Aug182021
Branding Your Business
Branding Your Business
© 2002 Elena Fawkner
If you think only big corporate names need to think about things
like brand names, think again. Your brand says a lot about you
and your business, and that’s as true for a one person home-
based operation as it is for a multinational conglomerate. In this
article we look at how creating a strong brand for your business
can help you set yourself apart from the pack and lay the right
foundation for the future growth of your business.
WHAT IS A BRAND?
Your brand is more than just the logo on your letterhead and
business cards or your business name. It is your corporate
identity. An effective brand tells the world who you are, what
you do and how you do it, while at the same time establishing
your relevance to, and credibility with, your prospective customers.
Your brand is also something more ethereal. It is how your
business is perceived by its customers. If your brand has a high
perceived value, you enjoy many advantages over your
competition, especially when it comes to pricing. Why do you
think people are prepared to pay stupid money for items of clothing
with the initials “CK” on them? Perceived value. Perceived value
as a result of very effective brand promotion resulting in very high
brand awareness.
Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and start creating
brands that are going to be recognized the world over. Most of us
simply don’t have the time or other resources necessary. What I
am suggesting, however, is that it is possible for your brand to
dominate your niche.
WHY DO I NEED TO CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
=> Differentiation
We touched on this in the previous section when we looked at
what a brand is and how it can be used to increase the perceived
value of your products and services. The main reason for creating
your own brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition.
New websites are a dime a dozen. So are home-based
businesses. You need to constantly be looking for ways to set
yourself apart from your competition. Your brand can do that for
you.
=> More Effective, Efficient Marketing
Another good reason for creating your own brand is to make your
sales force (even if that’s a sales force of one – you) more effective
and efficient.
Imagine if you didn’t have to spend the first 50% of your time with
a new prospect explaining who you are, what you do and how you
do it. What if your brand had already communicated that for you?
You can spend 100% of your time focusing on sales rather than
educating your prospects about your business
Another benefit of branding is that the efforts you expend increasing
your brand awareness through promoting and marketing your brand
to your target market automatically transfers to your products and
services. So, even when you’re advertising your brand, you’re
indirectly also marketing your products and services.
HOW DO I CREATE MY OWN BRAND?
OK, so you’re convinced you need to create your own brand.
Where on earth do you start?
We saw earlier that your brand needs to say who you are, what
you do and how you do it. It needs to do all these things at the
same time as establishing your relevance to, and building credibilty
with, your prospective customers. Needless to say, it is absolutely
essential, if you are to build your own brand, that *you yourself*
have a firm grasp of who you are, what you do and how you do it.
If not, you’re going to have the devil’s own time getting that
message across to anyone else, let alone establishing your
relevance and credibility.
=> Write A Mission Statement
So, let’s start by creating a mission statement. What is the
mission of your business? Obviously you’re in business to make
a profit. But making a profit is a byproduct of a successful
business. Focus instead on how you choose to achieve that profit.
What are your core values?
A good place to begin thinking about your mission is to put
yourself in the shoes of your customers. Put yourself in their
target market. Let’s say your business is web hosting. If you’re
in the market for a web host, what things are important to you?
Different people will be looking for different benefits but you can
bet that they want their website to be accessible to site visitors so
reliability will be high on their list. Price is also likely to be high
on the list as is 24/7 technical support. What about add-on features
such as unlimited email aliases, cgi support and what-not?
These things will be highly important to some and less important
to others. So focus on the benefits that are likely to be highly
relevant to the majority of your target market. Let’s settle for our
purposes on reliability, price and technical support.
Your mission statement might read something like this: “I strive
to earn a fair return on my investment of time and money by
providing affordable webhosting with guaranteed 99% uptime and
24/7 telephone technical support”. That’s a pretty general
statement and if you decide to focus on a particular niche of the
webhosting market, such as small business, you may want to
more narrowly focus on that group in your mission statement.
Now that you’ve written your mission statement, you can begin
thinking about creating a brand that reinforces and supports your
mission. So, getting back to the fundamental questions of who
you are, what you do and how you do it, you can now begin to
think of your business in these terms. You’re a webhosting
provider, you host websites of small businesses and you do that
by offering cost-effective webhosting solutions, guaranteed 99%
uptime and 24/7 telephone technical support.
When you create your brand, you need to keep the who, what
and how firmly in mind but also use the brand to establish your
relevance to your target market and build credibility with that
market.
Let’s turn now to the nuts and bolts of creating your brand.
=> Describe What You Are Branding
List out your business’s key features and characteristics, your
competitive advantages and anything else that sets you apart
from your competition.
Using our webhosting example, you’ll focus primarily on the
objectives from your mission statement namely, reliable, cost-
effective webhosting solutions supported by 24/7 technical
support.
=> Identify and Describe Your Target Market
Decide whether you want to target the entire webhosting
community or only a segment of it such as small business
websites. Describe your market.
