The 6 Golden Rules For Building Your Brand

If you want to create a meaningful brand that will resonate far and wide, you must identify the needs of your audience and market. For example, what popular search terms surround your business, and how can you utilise them to attract new clients? What expectations does your audience have, and how can you use both marketing and sales to meet - and hopefully exceed - them? 

We’ve developed six golden rules for building a brand that will help achieve your company goals and carve a meaningful space for your brand identity.

Core values

It may seem obvious, but establishing your company’s core values - what the backbone of your business will be - is essential for building a brand. It’s important not to think of your core values as a box-ticking exercise but rather a conversation about what is important to you and your business and what - besides profit - will influence your decision-making.

Core - or brand - values are the scaffolding which holds everything together. They will impact your marketing campaigns, helping to establish things like tone of voice and demographics, as well as your customer support. If you are able to compound your core values into one simple yet effective mission statement, your customers will have something to latch onto, helping to build reputation and trust.

A clear marketing strategy

There’s no way around it: marketing is a major part of any company. It can seem daunting at first not knowing where to start. The internet and social media can at times feel like a black hole, where cutting across the noise and making a real impact seems impossible. This is where your core values and brand immersion come into play, helping to establish your voice against the competition.

At WithBrand, our expertise ranges from content marketing to social media and email marketing campaigns, with a focus on brand cohesion. By building a marketing strategy with your brand at the heart of everything, you’ll be able to market your product in a way that’s both organic and futureproof.

It’s important to remember that the way consumers buy their products has changed over the years, which means the way you sell has to as well!

More than just a logo

The power of logos shouldn’t be underestimated: after all, they’re usually the first thing a customer sees when engaging with your business. However, while a company logo is undoubtedly key for your brand identity, it shouldn’t be the thing that defines it. It’s best to think of your logo as an extension of your brand identity rather than the foundation.

At WithBrand, we take several things into account to successfully build a brand identity, including tone of voice, visual guidelines and core values. By building from the inside out in this way, your brand is driven by its belief system: this is what your customers will be interacting with, after all, not just your visual identity.

Which brings us onto our next point…

Customer service is key

It may sound obvious, but having great customer support is crucial for your business. Not only is it a vital part of your service, but establishing a strong customer support ethos will help to build your brand’s reputation and loyalty. We’ve lost track of how many companies develop a bad reputation for providing poor customer support - but equally, we’ve seen a company’s brand identity grow organically through word of mouth by customers who received a high level of customer support.

Using social media tools to keep track of indirect complaints on Facebook and Twitter can be a great way to keep your finger on the pulse, identifying what is or isn’t working and allow you to pre-emptively tackle any queries or complaints your customers may have.

Know your customers

One way to ensure a happy customer is to be confident in who they are. Are you certain about the core demographic you’re selling to? Do you know their habits and tendencies? Having buyer personas is the first big step towards this.

Establishing your buyer personas should be high up on your branding checklist. Working out who your ideal customer is, what their spending habits are, and how they like to buy their products can be pivotal in how you tailor your marketing campaigns. If you can ascertain where to find your customers, and what sort of content they’re looking for - for example, if they prefer digital marketing as opposed to printed materials - then you’ll be able to streamline your processes, as well as find new opportunities to reach your target demographic.

Branding personas can be as simple or as detailed as you want, but it’s important to establish a clear image of who you’re selling to. Hopefully, once you identify your ideal customers, you’ll be able to finetune your content towards them, and create your very own brand evangelists.

Brand evangelists

What are brand evangelists, you ask? Put simply, these are customers who love your product so fiercely, they vocally champion you. They are the people who defend your company on social media and forums, who regularly engage with your content and promote you. In fact, they’ve become so important for companies that ‘evangelism marketing’ is now considered a crucial form of marketing.

In an age where content can seem inauthentic, brand evangelists provide an invaluable personal element, ideally creating a community of people who also love your brand and product. In many ways, evangelists are even more lucrative than something like celebrity endorsements, as the ‘realness’ of their praise is reassuring to other potential customers.

If you’ve managed to hone your core values, marketing strategy and customer support to sell your product in the best possible way, there’s no reason why brand evangelists shouldn’t flock to you!