Have you spent a lot on marketing and not getting the desired results? Are your potential customers not resounding with your brand values? If you have answered yes then, it’s time to analyze your brand development strategies and revise them as they are not functioning well.
If you are worried about why your brand development strategy is not working and which steps you have to take brand development for your small business, give a read to this article. In the end, you will be able to design a perfect brand development strategy to win customer trust and loyalty.
Let’s have a look at ten actionable brand development strategies that can help you grow your small business.
1. Choose a Memorable Name
There are thousands of brands and companies out there in the market. Usually, customers relate to or remember only those brands whose names are easy to pronounce and recall. So, ask yourself, is your brand name easy to remember? If your brand name is too hard to pronounce, it could be an utter disaster for your branding strategy.
So, how to select a brand name? Here are a few tips for you.
- Always choose a name that everyone can easily remember
- Select a name that indicates what you offer
- Make sure that your brand name isn’t confusing
- Choose a name that leaves a positive impact on your targeted audience’s mind.
- Test your brand name through verbal communication to know whether everyone can easily pronounce or spell it
Keep in mind that naming your brand is not enough for you. Besides that, you also need to understand how to utilize it ideally. For that purpose, make sure to register it in your country so no one can use it. In case you want to globalize your brand in the future, registering it online is a smart option.
Whether in New Zealand, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Denmark or Singapore, company registration is now easy since it is done 100% online, without having to wait in long queues. It would be helpful if you also purchase the domain with the same name and create a logo with the help of a logo creator.
The last thing you need to do is align your brand values, message, and personality to make it more impactful.
2. Evoke Emotions of Your Targeted Audience
Evoking the emotions of potential customers is one of the best ways to win the hearts of your targeted audience. Targeting your audience with the help of emotions and feelings can let your consumers relate to your brand. Marketers always focus on the emotional side of marketing and branding. They do it purposely to leverage emotional association to their benefit.
Are you confused about how you can evoke the emotions of your targeted audience? Don’t worry. You are not alone; everyone does. To learn how you can target your potential clients using emotions, it is essential to understand the agreement types of emotions and sentiments.
According to research published by the University of Glasgow, people usually have four kinds of emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, and fear/surprise. Your brand strategy has to evoke any of them, and you will be amazed by the results.
Coming on how to target your audience emotionally, you need to craft emotionally rich content. Your written content and visuals must have an emotional appeal to compel the audience to purchase your products and services. It should tell the audience what they are missing and how your products/services are beneficial for them, and make sure that you use your content wisely. Keep your message shorter and more impactful so your audience doesn’t get distracted and feel that you purposely hit their emotions.
3. Develop a Visual Identity
Your brand’s visual identity must be unique and has the key elements to distinguish your brand from the competitors. The visual brand identity encompasses logos, colors, graphics, and images. All of these elements must resonate with your audience and spread your brand values and messages without words.
The visual identity can help you in the following ways:
- Relates your brand with consumers on an emotional level
- Informs viewers about your values and your unique proposition
- Leaves a positive first and long-lasting impression on the targeted audience
- It makes your brand memorable
- Works as an awareness tool
After having an idea about how a visual identity can help in brand development, let’s have a look at how to develop a solid visual identity.
For that purpose, first of all, ask a few questions to yourself, like:
- What is your brand’s mission?
- What makes your brand unique from others?
- Which colors relate to your brand and its audience?
- Which emotions do you want your brand image to revoke?
Once you get the answer to these questions, choose a color scheme first and then create a logo using those colors. If you are an expert at designing logos, you should utilize your creativity and design all of the things yourself. If you are not good at designing you can take the assistance of a free logo creator, you can create a fantastic logo for your brand. These logo creator comes with a wide range of premade templates that can be utilized to generate a perfect logo for your brand in less than 5 minutes.
4. Align Your Website with Your Brand Identity
Are you interested in having your website perform well and engage the viewers? If yes, you need to realize that your website design is not enough for it. Sometimes startups and small businesses create websites and believe that they will bring incredible results. If you are also one of them, you are making a huge mistake. Don’t repeat the mistake that many brands made before you. Your website must align with your brand identity.
When you are designing a website, you should focus on its design and analyze how it will communicate with your targeted audience and spread your brand values and message.
For that purpose, analyze what is the key idea of your products, services, or your overall brand and then choose the design according to it. Make sure that your web design is simple and easy to use so that your visitors won’t get distracted and leave a good impression. Furthermore, add some pictures, videos, and written content to grab the visitors’ attention.
5. Build Your Social Media Presence
Did you know that 4.48 billion people actively use different social media platforms? Are you curious why we’re providing you with this information? The purpose is to help you learn about the most significant opportunity for brand awareness.
Social media is one of the biggest and most powerful tools for brand development. It doesn’t matter if it’s a startup, small business, or multi-national corporation, it needs social media to brand awareness and generate a positive relationship with potential clients.