=> List Names that Suggest the Key Elements from Your
Mission Statement
The key elements from your mission statement were reliability,
cost-effectiveness and customer service. List names that are
suggestive of these elements. Let’s use Reliable Webhosting
for our example. (I don’t claim to be a creative genius.)
Don’t limit yourself to real words, though. A coined name with no
obvious meaning is a perfectly legitimate name provided it conveys
something about your business. You will find coined names easier
to trademark and secure domain names for too – a definite plus!
=> List Tag Lines that Reinforce Your Mission Statement
We’ll use: “Outstanding reliability and technical support at a
price your small business can afford”. I know, I know. You can
do much better, I’m sure.
HOW SHOULD I USE MY BRAND?
=> Create a Logo for Your Brand
Your logo is NOT your brand but your logo should allow your
brand to be instantly recognized by those familiar with it. To
this extent, your logo helps create and reinforce brand
awareness.
The logo you create should be able to be used consistently in a
variety of different media. It should be suitable for corporate
letterhead and business cards, as well as for your website and
corporate signage (if any). You do NOT want a confusing
mishmash of logos and banners and heaven knows what else.
Everything you produce needs to use the same, consistent
style of logo so that, over time, your logo becomes synonymous
with your brand. Instant recognition is what you’re going for here,
so don’t dilute it by using several different logos for different
purposes.
=> Consistent Usage of Company Name, Logo and Tag Line
Going back to our webhosting example, putting the brand name
and tagline together, the physical manifestation of your brand
will be:
RELIABLE WEBHOSTING
Outstanding reliability and technical support at a price
your small business can afford.
To establish brand awareness, this branding needs to be used
consistently and frequently in everything your produce, whether
that be letters to clients, business cards, brochures, quotations,
invoices, advertising, promotion, on your website, on the front
door of your principal place of business and on your products.
And don’t forget to be consistent in your use of color schemes.
These can be powerful brand reinforcers.
=> Marketing and Promotion of Your Brand
Once you’ve created your brand, you need to market and
promote it, in addition to your products and services. This is
how you establish your credibility and relevance to your target
market. You can hopefully see why your brand needs to be
suggestive of your mission statement. If, at the same time as
you’re selling your products and services you also push your
brand, your brand becomes synonymous with your products
and services. And vice versa.
A properly descriptive brand and high brand awareness amongst
your target market will allow you to more easily introduce a wider
range of products and services when they’re developed without
having to start by again selling who you are, what you do and
how you do it first. Your brand has already presold YOU. Your
job then is to sell your products and services.
——
** Reprinting of this article is welcome! **
This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you
include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to
a 100% opt-in list.
Here’s the resource box to use if reprinting this article:
——
Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online …
practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the
work-from-home entrepreneur.
http://www.ahbbo.com
To be honest, the answer depends on whom you ask. If you ask the branding experts, they will be up in arms if you dont nail down the name, feeling that branding should be the first order of business. But if you ask me, I am more of a content gal and feel that its better to know what you are offering and get that all worked out as your first priority. In my practice over the years, I find too many people get into perfection paralysis around their business name, their tagline, their website, and so on.
Id rather see you get started now, rather than wait for the perfect branding. As an example, my company started out as Self-Employed Success, then it moved on to The Ideal LIfe and next was Rainmaker Coach . That lead me to where I am now. The branding has evolved as my business and material has evolved, becoming more encompassing of everything I offer.
If you can come up with something thats good for now, that is what Id go with. Just know that it will evolve along with your whole marketing message over time. And that is totally acceptable and to be expected. Focus on coming up with your proprietary system and your content, which is how you will be earning your money.
Dont get me wrong, I do believe branding is important, just not at the expense of holding off on getting started. Spend some time with your branding, but after a while, decide on something and start using it. The more you work with your new business format and model, the more evident the name will be. And it will likely change and grow over time as the work does.
Your Client Attraction Assignment
Have you allowed branding perfectionism to keep you from getting started with your business? Heres my suggestion if this has happened to you. Work on your branding to come up with one to three names that you like.
Next, talk to people about them to help you narrow them down. Pay attention to see if there are any patterns in the feedback. Sometimes you can get as many opinions as the people you ask, which might not be that helpful. Other times a favorite name will emerge.
Either way, dont let too much time slip by before you select a name that works for now. Then get started building your business. Being of service is what its all about and you cant do that if your progress is hindered by worrying about your branding.









Aug192021
5 Major Branding Obstacles Organizations Face
This article has the best possible information about Branding of business, we have mention 5 major branding obstacles. Go through the article we hope it will help every reader to increase business profit.
Today, branding is more important than ever before in terms of marketing success. Everywhere you look, marketing experts are telling you that the only way to win is to create a recognisable brand. With shifting environments and customer preferences, the digital era presents a relentless challenge for brands, requiring constant adaptation and reinvention.
