience you’re choosing to target, etc.
• Lack of control in terms of setting and adjusting your budget delivery.
• Limited options on where you get to platform your posts i.e. where your target audience gets to see it. This is usually different for each platform and maybe a task you have little control over.

Paid Advertising

Almost every platform comes with an option of creating an ad. These dynamic Ad Managers help you reach your audience keeping your objective in mind. Needless to say they come with a ton of adjustable options that you can use to optimize your socials fully.

Opportunities (/Pro’s)

• The wide range of campaign objectives allows you to optimize each phase in the user journey.
  • Awareness: Brand awareness and reach
  • Consideration: Traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and messages.
  • Conversion: Conversions, catalog sales, and store visits.
• Ability to adjust your ads budget delivery for maximum impact.
• Flexibility in terms of picking an audience to target. You get an array of options that you can choose from, and more than one, creating a complex synergy of audiences.
• Freedom in testing. You have the option of creating a different range of ad sets to test your creatives, copy and overall appeal to see which works best with your budget. Along with a much more prominent creative flexibility.
• Gives you control over the placement of your ad across the platform.
• With Ads manager comes significantly more reports and statistics you can access to get a deeper understanding of your ad campaign.

Shortcomings (/Con’s)

• The prerequisite of having a business page set up.
• Requirement of a deeper understanding of the functionality of certain features and an overall higher level of experience to fully optimize your page. This means getting acquainted with bidding strategies, ad campaigns, ad sets, etc.

This should give you a pretty clear picture of what you can do with your social media posts and how you can increase your engagement across your platforms. The option to invest in these definitely goes a long way.

So there you have it! Everything you need to know to make and maintain your social media presence. Click through for the next piece of this puzzle to guide you through the best practices for social media marketing. Hint: it’s all about creating an effective social media strategy.