Customers usually discuss the brands, products, and services on social media platforms, and they let others know about it. If you don’t know what people are talking about your brand, you won’t know how to manage your online reputation and improve your services. Even you can’t do anything to tackle a campaign against you.
In contrast, if you’re actively present on social media channels, you can build an excellent brand reputation that could help you make people aware of your brand and ultimately generate sales.
All the information is useless until you don’t know how to use social media for your gains.
Here are a few tips for managing and building your social media presence.
- Get the help of visuals like logos, photos, and videos to grasp the attention.
- Create unique, engaging, and valuable content to communicate with your audience
- Build your social media network and expand your social media reach using different techniques
- Consistently post and share the content to let people remember about your existence
- Promote your social media channels and content on various platforms
- Always utilize the trends on Twitter and other social networking platforms for your benefits
If you think that implementing the tips discussed above is a complicated task for you. Don’t worry; some helpful tools will make your work easier.
6. Align your promotions with your brand’s voice
Promotions are an essential component of a marketing strategy. It allures your potential clients to purchase your products and services and makes aware a wider audience about your brand. So, while planning promotions for your customers, focus more on your brand over its products. Promotions have more things to offer than just enhancing your seasonal sales.
Try to utilize promotions in a better and more effective way. Don’t rush to design a promotional strategy to sell your blocked products; always do some research about how that promotional campaign can ultimately help you in brand development.
Analyze how your competitors have used the promotions and their benefits for that purpose. You can also take help from the internet to learn about recent case studies about promotions and learn from their experience. Once you understand it, now is the time to align the promotions with your brand’s voice.
Always ensure that your promotions correspond to your brand values. That is how you can get maximum return from the promotions.
7. Get Consumer’s Feedback
Do you know why most of the marketing and brand development strategies fail? Because they don’t satisfy the consumer’s interests. Some marketers use traditional marketing strategies and think that those strategies work every time. However, if a brand development strategy works for one or a few brands, it doesn’t mean that it will also work for others. Don’t ever think that what you like the most or what you think is reliable will be appreciated and accepted by others.
It is better to get the feedback of consumers or the targeted public to share their views and experiences while designing strategies. This approach helps the companies in two ways; first, the consumers realize that a brand is giving them some importance. Secondly, the brands can analyze how people think and respond to their brand development strategies.
8. Work well on your communication strategy
When it comes to communication strategy, it revolves around mainly two things; designing your content and the distribution platforms. So let’s discuss them one by one.
The key components of the content are the website design, brand logo or visual identity, pictures, videos, and texts. These components have to be associated to give a clear message to the audience.
The web design should match the brand values to achieve its goals. It is better for your brand or small business if you hand over the web designing task to professionals. Besides that, create a visually appealing and memorable logo by using a free logo maker or with the help of experienced logo designers.
Write unique, valuable, and error-free written content that doesn’t have a single dot without purpose. Use attractive and meaningful photos and videos to convey and share your message across different online platforms.
Coming to the content distribution platforms, there are dozens of platforms where you can share your content, including social media networks (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.), video sharing platforms (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, TikTok, etc.), and search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.). Try not to miss even a single platform where your targeted audience is present and from where you can reach them.
9. Always be consistent in your branding strategies
Usually, companies claim that they don’t get adequate results from the branding strategies. Sometimes it happens due to some gaps in the strategy, and sometimes they are not consistent in implementing and updating the plan. Therefore, one should not consider that implementing the branding strategies once can help achieve the desired results as it needs consistent efforts.
If a brand wants its customers to visit its website or online store regularly, it needs to target it frequently. The digital market is highly competitive, and every brand is executing branding strategies. Therefore, once you free a potential client from your hands, someone else will catch him. Therefore, consistency is required to implement branding strategies and not get the consumers distracted.
10. Regularly analyze your brand development strategies
Some branding strategies don’t work in certain conditions, and companies get disappointed by the efforts and don’t try again. If you get demotivated easily, you won’t succeed in the business. You need to analyze the loopholes in your strategy and fix them with extra work. Even if your branding provides surprising results, you still need to analyze them for much better results or locate if there are any weaknesses.
Analyzing the brand development strategies help the companies know where they need to put efforts or which branding or marketing strategies they have to exclude. Furthermore, this analysis helps them beat the competitors and win the market share. Even large corporations which don’t put effort into research fail to achieve their goals, and the small businesses replace them in no time.
Final Words
The business world is full of opportunities for those who know how to grab them, and brand development strategies work like the fishing rods to catch the fish. Without the right and dependable branding, it would be difficult for companies to survive in the market. “Right” and “dependable” are the words to remember.
However, designing the branding strategies is not a cakewalk. When you start branding without research, you regret it later. Therefore, research everything, plan it and then execute your brand development strategy.
Your branding doesn’t rely solely on one thing, it’s a combination of multiple tactics, and every tactic has its own purpose and significance. When all of these things are allied and give a clear brand message, success is guaranteed. Starting from choosing the name to analyzing the strategies after execution, don’t ignore the importance of any tactic. It would be dramatically beneficial for your business and brand.