Customers aren’t the only ones pushing change; the Internet helps every company to see what every other business is doing, hastening the spread of industry norms and business processes. The widespread adoption of digital technology has resulted in a surge in the popularity of virtual shopping and online video shopping, and the pandemic has only escalated this trend.
As a consequence, the overall situation for businesses and brands is, to put it bluntly, quite difficult. Particularly for brick-and-mortar businesses that had to make the switch to digital almost overnight. When you add in the need to adjust to virtual shopping procedures, it’s clear that the game has changed for both of them.
The importance of branding has risen dramatically as a result of this change. The problem is that, although most businesses recognise the value of branding, they are uncertain how to build one that is effective. In the virtual world, a new concept doesn’t stay new for long, and this is something that businesses must bear in mind.
Brands, large and small, face many challenges today, all of which must be considered in order to achieve the pinnacles of success. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Perceptions are central to a brand’s identity – or image. For better or for worse, every brand has a reputation. Since perception is real, a brand’s credibility can affect whether or not business opportunities are found or lost in the marketplace.
As previously stated, the pandemic has accelerated global e-commerce development. Brands are putting forward plans to reinvent distribution and experiment with new models in order to react to this trend in 2021. Some companies are looking at direct-to-consumer choices in order to make it easier for customers to make repeat purchases. This change in delivery would have ramifications for brand management and advertising spending.
Online B2C visibility is becoming more difficult as more customers go straight to virtual stores online rather than using search engines to locate items. As a result, it’s critical to establish a brand identity as soon as possible so that customers can find you by name rather than by product. Print catalogues and postcards, for example, can be powerful offline marketing complements to online promotions.
A brand vision must stand out, connect with consumers, and motivate employees. It must be practical to execute, work overtime in a fast-paced market, and drive brand-building initiatives. Working visions are normally multidimensional and adaptable to a variety of situations. They use ideas like brand personality, corporate ideals, and a higher purpose, and they clearly go beyond practical benefits.
Brands are formed through a variety of touchpoints; customers develop relationships with brands every time they communicate with them. This means that the brand is influenced by everyone in the business. As a result, brand building’s main goal is to keep the message consistent across all channels, media, and time. This necessitates keeping the brand alive by developing new ways to communicate the message while maintaining consistency. This entails making clear and necessary improvements around the board, as well as changing to keep current with trends.
These are the five major obstacles that brands are confronted with today. Given the amount of noise surrounding virtual shopping and online video shopping
, brands must take these challenges seriously if they are to thrive in the modern age.
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As a blogger personal branding is one of the most important strategies you can take to help establish your site. Most popular blogs have become so because they built their reputation around certain unique characteristics. In fact the use of identity branding is a commonly used strategy to help increase blog traffic. When you think about it there is really no easier way to distinguish your blog from the millions that can be found on the internet today.Here are 3 advantages you can expect to enjoy by establishing your own personal brand when bogging on the internet.Sets You ApartEven if the topic you blog about is similar to that of other sites YOUR insight makes it completely different. Even the most popular blogs contain information that can be found elsewhere, it is just their ‘spin’ on the issues that makes it unique. No matter what your personality is or your opinions may be there will always be people who agree with you or will be attracted to your style. The best way to increase blog traffic is always to step away from the ‘pack’ and be the individual that you are. In this way it is more likely you will create some sort of stir or interest. Encourages Your IndividualityYou are always more comfortable in your ‘own skin’ and this makes the blogging ‘process’ all the easier for you. The result here is that the content you produce tends to be increasingly more unique as you shed your inhibitions about sharing perspectives or making suggestions. This is all part of the identity branding process and your blog is actually ‘maturing’ as it takes on and grows into its personality. Stimulates Creative JuicesOnce you have hit your ‘comfort zone’ you now feel more comfortable about tackling issues with which you may have an opinion or even suggest solutions. Everybody has pet peeves or personal passions as you likely also do and now you can pursue them from the ‘pulpit’ which is your blog. With your personal brand already established your readers now know what to expect and this is likely why they continue to return.Personal branding is one of the wisest strategies you can implement when trying to increase blog traffic. This approach allows you to build your site around characteristics that are uniquely you. In fact most popular blogs use identity branding like this in the same way to gain their success online as well. The 3 advantages we reviewed here are strong reasons as to why you should establish your own personal brand. Blogs are meant to be unique and since this is what appeals to readers it only makes sense to allow your site to be an extension of your own unique personality.
Article Tags:
Most Popular Blogs, Increase Blog Traffic, Personal Branding, Most Popular, Popular Blogs, Identity Branding, Increase Blog, Blog Traffic, Personal Brand
Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.To learn more about the importance of personal branding when you blog and to also receive a free instructional manual that teaches valuable niche research techniques simply visit:http://blogbrawn.com
By PBZC.Name-Devloper •Blog