Making sure you create the right brand image for your business is one of the keys to success in today’s competitive landscape. Brand image is everything, with the business world now being a twenty-four seven game with the use of the web, you need to make sure you have a solid, well-presented brand image in order to stand out from the crowd and grab your customer’s attention away from the competition.
Creating a good foundation for your businesses brand image starts with several different factors, you should aim to have a unified imagine across any means of communication you have such as using the same logo on your letterheads, the plastic and gemini lettering that you have on your building, or your online advertisements.
There is a large variety of elements you should be making considerations for these include:
Identify Your Key Audiences
One of the first steps that you should be considering is to identify your target markets and audiences. They will include things such as consumers, partners, investors, employees, and industry analysists. It’s important to make sure you are being specific when you define each audience. You need to do this in order to gain clarification in being able to create an effective marketing campaign. It may be a good idea to carry out some extensive market research in this area.
Determine Critical Business Goals
In order to know if you’re being successful or you are hitting the targets you need to think about where you are going and how you’re going to get there. Trying to create a solid brand image when you are unsure of your businesses short or long term goals will be in-effective and just won’t work. You will find that a brand image relies on goals being set. Make sure you set realistic but critical goals for your business, that allow you the opportunity to make changes if you need to.
Define Your Brand Persona
When you have your target audiences and your business goals set, you need to start thinking about the persona of your brand. You need to make sure it appeals to your potential customers and it showcases your differences and products benefits. You should make sure that it remains simple and relevant in order to define your image the way you want.
Develop Key Messaging
Once you’ve sorted these three out it’s time to move onto thinking about the message you want to send out with your brand image. You should make sure you document your key messages and ensure they align with your key audiences. Your key messages are going to be the most important things that you want your audience to walk away with when dealing with any area of your business. Ant interactions with your brand should focus on the message or messages you want to send out. You can think about aspects such as your brand personality, it’s value, the unique features of your products and many more.
Once you have thought about these important factors with your brand image you will want to solidify and secure the image you have created. You can do this in several different ways, and now is the time to start drumming up a good customer following and generate the all-important sales.
Some areas to consider when promoting include:
- Public Relations – PR is all about getting your brand image and message out to the right people and it plays a key role in your success. It will be in control of releasing company news to the online world through a blog, trade publication and through news outlets. PR has the power to increase and improve brand awareness just through using the correct processes and methods of releasing relevant information. Think new product releases, upcoming sales or discount vouchers.
- Content – The content that you create and release is the bread and butter to all your PR and digital marketing activities so it is vital you get it right. You will need to deliver a relevant, good quality, regular source of contents such as contributed articles, blog posts, and Instagram posts all of which relate back to your correct target audience. If you have messy content or are very unreliable with your timing, then you risk failing.
- Social – It’s no longer a big secret that social media has become a valuable tool for any business, especially one that is trying to grow its brand image. It’s brilliant for sharing your relevant content and for interacting with customers and influencers that have an interest in your field. Having a good social media presence on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook can help to boost sales and drive traffic to a website.
This is just a quick guide on things you should be considered as a business who is trying to grow its brand image. Do you have any other hints and tips that could help to achieve this? Please share them in the comments section below.
