Using your brand to promote your business is much more than having a flashy logo and business cards to hand out to prospective customers. Instead, a strong brand seeks to understand, listen and communicate with its target demographic.
Brand design is important, both for legitimacy and to stick in the mind of your audience. However, how your brand acts is what attracts your audience. The brand imagery is just the frame that all other communications are built around.
Using an analogy of a person, with your brand and its core imagery being the skeleton, let's explore the features of strong branding identity and the anatomy of a brand.
How do you see your brand? Your brand vision encompasses goals and plans for development and achievement. It's what you see as the future of your company and provides guidance for your business strategy.
You must have a clear brand vision and tailor everything to align with it. Think about your brand purpose and how this ties in with your company values. Your brand vision is the cornerstone of your strategy and the basis for how you interact with your audience.
Social listening is a method of scanning social media activity for relevant content and discussion. This could be around your business or industry as a whole. Making sure you're up to date with current sentiments allows your marketing team to develop and produce content and communications tailored to your audience. Creating relevant content means better engagement.
There are software options, such as HootSuite, which can help collate all this content into easily digestible feeds. It’s also possible to do it manually, like using the Lists feature on Twitter.
Social listening also helps you quickly respond to negative comments and get ahead of any negative sentiment in the community.
Another way of tracking the needs of customers is to ask them directly. It seems simple, but automated Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys can allow you to spot issues in customer service or any operational problems which might be leading to negative feedback. Your NPS score is a reflection of your customer loyalty and can be collected via a simple survey.
Of course, this method also allows for positive feedback so you can see where your business is excelling and use this to make informed decisions and support your business strategy.
Getting feedback at the earliest opportunity means you can respond appropriately. Importantly, resolutions to issues can be more efficiently found if you have this style of clear feedback. The opportunity to do this before it reaches social media and starts impacting the discourse can be crucial.
This is the power behind your brand. It’s how the brand gets you in front of your target audience. Content creation connects your audience with your vision, and lets them see why you do what you do.
Content includes any piece of text, image, or video which promotes your business to your audience. Popular ways of communicating ideas are through blog posts - like expert insights - or video timelapse production, for a more visual method of communication.
Great content should inform, educate, tell a story, or address needs your customers have. If you provide your audience with thought leadership, press releases, infographics, and product insights, you will establish yourself as an industry leader.
If your brand is the skeleton of your communications, having creative and memorable design elements is like the face that your audience recognises.
Faces are important to us. We remember and recognise them; we are drawn to them and, in fact, instinctively see them even if they aren’t there in reality. Your brand is the same.
Therefore, it’s important that the face of your brand can be easily spotted in a crowd. Especially, with the overload of saturated social media feeds, your brand needs to be able to cut through and keep your readers' attention.
Having consistent guidelines for colour, text, font and imagery will keep you on track to establishing a strong, memorable brand.
Think about iconic brand elements that are instantly recognisable without their names or descriptions.
Once you have all the parts of the anatomy of your brand working in tandem, your brand will start working for you. You’ll be able to navigate your marketing services much more effectively and engage with customers like never before.
Talk to us today and see how we can help you achieve this with your brand!
